Candidate Verification, a practical guide.

Verification is not one thing. It is three, and they show up at three different moments in the hiring loop.

Layer one, the resume. A claim. “I worked at X. I built Y. I led Z.” Fast to read, fast to write, easy to stretch.

Layer two, the public web. Evidence. GitHub activity, LinkedIn endorsements, portfolio artifacts, writing, talks, press. Live, citable, and honest about its own limits.

Layer three, the background check. A legal process. Queries criminal, credit, education, and employment databases under the candidate's explicit consent. Runs after the offer, not before the interview.

Most teams skip layer two. That gap is exactly where hiring goes wrong.

• Identity across platforms. Is the person on the resume the same person on LinkedIn, GitHub, and their portfolio? Names, titles, dates, and artifacts should line up.
• Consistent story over time. A five-year arc on LinkedIn backed by five years of GitHub contributions is a strong signal. A resume showing five years with a LinkedIn and a portfolio that both started last month is a different story.
• Shipping record. Merged pull requests, a portfolio of launched projects, published writing, recorded talks. These are harder to fake than claims.
• Domain citation. A short note in a reputable publication, a conference talk listing, a podcast episode — third-party evidence is harder to manufacture than first-party claims.

• Private work. Someone who has shipped excellent software inside a private company for seven years will have a thin public footprint. That is fine. It just means public signals are not the right lens for that candidate.
• Quality of contribution. Ten thousand commits does not equal ten thousand good commits. Public signals measure presence, not merit. Merit still requires reading the work.
• Values and culture fit. A public web read cannot tell you whether someone will be a thoughtful colleague. Interviews and references do that.
• Future behavior. Past public work is a signal, not a guarantee. People grow, shrink, and change — resumes and the web both freeze a moment in time.

Social Score is a number between 0 and 100. Do not read it like a grade. Read it like a smoke signal — a quick scan that tells you whether to lean in.

A high score (85+) means the public web corroborates the resume. Strong recent shipping, consistent identity across platforms, substantial third-party citation. Treat as likely accurate and interview well.

A mid score (60–85) means the public web supports part of the claim but not all of it, or the candidate simply has a smaller footprint than the average. The verdict line tells you which. Interview with curiosity, not suspicion.

A low score (below 60) can mean two very different things: the candidate works privately and rarely publishes, or the public web disagrees with what the resume says. The verdict line tells you which — and only in the second case is caution warranted.

The sources panel is the point. Open every source. Read what Rook read. If the evidence does not support the number, tell us — the score always comes with its receipts.

Automated scoring has a well-documented bias problem. Rook Recruit addresses it by design choice, not by promise.

Social Score never reads protected attributes. Age, gender, nationality, ethnicity, religion, marital status, disability, and pregnancy status are not inputs and cannot be outputs. The scoring model never sees fields that would carry those signals.

Low footprint is not low quality. Candidates from backgrounds that traditionally publish less online are not penalized — the score falls honestly and the verdict says so in plain English.

The score informs, never decides. It is a trust layer, not a judge. Recruiters always choose who to shortlist.

The right way to use Social Score is as a prompt for attention, not a replacement for it.

A background check is a legal, post-offer process. Run it after you have decided to hire, not as an interview filter. The sequence is:

1. Pre-interview. Social Score, resume, portfolio. Decide who to interview.
2. Interview loop. Conversations, rubrics, references. Decide who to offer.
3. Offer. Extend the offer contingent on a background check.
4. Check. Run the legal process with the candidate's explicit consent.
5. Close. Confirm start date, onboard, and revoke failed offers with care.

Using a background check as a pre-interview filter is illegal in many jurisdictions and bad practice in all of them. Social Score sits in step one and makes step two better.

• Social Score verdict read before the interview calendar opens.
• At least one public source read directly (not just counted).
• Any gap in the timeline noted as a gentle ask, not a disqualifier.
• Any claim in the resume with no public corroboration flagged for the interviewer.
• Protected attributes never discussed in the debrief — Rook does not read them and neither should you.
• Background check ordered only after the offer is extended.