The blockchain promises to revolutionize a lot of industries from finance to supply-chain. However, we haven’t heard a lot of talk about professional services or the way people find work and that relationship. That might change with a new blockchain project called SpringRole.

LinkedIn Style Professional Verification

So what does SpringRole do? It provides professional verification, and an attestation framework built on the blockchain. Let’s discuss the professional verification part first.

Employers need to be able to verify the claims made by potential employees. Today, there are solutions, but they are a bungled up set of systems that are neither very accurate not easy to perform. Moreover, they are more expensive to carry out than it needs to be. A better solution is naturally desirable by both the parties.

Then, there is the question of attestation. This is a really tricky problem, but SpringRole has a plan to solve this. Why is this hard? Because you need to get a lot of stakeholders on a single platform and agree to do something in a new way. Now let’s be honest here – doing that is really really hard, especially when you’re talking about very technologically conservative organizations.

For example, the entire education sector, including the universities, are not known to be at the forefront of technology when it comes to things like attestations. Therefore, getting them to change their behavior is going to be a very difficult process. However, if they all agree to use SpringRole, it is a huge market to address.

Endorsements and Attestations

As we discussed above, attestations need a buy-in that is large and hard to bring everyone on a network. Luckily, there are several types of endorsements and attestations that SpringRole is building. Educational accomplishments is only one of them, and will likely be hard to get universities from all over the world on board a completely new platform.

Then there is employment attestation, which should be easier as there are many nimble firms especially in the blockchain space, that may do so. Providing an endorsement or attestation can be a simple factual check, such as did the employee work at the firm. This should be easy to do bringing startups on board.

Then, there is the skills attestation which is also quite difficult to pull off. Skills, after all, are hard to evaluate objectively and there is no simple yes/no for competency. LinkedIn solves this problem by ‘endorsement’ but it gets abused too much. SpringRole wants to bring in third-party testing platforms to the platform, which can provide a more objective measure of skill. In the meanwhile, endorsements from people with an already high reputation on the platform would count for more.

Yes, the industry is going to be challenging to break into, but if the company can bring the various stakeholders on the table, the market is big enough to try.

If you want to learn more, check out the website and whitepaper.

Photo Credit: Flickr