Every candidate makes the same claims.
Can0nical tells you which ones are true.
A CV is written by the person it flatters. A portfolio shows what someone chose to show you. A Can0nical profile shows only work that the client who received it has confirmed: verified, not self-reported, and provable long after the interview ends.
You are asked to trust documents that no one checked.
The résumé, the portfolio, the glowing reference: every one of them is supplied by the candidate, and every one of them can be embellished, staged, or fabricated outright. When employers removed degree requirements in order to hire on skills instead, a study of 11,300 roles at large firms found the net effect was 0.14 percentage points, because taking away the degree took away the only independently verified item on the page, and what remained was self-reported. Traditional vetting tries to catch the rest after the fact: slow, expensive background checks commissioned once you are already invested. Can0nical takes the opposite approach. The proof is created when the work is delivered, by the client who received it, so it is already true by the time it reaches you. The research behind that 0.14 figure, and the rest of the case, is set out with its sources in the research this rests on.
When a candidate hands you their profile, here is what stands behind it.
A Can0nical UPID, the identifier a professional shares with you, is not a self-description. It is the visible end of a chain that started with a real client confirming real work: an authoritative, canonical record of what a candidate delivered.
- 01
The professional logged the work
They recorded what they delivered while it was fresh: the project, the outcome, the client it was for. A claim, at this point. Nothing more.
- 02
Their actual client confirmed it
The organisation that received the work verified it directly, not the candidate, not a friend, not a reference they hand-picked. Confirmation comes from the party with something to lose if it were false.
- 03
It was sealed into a permanent record
Once confirmed, the entry is written into a tamper-proof record that can't be quietly edited, back-dated, or deleted later. What you see is what was confirmed, unchanged.
- 04
You can check it yourself
Every record carries an identifier anyone can independently verify: no account, no request to Can0nical, no waiting. You confirm it holds up in seconds.
The distinction that matters: the candidate never confirms their own work. Confirmation comes only from the organisation that commissioned it, the one party with a reason not to lie on their behalf.
Proof of Work
noun
A computational process where participants expend energy solving puzzles to secure a distributed ledger.
Documented evidence that a professional actually did the work they claim: logged, confirmed by the client who received it, and permanently provable. No puzzle. No mining. Just work, proven.
The four conditions a record has to meetThe difference between being told and being shown.
A résumé is a claim
The document is written by the one person with an incentive to embellish it, and nothing in it was checked before it reached you. Research on résumé deception separates outright fabrication from embellishment and omission, and two of those three involve no false statement at all, which is why reading it more carefully does not help.
A portfolio is easy to stage
Screenshots, case studies, and five-star reviews can be borrowed, mocked up, or bought outright. They show what someone wants you to believe, not what a client actually confirmed happened.
A background check looks backward
It is slow, expensive, and reactive: commissioned after you are already interested, to catch what went wrong. It tells you about the past. It does not prove the work.
A Can0nical record is proof that already exists
The verification happened when the work was delivered, confirmed by the client who received it. By the time it reaches you it is already proven. You are not commissioning a check. You are reading one.
No account. No cost. No waiting on us.
Verify any credential
Paste a UPID or CV identifier into the verifier and confirm, independently, that the record is genuine and unaltered.
Open the verifierRead the full profile
A verified profile shows the work itself: the projects, the skills drawn from them, and which client confirmed each one. Nothing on it is self-asserted beyond a name and a photo.
Read the state honestly
Two things a record can tell you. Both are honest signals, not pass/fail.
The record has been sealed into a permanent, tamper-proof form. It can be verified independently, by anyone, forever, with no reliance on Can0nical and no way to alter it after the fact. This is the strongest signal a candidate can hand you.
The work is real and the client has confirmed it, but the professional has not yet made the record permanent. This is not a red flag. It is genuine, client-confirmed work; it simply is not sealed against future change yet. Weigh it as real, and know a permanent version can follow.
Ask your next hire for their Can0nical UPID.
It is the fastest honesty test there is. Anyone can send you a link; only a real track record survives an independent check. One identifier, verified in seconds, tells you more than a stack of references ever could.
Teams that hire at volume can make verified proof of work a standard step in screening. Reach out and we will help you set it up. If your own team is asked to confirm work that others delivered, that side of it is what a validator does.