I strictly separate work from personal stuff. Work stuff gets my work email. Personal stuff gets my personal email.
Traveling for work and need to book a hotel? Work email. Apple Id for work laptop? Work email. New account per employer. Gets disassociated and closed before I hand in my laptop. Electronic pay slips? Personal email. Health insurance account? Personal email. Apple Id for personal laptop? Personal email.
There are things I need or want access to without being dependent on my employer.
LinkedIn has nothing to do with my work. It's personal. It's about me. I list information about me. It's like a CV. No I should not have to update my CV through my work email account where my employer has access to information they shouldn't and where I can't update it if I no longer work there.
That (changing your account to use your work email for sign-in) is not what they're suggesting; they're suggesting binding the email address as secondary information to your account (by sending it a magic-link email you have to click) — like a Keybase verification that you "own" a profile.
I don't update my LinkedIn right away for example when I change jobs. I usually wait about a year until I put the new employer. Why would I accept getting forced, as one of the first actions at my new employer, to list where I work?
IMHO, of the two options, the email is the more convenient and less invasive one — at the expense of not always being reachable by the time you need it.
Yes sure it is less invasive than the other option you gave. I mean income tax statement to show I worked somewhere, are you kidding me? To LinkedIn? Showing exactly how much I made? Your suggestions are not getting better. Less invasive doesn't mean it's a good idea.
Making the president dictator for 20 years is less bad than making him dictator for life. I still like democracy better, even if it's not perfect.
In other words, in a perfect world, the government requires LinkedIn and similar services to put users through KYC (i.e. demand proof-of-identity+income for sign-up)... and poof! These services cease to exist, because nobody's going to give them that for only the small amount of value LinkedIn provides people.
The more I think about it, the more corner cases I see that make this problematic.
I think you may just have to accept that if you want to verify an employee, you'll need to call their previous employers. This is the way it's always been done.
You're talking about "they" as in the people reading the CV. Which works fine for the scale individual employers operate at.
But the point of this conversation, is what the services themselves, dealing with fake profiles at scale, should do. LinkedIn themselves don't make hiring decisions; they make money off of how reliable their listings are. Their incentive is entirely different than the employer's incentive.
By analogy: it's fine to talk about how a given person should carry pepper spray with them if they want to avoid getting mugged. But what should a city government do to make a city a place people want to move to, where people generally don't want to move to cities where they might have a high chance of getting mugged?
> Linkedin will never require proof of income. That's much more intrusive.
You seem to think we're talking about this being done for every company automatically. But my understanding is that bots are always trying to impersonate the same top companies — so this requirement would either be for a certain whitelist of important employers, or (more likely) would be an org setting that the LinkedIn org admin for a given company would set (when they're having trouble with bots), to require LinkedIn to do extended verification for people claiming to specifically be employees of that company. Very much like how Cloudflare has an "I'm under attack" toggle that forces visitors through CAPTCHAs. If your previous employer sets that flag... well, that's their fault. Same as it's their fault if they aren't willing to give you a reference for petty reasons.
They already know your corporate email address. They — and anyone else who sees the public profile they display for you(!) — has all the information required to deduce it. (And privately, they have all the info required to not even have to brute-force it — i.e. they already know some of your coworkers' corporate email addresses, and so the format of the username-part of yours.)
The only thing they don't know, is whether you — the person who claims to have worked for company X, but might not actually — can access that email address.
Is there something scary about them having that information, over-and-above what's scary about them being able to do what they can do with the information you explicitly did choose to give them?
The single HR email seems like the best option since they would be able to retroactively confirm employment even if you've left.