Recommendations you actually own
A LinkedIn recommendation is rented furniture. A signed recommendation is property.
Sarah leaves her VP Engineering job at a robotics company. Over five years she collected eleven LinkedIn recommendations from people whose opinion would move mountains. Then her LinkedIn account is suspended by mistake during a wave of bot cleanup. The eleven recommendations are still on the platform — but they're invisible to anyone she sends to her own page.
Sarah's recommendations were never hers. They were comments on a page she happened to own at the time.
What changes with signed recommendations
A signed recommendation is a tiny file. It contains:
- The text the colleague wrote
- The colleague's identity (e.g.
did:web:halcyon.capital) - A timestamp
- A cryptographic signature only that colleague could have produced
Sarah can host that file on her own domain, attach it to a PDF CV, email it to a board, or paste it into a pitch deck. Anyone who cares can verify it — even if every platform Sarah has ever used goes dark.
What it looks like in practice
On your verified CV page, each recommendation has a small green "Verified by did:web:colleague.com" chip. Click it and a popover shows the signing details. Click "Verify now" and the page fetches the live public key from the colleague's domain and re-checks the signature — right there in the recruiter's browser. No third party.
Why this matters more for senior people
For a junior engineer, the LinkedIn recommendation feature works fine. The stakes are low and the recommendations are short. For consultants, executives, and senior ICs, a recommendation is often a six-figure decision in someone else's head — and a screenshot is not the medium for that.