What Is a Verifiable CV? A Career Record Your Agent Can Maintain
A verifiable CV is a confirmed, structured Career Record that remains useful across agents, web profiles, PDFs, and portable data.
The useful definition
A verifiable CV is not a prettier document and it is not an AI-written biography. It is a structured record of professional facts whose changes, sources, and approvals can be inspected.
The record separates four things that a conventional document tends to mix together:
- the facts about roles, projects, skills, and outcomes;
- the wording used to present those facts;
- the evidence or provenance behind individual claims;
- the layout used for a particular audience.
That separation is what makes the record useful to both humans and agents.
The audience person.work is built for
The initial audience is deliberately narrow: experienced freelancers and IT consultants who already have a CV and already use Claude, ChatGPT, Codex, or another MCP-capable agent.
They are not looking for a social network, a job feed, or another place to manually re-enter their history. They want to say, “Add the platform migration I just completed,” review the proposed diff, and know that the profile, PDF, and data export now agree.
One source, several outputs
The Career Record is the single source of truth. From it, person.work can render:
- a public web profile that works without a login;
- a printable PDF for clients or intermediaries;
- structured JSON for another tool or agent;
- profession-specific extensions without flattening every career into the same template.
Changing a sentence in one exported PDF should not create a second version of reality. The change belongs in the record, where every output can use it.
What “confirmed” means
Confirmation begins with the owner. An authorized agent can read the current record and submit a proposal. It cannot accept that proposal, make a private profile public, or publish its own work. The owner sees the change and decides.
This creates a clean boundary:
| Authorized agent | Profile owner | |
|---|---|---|
| Read current facts | Yes | Yes |
| Draft a change | Yes, as a proposal | Yes |
| Approve the change | No | Yes |
| Publish the record | No | Yes |
Optional evidence, not compulsory reputation
A client, peer, or former lead may confirm a specific claim from first-hand experience. The statement remains attached to that role or project and discloses who made it and how they relate to the work.
That is useful evidence, but it is not a universal seal of quality. A Career Record with no confirmations can still be complete and valuable. person.work does not rank people, calculate a reputation score, or treat a missing confirmation as failure.
Why an agent does not make the record less trustworthy
An agent is good at extracting structure from an existing CV, spotting inconsistent dates, and turning a conversation into a precise proposal. It is not the authority on what happened.
The authority remains the professional who owns the record. Provenance shows whether a fact came from an initial sync, a manual edit, or an agent proposal. Review keeps fluent generated language from silently becoming accepted biography.
Portability is the exit, not a slogan
The value of an open format becomes clear when a professional changes tools. A new agent can read the same stable roles, projects, dates, and evidence instead of parsing a fresh PDF and guessing at its structure. The owner can export the record without a commercial tier or paid gate.
person.work is a non-commercial goodwill project and reference implementation of the open Career Record. It does not sell profile data, run ads, or manufacture a feed around the information.
The smallest useful first step
Start with the CV you already maintain. Give it to your own agent, authorize person.work through OAuth, and ask for an initial sync. Review the resulting record before anything is public. After that, maintenance becomes a conversation about what changed rather than another round of form filling.
