LinkedIn, the social media platform for people who only talk about work, is introducing more user verification obligations for certain users, ostensibly to cut down on the number of employment scams running rampant on the site.
Users who change their job titles to anything recruiter- or executive-related will have additional hoops to leap through in the form of (slightly) more stringent verification. The change probably won’t have much impact on existing scam networks, as it only applies to new changes going forward.
Even more LinkedIn
Still, LinkedIn profiles that hop between job roles to convince users that they totally have a job for them might be a little stymied. Any user who changes their job title to something recruitment-related (like ‘recruiter’ or ‘talent specialist’) or to an executive-level position (‘director’, ‘vice president’, and others) will be asked to verify themselves on the platform.
The hoop isn’t too onerous — an official company email address using the company domain name is required to receive a verification code. Somebody listing themselves as the Executive Vice President of Human Resources Decisions will struggle to make the change with a boring old Gmail address. If the IT department is slack when it comes to creating those, they’ll just have to nerd a bit harder, won’t they?
This isn’t really aimed at making the lives of average users simpler, though. This new function is part of a new “Premium Company Page subscription”, a paid-for service for companies looking to be given Verified status on LinkedIn.
Giving Microsoft’s platform more money will help convince job applicants that you’re trustworthy enough to send a CV to, apparently. It might even work. Receiving a non-verified job offer from a company that is known to have paid for executive VIP status will be a rather large red flag.
