How are Requesters verified?

The verification process

Every Requester must verify their professional identity before they can create their first poll a Survey.

Verification includes two mandatory elements:

1. Professional email verification — We confirm that the Requester controls a work-domain or domain-linked email (for example, @company.com).

2. LinkedIn key verification — A short unique identifier generated by Salary Confidential that must be placed in the Requester’s LinkedIn “About” section. We expose this LinkedIn verification key in all active surveys, so the respondent is able to verify by themselves that the LinkedIn profile of the requester does show this key. The fact that the key is present guarantees that the requester controls the LinkedIn profile they attached to their Salary Confidential account.

Both elements must be validated before you can buy your first poll.

What if you don’t have a @workdomain email?

If you’re a student, between jobs, or a freelancer using a free email service like gmail.com or outlook.com, you can still verify.
We’ll verify that email address and display it on your Survey pages.

For Respondents, this is a weaker trust signal — it may prompt them to check your LinkedIn profile for context. If your situation is clear (“Freelance PM, formerly at ACME”), that’s perfectly fine. But if your LinkedIn profile says you’re currently at ACME Inc. and your verification email is person@gmail.com instead of first.last@acme.com, this will appear inconsistent and may discourage participation.

Why this matters

Respondents are being asked to share highly sensitive compensation data. Transparency and legitimacy from the Requester are non-negotiable trust requirements.

Verification signals that the person running the Survey is a genuine peer conducting legitimate research — not a recruiter, journalist, data harvester, or, our favorite villain at Salary Confidential, the nosy neighbor.

In social terms, we're making someone's professional reputation be a collateral in running a sensitive peer survey. Don't ask for what you have no business asking about -- because you have to reveal who you are in order to ask. In the security world, that's called 'raising the cost of attack', which means that we're making the risk to the requester (to the reputation of the requester) be part of the assessment about the value of trying to misuse the platform

Your data is on a webpage but it won't be found

Your email or personal information is not going to be found by robots or data scrapers. You can read about how we prevent this by reading this article about how we prevent scraping and discovery

Report issues with Respondent verification

If you're a responder and you find that your Requester's LinkedIn profile doesn't carry its Salary Confidential verification key, reach out to us via support, customer-help@salaryconfidential.com

If you received your outreach via that same LinkedIn profile, the missing key is probably a misunderstanding - do let us know in your message to us whether you were contacted via the LinkedIn profile in reference on the survey page, or a different one. If your outreach from the respondent came from another channel than LinkedIn, tell us so, and we will suspend the survey and reach out to the requester to clarify