What is Vetted?

Hiring is broken in two directions at once. Companies can't tell whether a candidate is actually good until they've already spent weeks on interviews. Candidates can't get in the door without pattern-matched resumes and prestige signals. Everyone agrees the system wastes time — nobody agrees on who should fix it.

The problem

The deepest signal about a candidate's ability comes from people who already do the work. A staff engineer knows whether another engineer is faking it in twenty minutes. A principal designer can read a portfolio in a way a generalist recruiter cannot. The problem is that this signal is trapped: it lives in private Slack DMs, in personal referral networks, in closed-door interview loops.

Vetted's bet is that if you give experts the tools and the incentives to evaluate candidates publicly and accountably, you get better hiring outcomes than any resume screen, any AI matcher, or any generic jobs board can produce.

The Vetted model

The platform is built around three ideas that reinforce each other:

1. Guilds group domain experts — engineers, designers, data scientists, security researchers — who collectively review candidates applying to jobs in their field.
2. Commit-reveal voting means every reviewer submits their score blind, before seeing anyone else's. This prevents anchoring and herding, which are the two biggest failure modes of group evaluation.
3. Staked reputation means reviewers have skin in the game. Experts earn reputation and token rewards when their votes align with consensus, and lose both when they're persistent outliers.

Three actors, one loop

There are three kinds of users on Vetted, and each one's actions feed the others:

• Candidates create profiles and apply to jobs. Their applications flow into the relevant guild for review.
• Experts are guild members who review the applications. They score candidates against a rubric, submit blind votes, and eventually reveal them for consensus.
• Companies post jobs, receive guild-vetted shortlists, and hire from candidates who have been publicly and accountably reviewed by people who actually do the work.

Why on-chain?

"Web3 hiring" sounds like a contradiction in terms unless you know what the blockchain is actually doing. It's not there for the branding. It's there because three specific things are hard to do any other way:

• Commitment-before-reveal requires cryptographic guarantees that a score can't be changed after the fact. A hash committed on-chain is tamper-evident by default.
• Staked accountability requires custody of real value that can be forfeited if a reviewer acts in bad faith. A smart contract enforces this without anyone having to trust Vetted the company.
• Portable reputation means the credential an expert earns on Vetted belongs to them, not to a platform they can be locked out of. Reputation tied to a wallet is portable by default.

What Vetted is not

• Not a resume parser. Applications are scored by humans against a rubric, not grepped for keywords.
• Not a referral network. Experts who review candidates are accountable to the rest of their guild, not acting as private gatekeepers.
• Not a DAO. Guild governance exists, but there's no "decentralize everything" dogma. The platform is a product first.
• Not pseudonymous-only. Candidates and companies present real identities. Experts can choose to remain pseudonymous, but their track record is public.