Blockchain application in the world of work: the future of recruiting starts here.

“Gradually, then suddenly” is a phrase that is particularly suited to describing the advent of blockchain technology in our global matrix system.

This Copernican revolution, based on a concept that could be defined as technological trust or trustworthiness, represents, without a doubt, one of the major challenges, and at the same time a dazzling banner, of the digital transformation trend that is now widely spread globally.

Often reduced to the sole partitioning of cryptocurrency assets, blockchain is a technology with enormous potential, destined to profoundly impact, at various levels, the main sectors that make up our system, including the world of work, considered in a broad sense.

And indeed, the endogenous usefulness of such a cryptographic system for blocks and chronologically ordered and unmodifiable chains of information becomes crystal clear and disruptive, for example, in the field of recruiting and management of active labor policies, thanks to the use of trustless technology in job demand/offering matching (S. Ciucciovino – M. Faioli, Blockchain and Labor Policies, in Quaderni CNEL, 2018, 1).

The possibility of digitally conveying values, data, and information, in maximum transparency and security, in fact, allows for easy overcoming of the system of intervention of third-party certifying entities, not only ensuring the optimization of the complex process of verifying data concerning education, work experience, titles, and skills, as attested and confirmed from the origin by the control tools of the digital chain, but also leading to the constant actualization of the training processes, ultimately benefiting the quality of the hiring and personnel search phase.

For example, think of the virtuous experience, in terms of the use of blockchain technology, of the Gradbase platform of University College London, where each diploma is assigned a unique QR code hashtag, which allows for the immediate verification of the enabling title and the training path entered in one’s curriculum vitae, on one’s business card or loaded on one’s smartphone, by any subject equipped with a digital scanner.

It is therefore a disruptive innovation, capable of making a valuable contribution to the realization of an effective and swift system of labor policies, allowing the dialogue between databases to verify the identity, qualifications, credentials, and background of potential candidates, thus facilitating scouting activities.

By allowing an immediate and secure “profiling” of the subjects involved in the labor market, blockchain technology represents a factor of innovation capable of streamlining the management system of active labor policies, thus overcoming the typical matching difficulties between demand and supply of employment centers (T. Treu, Blockchain, technology to support labor policies, in Guida lav., 2018, 48, 16), to ferry the management of processes with high complexity in the so-called smart utility phase, with evident benefits for the entire sector.

The real challenge now is to believe in and invest in technological innovation and its catalytic and propulsive power, because, to put it in Henry Ford’s words, “There is true progress only when the benefits of a new technology become available to everyone.”