International English-Speaking Attitudes Toward Business Verification
Background
Job fraud affects those who can least afford it. Job boards often ask employers to confirm their legitimacy through verification to reduce the incidence of job fraud from employer accounts created by illegitimate businesses.
I ran a study in January 2023 to understand the attitudes of the non-US English speaking world toward needing to verify the legitimacy of their businesses. Understanding employer attitudes was expected to help reduce the friction involved in verification and optimize the experience to their needs.
Prototypes
Below you can see approximations of the prototypes used in this study to provide employers with necessary context for the topic of the study. The original prototypes were not used for confidentiality reasons.
Prototype about uploading an official business document for verification
Prototype about using a personal ID for verification
Study Goals & Methods
There were three main goals for this study:
1) Explore how Canadian and British employers feel about verifying their companies to post a job on Indeed.
2) Learn how they feel about verifying their business by uploading an official business document or verifying their personal ID
2) Understand which official business documents employers in Canada and Britain have available to them
To best address these goals, I performed remote, moderated interviews with employers from Canada and Great Britain. Moderated interviews allowed me to explore further whenever these employers mentioned something that myself and the team had not yet encountered. We expected this to be more of a generative study than evaluative, and the prototypes were meant to begin a discussion with those employers.
Findings
ID verification reactions
British employers were much more comfortable with ID verification than Canadian employers, whose discomfort was similar to that of US employers.
No employer understood why verification using their own ID would have anything to do with verifying their business, especially those who were not owners of the company.
Security needs for hiring
Much like employers in the US, employers did not think of hiring as an industry in high need of security, especially as compared to financial industries. Employers did not have a good understanding of what can happen if someone steals their account, nor if someone creates an employer account pretending to be them. Most did not understand the kinds of fraud that illegitimate businesses enact against job seekers, nor did they understand that this would affect their reputation if it's believed to be their company's doing.
Outcomes
This research resulted in later research to explore alternate ways to explain why verification is important to employers.
In addition, the research made evident that internationalization to other English-speaking countries is necessary to avoid confusion. As a result, the anti-fraud team was looking for ways to internationalize content that differs by country without having a translation requirement.
Finally, this research confirmed that there are pain points for remote-only employers around documentation that assumes a physical location and being officially a business according to a relevant local authority.