How we verify
The Trust Ledger
In a market with more confident claims than checked ones, our edge is simple: we tell you exactly how sure we are, and we show our work.
The three states
Every claim we make lands in one of these. Nothing gets rounded up.
- VERIFIED
- Confirmed by direct read of the primary source.
- CORROBORATED
- Consistent across independent sources, but the primary page could not be fetched directly.
- UNVERIFIED
- Repeated in the market but not independently confirmed. Treat with caution.
The standard
Every factual claim carries a confidence marker.
Directly confirmed, cross-corroborated, or flagged-unverified — never a flat assertion. This is the whole difference between us and the vendor blogs that dominate this topic.
We never upgrade a snippet into a fact.
If the only source is a search-engine snippet from a page that itself returned 403 to a direct fetch, we mark it “corroborated, not directly verified” — we don't quietly promote it.
We never fabricate credentials.
Our bylines are pen names, and we say so. What we never do is invent a work history or a placement to sound more authoritative. A discovered fake would undo the entire point of a neutral, cited source.
We read the source, not the summary.
Before repeating a number, we read the page it came from. Most of what circulates in this market has never been checked — because almost everyone writing about it is selling something in it.
Worked examples
The claims we've checked so far, and where each one landed. This grows with every dispatch.
Paraform: “30+ forward deployed engineers placed at Palantir.”
UNVERIFIEDRead the full post directly. No name, date, hiring manager, case study, or link of any kind under the number. Unverified marketing copy — the single most-cited enterprise placement claim in the space, with nothing behind it.
Recruiting From Scratch: “Real Data from 200K Job Postings.”
UNVERIFIEDThe analysis under the headline rests on 135 postings, not 200,000. A near-identical sister article uses “1.9 Million” for the same content. A programmatic-SEO hook, not a methodology.
Bloomberry: FDE comp from ~1,000 postings via Revealera.
VERIFIEDDiscloses its data provider, sample size, and segmentation logic, and states its numbers consistently. The most credible aggregate comp source we found — cited as such.
Anthropic (Paul Smith) & Salesforce (Ben Hickin) hiring quotes.
CORROBORATEDConsistent across multiple independent sources, but CNBC's and Salesforce's own pages return 403 to direct fetch. Used, and labelled as corroborated-not-directly-verified.
Shyam Sankar: “heretics/rebels” make ideal FDEs.
UNVERIFIEDTraces to a specific YouTube video via PostHog's blog, but we haven't confirmed the exact wording against the video itself. Labelled attributed-but-not-transcript-verified.
See these in context in the fact-check dispatch.
Verification, once a month.
The claims we checked, the ones that held up, and the ones that didn't.