How Vetted works

The three lanes

The easiest way to understand Vetted is to follow each user type through their own lane. The lanes run in parallel, intersect at specific hand-offs, and eventually converge on a hire.

• Candidates build a profile, apply to jobs, and wait for guild review.
• Experts pick up applications in their guild queue, score them against a rubric, and vote.
• Companies post jobs and receive a ranked shortlist once review completes.

End-to-end lifecycle

The candidate lane

A candidate signs up with email and password (or LinkedIn), and fills out a profile. They browse job listings by guild and submit an application. Each application routes to the guild tied to the job — a backend role goes to the Engineering guild, a design role goes to Design, and so on.

The expert lane

Experts in the receiving guild see new applications appear in their vetting queue. From there, the review process runs in three phases:

1. 1

   Commit phase

   The expert reads the application, scores each rubric criterion, writes optional comments, and submits. Their score is hashed along with a nonce and stored on-chain. No other expert can see it yet.

2. 2

   Reveal phase

   Once the commit window closes, experts reveal their actual scores. The backend checks that each revealed score matches the committed hash — which guarantees nobody changed their mind after seeing the others.

3. 3

   Finalization

   Consensus is calculated using interquartile-range filtering (scores outside the median ± 0.75×IQR band are excluded, average of the rest becomes the consensus score). Each expert's deviation from consensus is classified as Aligned or Misaligned, and reputation/rewards move accordingly.

The company lane

The company posts the job, sets the guild that will vet it, and configures any job-specific screening questions. Once applications are finalized, the company sees a ranked shortlist with each candidate's consensus score and optional aggregated feedback.

The company reviews the shortlist, runs their own interviews as usual, and marks a final hire. If an expert staked VETD endorsing a candidate and that candidate is hired, the endorsement pays out. If the hire doesn't work out, that reputation signal gets recorded too.

What moves on-chain

Not everything needs to hit the chain — that would be expensive and slow. Vetted uses on-chain storage only for the things that require tamper-evidence or portable ownership:

• Vote commitments (hashes, not scores) so reveals can't be rewritten.
• Revealed scores and their corresponding consensus calculations.
• Reputation deltas attached to each expert's wallet.
• Stakes and endorsements — VETD tokens custodied by a smart contract.

Everything else — profiles, application text, messages, rubric metadata — lives in the Vetted backend and is indexed by the chain's canonical identifiers when needed.