Most job platforms call a listing verified because it has a date on it. We check three separate things — the portal it came from, the employer behind that portal, and the req itself — and a badge only appears when all three hold. On the candidate side, the anchor is a real interview, wherever it happened.
Each can fail on its own, so each is answered on its own. A trustworthy portal does not make an unreadable listing trustworthy, and a real employer does not make a stale req current.
Every listing carries the host it was scraped from. We classify the host once and every listing from it inherits the result — the only way a pool this size gets checked at all.
A host is tied to a legal entity through the registry for its market — GLEIF, Companies House, MCA, ABN. On a vendor-hosted board the tenant slug already is the identity.
The listing has to be readable, recently seen, present on the employer’s own board, and not a copy of something posted elsewhere.
Every distinct host in the pool resolves into one of four tiers. Tier A is the strong one and it costs nothing: on a vendor-hosted applicant tracking system the tenant slug was issued by the vendor to that employer. usbank.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com cannot be stood up by somebody else.
| Tier | What it means | How it is established | Hosts | Listings |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A | Vendor-hosted ATS tenant | Tenant slug issued by Workday, Greenhouse, Oracle, iCIMS and 30 others | 28,915 | 2,501,749 |
| B | Own-domain career site | Configured board with sustained yield across many days | 417 | 42,060 |
| C | Own domain, thin history | Known board, not yet enough record to stand behind | 2,265 | 25,024 |
| D | Aggregator or unplaced host | Republisher, or a host we cannot tie to an employer | 2,562 | 83,200 |
Why tier A carries so much. 2,501,749 listings sit on boards where the employer’s identity was established by the ATS vendor before we ever saw it — not a claim to take on trust, a fact about who was issued the tenancy.
Top vendors by volume: workday 943,036, iCIMS 280,829, oracle 261,742, Greenhouse 181,699, Paylocity 129,732, Workable 97,159, JazzHR 95,026, SmartRecruiters 77,118.
A binary badge forces every ambiguous listing into one of two wrong answers. Each state says what is actually known, and a listing takes the weakest link in its chain.
Employer established, req readable, seen this week, present on the employer's own board, not a duplicate.
The employer is real. Something about this req could not be confirmed — usually a missing description.
No claim in either direction. We could not place the host. Never shown as a warning.
A specific finding: no successful scrape in 90 days, heavy reposting, or the same text on another host.
Disqualifying: a dead link, a look-alike domain, a dissolved entity, or money asked for before hire.
The hard problem here is not identity documents — it is proving a real, capable person is behind an application when hundreds look alike. We do not judge whether a résumé was written with AI. We look for what a fabricated candidate cannot produce cheaply.
A live conversation with a real employer is the most expensive thing for a fabricated candidate to produce at scale. No candidate reaches Verified without one. The interview does not have to come through Matatah. If you interviewed somewhere you found yourself, that counts — it just has to be corroborated.
A calendar invite from a corporate domain that resolves to a tier A or B employer. A scheduling email whose signature passes authentication against that domain. A direct confirmation from the employer. Or an interview held on Matatah. Any one is enough; a screenshot is not.
A government ID proves a document exists; it does not prove the person applying will do the work. What is hard to fake is history with depth — an account with years behind it, a commit graph, published work, a domain registered long before today.
A link to something you made is checkable. A paragraph describing it is not. This costs an honest candidate nothing and a manufactured one everything.
We flag concealment — text hidden from human reviewers but fed to screening models — because invisible text has no innocent explanation. We flag identical claimed accomplishments across supposedly unrelated candidates. We do not flag polished writing, AI assistance, or an application that reads like the others.
Why not just check IDs? Identity verification catches the wrong failure. The people causing real harm are not using fake names — they are real people misrepresenting capability, or operations running many plausible personas at once. An interview requirement and a demand for checkable work defeat both, without asking honest candidates for a passport.
Verification only ever raises confidence. An unverified candidate is not marked down. Plenty of real people worked at companies that no longer exist, freelanced, or are re-entering the workforce — the moment a missing badge becomes a penalty, the system stops protecting people and starts gatekeeping them.
Portal tiers, listing counts and vendor volumes are read from the live pool at page load — 2,652,033 listings across 34,159 distinct hosts, last stamped 27 September 2026. Employer registry coverage reflects sources publicly available in each market. Check a specific posting, offer or application on the verification tools.