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LinkedIn Will Finally Offer Ways To Verify Your Job (wired.com) 55

Posted by msmash from the about-time dept.
In the never-ending battle against online impersonation scams, the professional social media platform LinkedIn announced today a set of new verification features that enable users to authenticate aspects of their identities and job histories. From a report: Crucially, users will now have a few different options to verify their identity and current jobs on LinkedIn. That way, if someone tries to make a copycat LinkedIn account, there can be clear differences between the imposter account and the verified profile. LinkedIn facilitates verification in three ways that are all free to individual users. The most low-key option launching today is to verify your current employer by receiving a security code on your work email and entering it into LinkedIn. The social media platform has recently been piloting this work email verification feature with a small group of companies.

The second option is to verify your identity on LinkedIn through the airport security service Clear. The authentication company will take your United States phone number and government-issued ID and use the information to verify your name. You have to weigh whether you want to trust a third party like Clear with your personal data, but the option might be particularly appealing if you already use the company for travel verification and they have your data on file anyway. The third verification feature allows users to confirm their name and current employer through the Microsoft Entra Verified ID credential, a workplace identification platform Microsoft launched last year. This option will have a slower rollout, and it will be available at the end of the month to employees at a few dozen pilot companies that are already enrolled in Entra.
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LinkedIn Will Finally Offer Ways To Verify Your Job More

LinkedIn Will Finally Offer Ways To Verify Your Job

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  • Free! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Gilgaron ( 575091 )
    Here and I thought it was supposed to be $20--err, $8

    • Pretty sure that the FP was intended as a Twitter joke, but most of the FP attempts at humor remind me of Stewart Lee's long joke about his mother's favorite comedian. The recurring punchline is "Are you a sardine?" I can't remember the name, but the relevant point is that's he's fast (according to Lee's mother) and most of the FP joke attempts on Slashdot are too slow or too unintelligible.

      The FP joke was supposed to be something about Twitter, right? Well, you're too late, since that company is already de

      • The FP joke was supposed to be something about Twitter, right? Well, you're too late, since that company is already dead and zombified.

        This wont age well. Twitter has more engagement and is without arms reach of being cash-flow positive, as claimed by its CEO who has a nack at making businesses succeed. Furthermore, you can't claim it is dead and zombified when others (Linked-in in this case) are copying its "features". Organizations can pay a grand to get verified, and then associate other accounts as being a part of the organization (Apple can pay the org fee and then certify @tim_cook). That makes verification for those high profile pr

      • You're right, I was making a joke about Twitter, and you're correct that it was as dead as a doornail from the moment it was bought with a leveraged buyout for far more than it was worth, further mismanagement just being insult to injury. As for why this was necessary, apparently it has been pretty easy to pose as a recruiter and conduct interviews and offer someone a job, and then send them onboarding paperwork for tax related info and direct deposit and all sorts of horrible things can be done to person

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by shanen ( 462549 )

          I've seen plenty of the fake recruiter stuff and appreciate how bad that form of identity theft can be, but I'm unclear how it relates to this particular confusing new feature of LinkedIn. Were the scammers taking the identities of people who were known to be in the HR departments, but who did not have accounts on LinkedIn? If not, then it seems it would be easier for LinkedIn to focus on duplicate identities, or perhaps better authentication of any identities that claim to be involved in hiring or recruiti

  • DELETED linkedln account the day Micro$oft bought (Score:3)

    by furry_wookie ( 8361 ) on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @11:18AM (#63444140)
    I DELETED my linkedln account the day Micro$oft bought it. Never looked back.

    • Re:DELETED linkedln account the day Micro$oft boug (Score:5, Informative)

      by CubicleZombie ( 2590497 ) on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @11:30AM (#63444180)

      Unfortunately it's a necessary evil at this point. Last couple of jobs I got came through Linked In.

      Cue all the replies from people who get hired by word of mouth only. Sure, but maybe you missed out on something.

      • I wouldn't call it a necessary evil. If you remove the platform tomorrow, hiring does not become more difficult, nor does job seeking. The creation of a low-quality work-based social media platform being made into something that employers want to use does not make it an inherent necessity, it makes it a current tool in use, and tools evolve...

      • Unfortunately it's a necessary evil at this point. Last couple of jobs I got came through Linked In.

        Interesting...I've heard of Linked in, but never been on it before that I know of...or needed it.

    • I DELETED my linkedln account the day Micro$oft bought it. Never looked back.

      I'm happy for you. More power to you. I hope there are more people out there like you. After all less competition for jobs is good. LinkedIn is a completely ignorable system. Link you messages to an email notification on a throw away account and it opens up job opportunities for you basically without any downside.

    • I'm going to assume you deleted your account because your slashdot number is so low, you're long retired!

      For everyone else looking to stay connected in the workplace, it's not so easy. Heck, I've known several hiring managers (and admittedly, even been one) who view not having a LinkedIn profile as a red flag.

  • I didn't know people still used LinkedIn anymore. The only time I see it, it's spam from companies telling me they want to continue a conversation I never had with them. After which, I block their domain forever and forward their spam to the junk mail service.

    • I use it for one thing, providing resume information to sites which support it. Resume parsing is almost always garbage. The only other thing it's useful for is jerking one another off in the pursuit of new employment, which is what 100% of the social media part of the site consists of.

  • Email verification - HARD NOPE! (Score:3)

    by Sebby ( 238625 ) on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @11:26AM (#63444164)

    The most low-key option launching today is to verify your current employer by receiving a security code on your work email and entering it into LinkedIn

    Already get spammed by spammers "guessing" variations of my name + company name to try to figure out the email address; I can easily blacklist incoming attempts based on "guessed" variations that don't match my actually used address.

    Confirming my employer by providing my real work address just means it'll be recorded as the valid one, and we all know it's just a matter of time before LinkedIn has a data breach revealing everyone's data leading to a boatload of spam. Thanks but no thanks.

    This "feature" sounds just about as useful as Twitter's "verified" B.S. - HARD NOPE!

    • Agreed. My work email address is trivially easy to guess, and the last thing I want is an additional 100 emails per day from spammers and the like on top of the hundreds I already get for my job.

      If LinkedIn is so incompetent that a simple password can't be the only form of entrance to the account, they, like so many other companies, have serious issues.

      • They're not talking about protecting access to your account, they're talking about how to prevent someone from scraping your profile and making a copycat. Assuming your email is private, someone you have goven your email to could use it to validate the profile. Of course as has been pointed out by many people already, using email is stupid for several reasons.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by thomn8r ( 635504 )

      [...] it's just a matter of time before LinkedIn has a data breach revealing everyone's data leading to a boatload of spam.

      It's not actually a "breach" when they sell your data

  • Concerns (Score:3)

    by sinij ( 911942 ) on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @11:26AM (#63444166)
    I am CEO of Apple, here is my email: sinij@the-appIe.cx. Can I get verified now?

  • This is the first sign I've seen of clear trying to use their PII database outside paying your way around a security line that mere taxpayers need to endure. This sounds frightening. The day clear is broken into (they all are) will be terrible for so many people.

    IMO Clear should be disbanded, before this gets out of hand

    • Can you explain what biometrics and other data Clear has that most people don't post on Instagram or other social media sites, and/or hasn't been harvested by data search engines like Nuwber?

      I'm having a hard time seeing how a breach of CLEAR is worse than your other garden variety breaches, like Equifax etc..

  • become the equivalent of a credit bureau for job history. be aware on what's on the horizon. on the bright side, this would probably prevent liars liked George Santos from stealing opportunities from honest folks.
  • Seriously, this story is without any mention of the privacy and security nightmares involved in being definitively trackable and locatable ?

    I find Facemetabook's real name demands outrageous.
    This is much worse.

  • How about just crap job opertunities. (Score:3)

    by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @11:45AM (#63444236)

    Oh I see you have Python as a skill, I have a job opening for you that is 200 miles away, and for an entry level developer! Despite showing decades of experience, and some advanced titles.

    I once confronted one of these people, they didn't seem to realize that New York State was an actual state beyond the City, and Buffalo NY, vs Albany NY vs. New York City are actually a good distance from each other. Then I floored them further with my Salary Requirement if I were to work in the City, as there is a large difference in cost of Living in NYC vs rural upstate. Where my 2k a month mortgage is for a good size house, and land, vs a Studio Apt.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 )

      There must be something wrong with your account to attract entry level crap job advertisements like that. I only get offered / notified of lead engineering / principal engineering jobs. Maybe you look like a n00b?

      • Recruiters are just dumbshits who are probably using automated tools they don't understand to find candidates. They don't know the jobs, so they don't know how to hire for them. And enough recruiters are just plain malicious enough to create fake job listings for the purpose of collecting people's PII that the noob recruiters can't learn anything useful by reading existing job listings. When a quarter of them or more are fake [wsj.com], you can't go by what they say.

        • There are certainly no shortage of dumbshit recruiters, but there are also plenty that are competent.

          One must also be careful to distinguish among:

          * A company's on-staff recruiters
          * A recruiting company retained by an employer with a formal relationship
          * Unauthorized third parties that shotgun

          There's a substantial falloff between the second and third types above, and sometimes but by no means always the second type are commission-driven pushing one to accept a crappy offer, while others are have a longer vi

        • Recruiters are just dumbshits who are probably using automated tools they don't understand to find candidates.

          So the account looks like a n00b to automated tools? That's equally a problem. If you want a good job you need to know how the recruitment systems work (automated or otherwise) and appease them.

          It reminds me of the old advice to make your CV stand out and be unique. NO! Bad advice. Your CV is a foot through a door controlled by automation, it needs to be as standard as possible, machine readable and tick all the boxes for the computer for that door to open for you.

      • I think it mostly due to my Location, Rural New York. My Salary Requirements which are really good for where I live, are near poverty in New York City. Then because where I live there aren't a flood of jobs that meet my needs, so the Random startup, trying to get new folks, with big skills often kicks in.

        I also expect my account may need to be brushed up, as I have Dyslexia so my written explanation often fails to impress, unlike my actual work.

        • In addition to having someone else proof your profile, drop it in MS Word, see what it flags when you set it to grammar nazi mode. Its suggestions aren't always right but it's worth knowing a sentence might be flawed.

      • Depends, human recruiters usually do pretty well, anything with a machine learning smell is suggesting matches based on blackbox pattern matching, so you get spam about call center jobs.

  • Dammit (Score:3)

    by slaker ( 53818 ) on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @11:57AM (#63444288)

    Guess they're finally going to call me on my purported SVP roles at Enron, Flooz, ToysRUs and SVB off my profile.

  • Not with many employers having a "no public use of work email" policy. My employer actively monitors email inboxes and sends warning messages about company policy when certain public sites end up sending notifications to work emails.

  • Here fishy fishy fishy

  • LinkedIn Will Finally Offer Ways To Verify Your Job / (1) The most low-key option launching today is to verify your current employer by receiving a security code on your work email and entering it into LinkedIn. (2) The second option is to verify your identity on LinkedIn through the airport security service Clear. The authentication company will take your United States phone number and government-issued ID and use the information to verify your name.

    So more of your personal information for them ... /cynical

    Next they'll offer to "accept* biometric info.

  • Look at the millions of volunteers readily handing out information that is worth lots and lots of money for free, just so they can publicly masturbate about their perceived economic success.

  • Rent seeking gate keepers (Score:3)

    by silentbozo ( 542534 ) on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @01:33PM (#63444602) Journal

    This is LinkedIn's problem. Decreasing the signal to noise ratio makes LinkedIn less valuable to people who are using it to headhunt. LinkedIn is trying to convince people that it's their problem, and that LinkedIn has a "solution" that they need to opt into to make LinkedIn more valuable.

    Or to put it another way... LinkedIn is now pretending to be a credit bureau. Why do we need yet another intermediary that turns us into product, has us do work to make that product more valuable (by verifying) and then sells us "services" on top of that?

    You might as well just go talk to a recruiting agency and let them do the legwork in exchange for their traditional cut. It sounds way less aggravating.

  • You will no longer have a job. So Microsoft are cannibalising the fcuk out of this one
  • Linkedin are spammers. Nothing more. Their domain should be blacklisted. Pay UCEPROTECT enough and you can kill any network.

  • I just want to know when they will finally allow me to flag all the people and fake profiles who say they work for my company and don't/never did.

    • Those are fake profiles, per se. Often those are real people just lying about their job history.

      One of my startups hired a guy who claimed to be vp of tech whatever at yahoo. He was clearly a fucking idiot and didn't know enough about tech to mop their floors. I spent hours coming the net to find any connection between him and Yahoo. Nada.

      CEO didn't care. I quit a few months later once this pos, our new CTO, was proven to be the fool I thought he was.

  • LinkedIn isn't exactly known for ethical behavior or its competence in securing your information [wikipedia.org]. Why on earth would anyone give them even more information to sell... or leak?

  • So, LinkedIn figured out a way to collect its users' work email addresses, eh? What could possibly go wrong there?
  • Why do I care about authenticating my job to my online Rolodex service? For longer than I can remember, all I have used LinkedIn for is a semi-self-updating electronic phone book. If I call someone and don't get who I expect, I'll know right away and delete their contact. I expect they would do the same with me. I probably use it to look someone up 3 or 4 times a year, if it is a particularly busy year. I can't be bothered with (and actively avoid) the social media features.
  • In retirement I am still on a few non-profit boards and steering committees, and do maintain contacts on LinkedIn. None of these would be active in Microsoft Entra. I still fly enough to have pre-TSA, travel enough to have a passport and boat enough to have a passport card also, and would think that one of those or a driverâ(TM)s license with Real ID should be enough. I certainly canâ(TM)t verify a job, but verifying identify shoulld be simpler than what LinkedIn is suggesting.

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