What can be verified about an IT consultant, and what cannot
Identity, language and rate can be verified. Stack and years of experience are stated. Level is for the buyer to judge. Mixing up the three is why candidate presentations all look alike.
13 August 2026 · 2 min read
Every candidate record that reaches a company mixes three very different things, and presents them in the same tone. That is why, by the third profile, none of them seems to say anything.
Keeping them apart costs little and changes how you read.
Verified
These are the facts someone has checked, and for which there is a record.
- Identity: document seen, person met.
- Language: tested, not stated. A level given by the applicant and a level observed in a technical conversation are different things.
- Rate: the one the professional actually accepted, not the one they give as an expectation.
- Feedback on previous assignments, but only on those placed by whoever is presenting the profile: they are the only ones whose context is known.
Stated
These are the professional's own claims. They are not less true — they are of a different nature, and should be attributed to the person who made them.
Stack, years of experience, projects, settings they have worked in. The right way to present them is not to rewrite them in the third person: it is to quote them. "On deployment they said: blue-green, with automatic rollback if the probes fail" tells a technical reader more than any adjective, and leaves the judgement to them.
Yours to assess
This is everything else: level, suitability for the setting, fit with the team.
This part cannot be outsourced to whoever presents the profile, and anyone who promises to have already settled it is promising something that is not in their power. The buyer knows their own team, their own technical debt and their own tolerance; the recruiter does not.
Reference checks, to settle a recurring question
On critical positions they are done, and rightly so. On contract profiles in Italy they are, as a rule, not done: they cost money, take time and often produce polite answers. Saying they are always done means saying something that then does not happen.
The honest wording has three levels: references provided by the professional, feedback gathered on assignments actually placed, and checks on request when the position justifies it and the client asks for them.
Why it also helps whoever presents the profile
Because it is the only version that holds up over time. A promise of complete verification falls apart at the first profile that does not work out; a clear distinction between what was checked and what was reported holds up even when the outcome is negative — and that day is the only one when credibility really counts.