Verification has become a key focus for almost all social platforms, amid rising concerns around identity theft, along with increasingly realistic-looking AI bot profiles, which can dupe unsuspecting users. Now, LinkedIn is also looking to add more identity features, providing more ways for people to prove that they are who they say they are, including ID verification, workplace confirmation, and more.
Show Me Your ID
Let’s start with ID verification – LinkedIn’s teaming up with identify platform CLEAR to provide a new verification process that’ll allow users to add a confirmation note to their profile by providing their Government-assigned ID. By sharing your ID details with CLEAR, US LinkedIn members can add a new Government ID verification qualifier to their profile display, which will provide more assurance to prospective partners and profile visitors.
LinkedIn’s also adding a new option to allow employees of certain companies to verify that they really do work for that organization. As per LinkedIn:
“Available now to 50 million members globally on LinkedIn, you can verify where you work using your company-issued email address. There are over 4,000 companies, and this is one more way to demonstrate the authenticity of your profile.”
This is a timely update, given how anyone, right now, can just claim to work for any organization on LinkedIn. For example, YouTube currently has around 144k employees on LinkedIn, which might be true given how large and famous it has become, but when you consider that McDonald’s, one of the world’s largest fast-food chains, statistically has around 200,000 employees, then YouTube’s LinkedIn employee count starts to look rather over-inflated. This new element will provide more assurance and confirmation on this element, which will help businesses ensure that they’re talking to the real representatives of an organization, and not just to someone who only claims to be.
Lastly, LinkedIn will also allow organizations to issue digital workplace IDs via Microsoft Entra, providing another verification element. LinkedIn says that this specific element could apply to over 2 million members, adding more assurance and validity to its network.
The Wrap
It could just be a valuable update, provided that it’ll actually take LinkedIn some time to roll all of these verification elements out to all users, but it could eventually help better highlight bots and spam, thus facilitating more trusted relationships through the platform. What’s more, these new verification features are free. LinkedIn, of course, also charges for its LinkedIn Premium subscriptions as a verification element, which will likely lead to the expanded takeup of these markers. Expect these new features to be rolled out first to US users, before a broader expansion in the future.
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