LinkedIn adds new tools to fight fake profiles and bogus work histories

AI has made it significantly easier for people to create fake accounts and identities to engage in online manipulation and scams. On Wednesday, LinkedIn announced a new set of tools to combat the problem while helping people and companies better control their presence on the platform.

The company says it will now let members vouch for each other’s experience and give businesses new controls to manage who associates with their brand, among other changes.

The new features arrive at a time when impersonation has become an internet-wide problem, not one limited to LinkedIn. However, on a network where your professional persona includes your work experience, past job titles, certifications, university degrees, and more, being able to verify you are who you say you are is even more critical.

Such claims can lead to career opportunities and advancement, prospects that those fudging or lying on their resumes haven’t earned.

“The backdrop for all this is that faking credibility has never been cheaper or easier than it is today; and conversely, showcasing credibility has never mattered more,” LinkedIn VP of Product, Oscar Rodriguez, told TechCrunch in an interview.

To date, LinkedIn’s existing verification tools have been used to verify 115 million users and over 700,000 companies on the platform, he noted.

“We’ve been invested in [verification] because we believe that authenticity will be the single most valuable currency on the internet,” Rodriguez added.

For starters, LinkedIn will now allow members to vouch for their colleagues and classmates, past or present. This feature is not the same as an endorsement, where you can recommend the member to others, but is more of a way to vouch that someone has the experience they claim on their profile.

In short, it’s a way of saying, “Yes, I worked with this person during this time,” not whether you enjoyed it.

The addition includes a number of built-in protections against abuse. For instance, the person doing the vouching must already have a verified profile, and they must have been connected to the person for at least a year. They also have to have a secure account that uses two-factor authentication to decrease the risk of hackers gaining access to their account to perform these vouches.

Another feature, which had previously been piloted with recruiters and execs, will allow companies to remove accounts that falsely claim employment from appearing on their page and in the search results associated with their page.

To use this feature, page admins will be able to visit the account that belongs to the person falsely claiming employment at the company, then manually remove them. LinkedIn is also testing a setting that will allow page admins to require that any member account going forward that tries to associate with the page complete some sort of workplace verification, like a verification done through their work email address.

When pages remove the member profile from their page, it won’t change the member’s LinkedIn profile — that’s something members themselves will retain control over. However, there will no longer be a clickable link to that company’s page from their profile, and their work experience won’t display as verified.

“We hope that this provides signals and context to members to make decisions,” Rodriguez said. He also clarified this feature focuses on full-time employees, not contractors or field workers, though they will have other means of claiming their rightful association with the company that employs them.

Plus, LinkedIn will expand its partnerships with more companies to allow members to showcase their verified identities beyond LinkedIn. On this front, Truecaller and PeerSpot will join existing partners like Adobe and UserTesting in this effort. For instance, Truecaller members can add their LinkedIn verified identity so it displays to the recipient when they place a call.

Overall, the new features expand LinkedIn’s push to invest in verification, something that it believes benefits members directly. “We have seen how, for members that are verified, they derive a lot of benefits from all of this,” said Rodriguez. “They receive, on average, 50% more post views than non-verified profiles, and they get 90% more impressions as well,” he noted.