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Jurgen Appelo's avatar

I see a few problems here:

1. Innovators often fall in love with solutions while they should be falling in love with the problem. There is not a single person I know who would be interested in a CV with "verified" credentials. It's like asking people to go on television without makeup on. Instead, everyone wants to brush up their CVs a little bit and show their slightly polished best sides.

2. If candidates are required to offer verifiable information then the same should reply to recruiters. The extent to which people are lying about their credentials is easily matched by the extent to which recruiters are lying about corporate culture, compensation and career paths.

3. Finally, tech people love making incredibly complicated solutions for other tech people. Yes, I'm looking at the crypto and DAO world here. If they cannot explain to an average person in the street how it all works, there's no change at all of any mass market adoption.

But thanks for the writing. I'm incredibly interested in the topic. I just don't believe this is the direction to go.

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Andy Spence's avatar

I agree with the points you made Jurgen. CHROs are not crying out for verified credentials even in regulated industries where there are occasional horror stories (aka the new hospital Doctor who is not medically qualified 🙈). The trust issues do work on both sides, and yes it is the techies who are often early adopters.

However, my view is that the whole system has evolved from 20th century management practices and is broken. There is little trust, it's inefficient, unfair in places with a flawed matching system. It is not fit for workers, or employers. We pay intermediaries fees to search and contract because we haven't organised our career data properly.

Much of the work being done on standards and tech solutions is to build some of the foundations for the next generation of work infrastructure, which I see as a 10-20 year development. I laid out some ideas of the features I would like to see and how it might develop in my paper from a few years back. We might see verification standards developed by specific industries e.g. medical, education followed by better matching-platforms. The pull from CHROs might be less around fraud and more around getting the fees down from around 15% to below 5%.

I would love to chat about what features we might need in the next generation of work-infrastructure...

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Jurgen Appelo's avatar

I very much agree that the match-making is in need of being disrupted. I expect AI agents to scout the markets for both customers and suppliers and do the job of narrowing the funnel until the final negotiation stage where it should just be a matter of accept or decline.

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ILFAT ZIGANSHIN's avatar

Matteo, your analysis of the 'Proof of Work' concept in the evolving job landscape is enlightening.

As someone reinventing my career, understanding these paradigms is crucial.

Appreciate your forward-thinking perspectives.

— ILFAT ZIGANSHIN | ziganshin.com

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