Every hire begins with an act of faith. A candidate submits a resume, and employers spend days, up sometimes weeks, chasing down the truth behind it. That is not a technology problem. It is an architecture problem. And it has persisted, largely unchanged, for centuries.
The Don't Get Played podcast brings together two people working at the center of that architecture's reinvention. Zach Daigle is Chief Strategy and Customer Officer at Cisive and a board member at the Velocity Network Foundation, working with employers in highly regulated industries where compliance and speed are perpetually at war. Etan Bernstein is Head of Ecosystem at the Velocity Network Foundation, the organization building what it calls the "Internet of Careers" — open infrastructure for credentials that candidates own, carry, and share throughout their working lives.
Their conversation covers the potential transformation of the hiring process if a credential can prove itself. Imagine if a nursing license, a university degree, or a decade of work history didn't require a third party to vouch for it, because the cryptographic proof is already built in. The implications for hiring timelines, compliance programs, and the balance of power between employers and candidates are potentially revolutionary.
The current verification model isn’t a product of design. It’s an inefficient process. Candidates self-report. Employers and background screeners go verify. And the entire enterprise runs on the assumption that the original information is probably wrong until proven otherwise.
"Every fact needs to be checked because there's no way to trust the source," Etan explained. "That's the basic premise behind the way the verification world has existed for a few hundred years, since the resume was invented."
What makes that premise so durable is not that it works well — it doesn't. There’s simply been no alternative to replace it. A PDF diploma is only marginally more trustworthy than a Word document. In a world of candidate fraud, there’s nothing in the file itself to prove it hasn't been altered. Daigle frames this problem in operational terms:
"It's really not just a technology challenge," Zach said. "It's a business paradigm shift that's required to get from that old model to where we need to be, to take friction out of this process."
The paradigm shift that Zach describes is a verifiable credential. At its most basic, this is a new file format, but the change completely alters the verification equation. Using cryptography, a credential issued by a university or licensing body is locked to the individual who earned it. It cannot be altered. It cannot be transferred. And when it is shared, the recipient doesn't need to contact the original issuer to confirm its authenticity — the cryptographic signature does that work instantly.
"Verifiable credentials are immutable," Etan said. "They can't be changed. And if issued to an individual correctly, they're also binding to that person. Now, that changes the world completely in a way that now we can trust the information an individual shares."
The practical consequence is that primary source verification — the weeks-long process of contacting schools, employers, and licensing boards to confirm what a candidate already told you — becomes redundant for credentials that arrive in this format. The credential is the verification.
Etan explains how most people already carry verifiable credentials in their pockets. Apple Wallet and Google Pay hold cryptographic representations of credit cards and boarding passes. No one questions whether a mobile boarding pass is real. The career wallet extends that same trusted infrastructure to degrees, licenses, work history, and certifications.
The Velocity Network Foundation's most deliberate design choice was building an open, interoperable protocol rather than a proprietary platform. Etan uses examples of two familiar technologies to explain the distinction.
"That is what we call open and interoperable," Etan said. "We've designed the Velocity Network to ensure that anyone can build technology, and anyone can receive credentials and issue credentials to every wallet in the world."
That wallet-agnostic model is what drew Zach in early. Cisive's clients don't want to bet their compliance programs on which digital credentialing platform wins the market-share battle. They want infrastructure that remains stable regardless of which commercial players rise or fall.
Self-sovereignty is another important aspect of Velocity Network’s approach. It’s built on the principle that credentials belong to the individual, not the platform. Because a candidate's career operates on the same open logic as email, it can travel with them across every employer, every credential issuer, every background screener.
The business case for the evolution of verification comes into focus most sharply in healthcare, where the cost of a slow hire is staffing shortages leading to compliance problems. Zach cited data putting the cost of a nurse not at the bedside at roughly $680 per day. The static credentials — the BSN degree, the years of labor and delivery experience — are the longest poles in the background screening process, often taking three to four business days just to receive a response from a school. The result? Hiring bottlenecks and a bad candidate experience.
When those credentials arrive as verified assets from a candidate's career wallet, that wait collapses to near-instantaneous. "We've actually measured this when it's come through organically," Zach said. And when the static credential verification compresses, the entire case compresses. The dynamic checks — criminal records, sex offender registries, license status — are already fast. Remove the long delay on education and employment history, and offer-to-orientation timelines that currently span a week or more begin to look like a single business day.
"Imagine a world where you get an offer accepted, and you can go into orientation the next day," Zach said. "That is game-changing for them."
Zach's longer-range vision extends well beyond faster turnaround. He described a future where background screening firms stop issuing static PDF reports after a waiting period and instead sit as continuous compliance monitors inside the talent lifecycle — flagging credential changes in real time, surfacing pre-screened candidate pools to employers facing critical shortages, and ensuring that verified data flows into the right decision point in the hiring sequence without creating new legal exposure.
"The new background platform is no platform," he said. "What I mean by that is I think it's data flowing seamlessly through all of the right technology and logic layers to deliver the most real-time compliance we've ever seen in the world."
The irony of hiring in the era of near-instant everything is that employment verification still runs on infrastructure built for a slower world. Verifiable credentials don't just accelerate that exchange. They change who controls it, who has to ask permission for it, and who bears the cost when it breaks down. For the HR and talent acquisition leaders who have spent years managing the gap between what candidates claim and what employers can confirm, that shift is not incremental. It’s foundational.