Glen Cathey, SVP Talent Advisory & Digital Strategy at Randstad, and a Board Member of the Velocity Network Foundation recently published a marvelous article about the need to adopt verifiable credentials in the AI-powered labor market.
Here is a reprint of the article, originally published on LinkedIn.
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Stop Chasing AI Ghosts. Start Verifying What’s Real.
Kevin Wheeler recently published a piece in his Future of Talent newsletter that should be required reading for anyone in talent acquisition. The title says it all: “What Hiring Looks Like When Nobody Trusts Anyone.”
He’s right. Trust is collapsing in hiring. And the instinct across the industry has been to fight fire with fire – to deploy AI to detect AI, to build better filters to catch better fakes, to escalate the technological arms race one more notch.
But here’s what nobody seems to want to say out loud: that approach is a losing game. It has always been a losing game. And the sooner we recognize that, the sooner we can redirect our time, energy, and investment toward solutions that actually work.
The Arms Race Nobody Can Win
Let me describe the situation plainly, because I think the scale of it is still underappreciated.
Candidates are using AI to tailor resumes to job descriptions in minutes. Cover letters are generated in seconds. Video interviews are being coached in real time by AI tools. Work samples are assembled with AI assistance. Applications per role on LinkedIn have doubled in three years. Tools like Final Round AI reportedly had 300,000 users within months of launching.
On the employer side, ATS systems auto-reject candidates before a human looks at them, AI tools score video interviews based on tone and word choice, and the entire process has become – as Wheeler powerfully describes it – “a ritual that nobody believes in anymore.”
And it gets worse. Far worse.
CrowdStrike identified a 220% rise in 2025 alone in instances of North Korean operatives gaining fraudulent employment at Western companies to work remotely. Security officials told Axios they have yet to meet a Fortune 500 company that hasn’t inadvertently hired a North Korean IT worker. These aren’t hypotheticals – the FBI has issued multiple advisories.
These operatives use AI-generated synthetic identities, deepfake technology to alter their appearance and voice during interviews, stolen credentials from real Americans, and elaborate “laptop farm” networks where US-based accomplices receive company equipment on their behalf. One facilitator was managing 90 laptops simultaneously.
So let me ask you a question that should keep every TA leader up at night: if state-sponsored actors with nation-state resources are systematically defeating your hiring process at scale, what makes you think another layer of AI detection is going to solve the problem?
Treating Symptoms vs. Curing the Disease
The entire industry response to AI-driven trust erosion has been reactive. Detect the AI. Flag the fake. Filter the noise.
This is treating symptoms. And if you’ve ever tried to treat symptoms of a chronic disease without addressing the underlying cause, you know exactly how that story ends. The symptoms keep coming back, each time a little different, each time a little harder to identify.
The root cause of the trust crisis in hiring is not that candidates are using AI. The root cause is that the entire system is built on self-reported, unverified information.
Think about that for a moment. Resumes are self-reported. LinkedIn profiles are self-reported. Skills assessments can be completed by someone other than the candidate. Education claims go unverified until a background check weeks or months later – if they’re checked at all. Employment history is taken on trust. Even identity itself is increasingly easy to fabricate.
We’ve built our entire hiring infrastructure on a foundation of “take my word for it.” And then we’re surprised when AI makes it trivially easy to generate convincing words?
The problem was always there. AI just blew the roof off it.
What the Credit Card Industry Already Figured Out
In the 1990s, the financial payments industry faced a crisis that looks remarkably similar to what we’re dealing with in hiring today.
Credit card fraud was exploding. Criminals had figured out how to skim magnetic stripe data from cards and create perfect counterfeits. The industry was losing billions. And the initial response was exactly what you’d expect – more fraud detection, more pattern matching, more sophisticated algorithms to identify suspicious transactions after the fact.
Sound familiar?
But the industry didn’t stop there. Europay, Mastercard, and Visa came together – competitors collaborating on shared infrastructure – to create the EMV chip standard. Instead of trying to detect fraud after the fact, they redesigned the underlying transaction to make fraud structurally harder to commit. Each chip generates a unique, one-time cryptographic code for every transaction that cannot be reused or counterfeited.
The results were staggering. Counterfeit card fraud dropped 90% in the UK and 76% in Canada after adoption. Over 12 billion cards now use this technology globally. More than 90% of all card-present transactions worldwide are EMV chip-based.
The payment industry didn’t win by building better fraud detectors. They won by making the underlying signal trustworthy.
This is exactly the paradigm shift that hiring needs.
Enter Verifiable Credentials: The Signal in the Noise
Digitally verifiable credentials represent a fundamental shift in how career information is created, owned, and exchanged. Instead of self-reported claims that anyone – or any AI – can fabricate, verifiable credentials are digitally signed proofs issued by authoritative sources.
Your university doesn’t just claim you graduated – it issues a cryptographically signed credential that any employer can instantly verify. Your former employer doesn’t just confirm your title in a phone call three weeks after an offer – they issue a verifiable record of your employment, role, and tenure at the time of separation. Your professional certifications, assessment results, licenses, and skills validations all become tamper-proof digital assets that you own, control, and share on your terms.
This isn’t theoretical. This is being built and deployed right now.
The Velocity Network Foundation – where I’ve served on the board for several years – is one of the organizations leading this effort. Founded in 2019 and governed as a nonprofit, Velocity had brought together major players across the HR, education, and employment ecosystem – organizations to build a globally interoperable, blockchain-based trust layer for career credentials.
But let me be clear about something: while I believe deeply in Velocity’s approach, this article isn’t about any single solution. It’s about the approach itself. It’s about recognizing that the fundamental problem in hiring isn’t that we can’t detect fakes fast enough – it’s that we’re still relying on self-reported information in a world where fabrication has become trivially easy and massively scalable.
How Verifiable Credentials Change the Game
Let me walk through the mechanics, because the power of this approach becomes clear when you see how it actually works in practice.
Verified identity. Before anything else, a person’s identity is verified through established identity verification providers. This alone would have prevented a significant percentage of the North Korean IT worker infiltrations, where operatives routinely used stolen or synthetic identities to obtain employment.
Verified education. When you complete a degree, certification, or training program, the issuing institution provides a digitally signed credential directly to you – not to a database they control, not to a third-party verification service you have to pay to access, but to you. You own it. You store it in a digital wallet on your device. And when an employer needs to verify it, the verification is instant and cryptographically certain.
Verified employment history. When you leave an employer, they issue a credential confirming your role, tenure, and other relevant details. No more “we can only confirm dates of employment” phone calls weeks into a hiring process. No more candidates inflating titles or fabricating employers that don’t exist.
Verified skills and assessments. Assessment providers, certification bodies, and licensing authorities issue credentials that prove specific competencies. Not “I listed Python on my resume” – but “This person scored in the 90th percentile on a validated Python assessment, verified by the assessing organization.”
Verified background checks. Perhaps one of the most elegant applications – once you’ve completed a background check, that result becomes a portable, reusable credential. You don’t have to go through the same process from scratch every time you change jobs. The credential travels with you.
Now imagine a hiring process where, instead of reviewing a self-reported resume and hoping it’s accurate, a recruiter receives a candidate’s verified credential package – identity confirmed, education verified, employment history authenticated, skills validated, background check current. In seconds. Before the first interview even happens.
That’s not filtering noise. That’s eliminating the conditions that create noise in the first place.
Self-Sovereign: The Individual Controls Their Data
One of the most important aspects of this approach – and one that I think will resonate with anyone who cares about candidate experience and data privacy – is that the individual owns and controls their credentials.
This is a profound shift from how career data works today. Currently, your career information is scattered across dozens of databases controlled by companies, institutions, and platforms. Your employer owns your employment records. LinkedIn owns your profile data. Your university controls your transcript. Background check companies hold your screening results.
With verifiable credentials, you hold your own data in a digital wallet. You decide what to share, with whom, and when. An employer can’t access your credentials without your explicit consent. And because the credentials are cryptographically signed by their issuers, the employer doesn’t need to trust you – they can verify the credential directly against the issuer’s signature.
This is trust without requiring trust. Verification without vulnerability. It’s a fundamentally better architecture for how career information should flow in a global labor market.
Why AI Detection Will Always Lose the Race
I want to be direct about this, because I know the AI detection market is growing rapidly and a lot of companies are investing heavily in it.
AI detection in hiring is chasing a moving target that moves faster than the chaser.
Every time a detection tool learns to identify AI-generated content, the generation tools evolve to produce content that’s undetectable. Every time a video interview platform flags a deepfake, the deepfake technology improves. Every time a screening algorithm identifies a pattern of fraud, the fraudsters change their patterns.
This is the nature of adversarial systems. The defense is always one step behind the offense. And the offense has a massive structural advantage: they only need to find one way through, while the defense needs to block every way through.
Worse still, AI detection creates its own problems. False positives flag or reject legitimate candidates – people who happened to use AI to help polish their resume (which, by 2026, is nearly everyone). You end up penalizing people for using the same tools you’re using on the employer side. The hypocrisy is hard to ignore.
And yet another challenge is identity fraud. It doesn’t matter how sophisticated your interview analysis tool is if the person on the screen isn’t who they claim to be. It doesn’t matter how well your resume screener detects AI-generated content if the employment history, education, and credentials listed on the resume are entirely fabricated.
Detection tools are trying to determine whether the signal is authentic. Verifiable credentials make the signal trustworthy by design. That’s the difference between treating symptoms and curing the disease.
Beyond Fraud Prevention: The Broader Opportunity
What excites me most about verifiable credentials isn’t just the fraud and trust problem they solve – although that alone justifies the investment. It’s the cascading benefits that emerge once career data becomes verified, portable, and individual-controlled.
Skills-based hiring becomes real instead of aspirational. Today, most organizations talk about skills-based hiring but still screen on degrees and titles, because they have no reliable way to verify claimed skills. Verifiable skills credentials change that equation entirely. When an assessment result or certification carries cryptographic proof from an authoritative issuer, employers can confidently make decisions based on verified capabilities rather than proxies.
Time to hire compresses dramatically. The Velocity Network’s SkillsONWARD program in healthcare has already demonstrated this in practice – over 47,000 credentials issued to healthcare practitioners, with instant verification replacing weeks-long credentialing processes. In healthcare, where staffing shortages cost lives, this isn’t an efficiency gain. It’s a patient care improvement.
Global mobility improves. When credentials are built on globally interoperable standards – W3C Verifiable Credentials, in Velocity’s case – a nurse credentialed in Florida can share verified qualifications with an employer in London or Singapore without starting the verification process from scratch. In a global labor market, this is transformative.
Candidate experience fundamentally changes. Instead of filling out the same information on every application, uploading the same resume to every ATS, and waiting weeks for background checks you’ve already passed – you share your verified credential package once, instantly. The candidate stops being a supplicant begging the system to believe them. They become the verified owner of their career data.
Where the Investment Should Go
Here’s what I’m asking the TA and HR community to consider.
Every dollar, every hour, and every ounce of organizational energy being spent on AI detection tools to identify fake resumes, flag AI-assisted interviews, and catch synthetic candidates is money and energy that could be redirected toward building the infrastructure that makes faking unnecessary and structurally ineffective.
I’m not saying detection has zero value as a transitional tool. But it should be understood as exactly that – a transitional band-aid, not a long-term strategy. The long-term strategy is to rebuild the foundation of trust in career data exchange.
The credit card industry didn’t solve fraud by building better fraud detectors. They solved it by redesigning the transaction itself so that fraud became structurally much harder to commit. Competitors collaborated on shared infrastructure for the benefit of the entire ecosystem.
That is exactly what organizations like the Velocity Network Foundation are doing for the labor market. Education institutions, employers, assessment providers, background screening companies, staffing firms, and technology vendors – many of them competitors – are collaborating to build a shared trust layer that benefits everyone: employers, candidates, and the labor market as a whole.
The question isn’t whether verifiable credentials will become the standard for career data. The trajectory is clear. The question is how much time and money we’re going to waste on detection band-aids before we commit to building the real solution.
The Choice in Front of Us
Kevin Wheeler’s article ends with a powerful observation: that in an environment dominated by automation and synthetic signals, the most radical act in hiring may simply be two people having a real conversation about real work.
I agree completely. And I’d add this: for that conversation to happen, you first need to know that the person you’re talking to is who they say they are, that they’ve done what they claim to have done, and that their qualifications are real.
Verifiable credentials don’t replace the human conversation. They make it possible to have that conversation with confidence.
We have a choice. We can keep spending resources on an escalating arms race – building better detectors to catch better fakes in a cycle that never ends. Or we can invest in infrastructure that makes the signal itself trustworthy, the way the payments industry did with EMV chip technology.
One approach treats symptoms forever. The other cures the disease.
I know which one I’m investing my time in. And if you care about the future of talent acquisition – not just surviving it, but shaping it – I’d encourage you to look into verifiable credentials and the work being done by organizations like the Velocity Network Foundation.
The infrastructure for trust is being built right now. The only question is whether you’ll help build it – or keep chasing ghosts.
Full disclosure: I serve on the board of the Velocity Network Foundation and have for several years. My views on verifiable credentials are informed by that experience, and I’m advocating for the approach because I’ve seen firsthand how it works – not because of any commercial interest. The Foundation is a nonprofit, and its network is a public utility built on open standards.