I\'m working on a website and I want to validate that an individual is an employ
ID: 651623 • Letter: I
Question
I'm working on a website and I want to validate that an individual is an employee at one of a large number of companies (probably using their company's email address, which I don't know before hand). The idea being some users are the general public and others are from these companies. And I need some way to authenticate that the users claiming to be employees are being honest while still having a friendly enough UI.
I did an informal survey of people I know and the domains and emails will match in a majority of cases but they might not always match exactly so you might have a company with a website foo.com and an email billy@foobar.com (although foobar.com did redirect back to foo.com).
And while I can easily check that I'm not sure what other variations might be out there (maybe fooLA.com and email billy@foolosangeles.com, etc.)
Explanation / Answer
You require a moderation procedure there. You need to work out a user-friendly moderation procedure that may not offend the user claiming to be an employee of a certain company. The best and most credible way to determine is to contact the HR department of that company.
Verifying emails will not be a very credible way to determine whether a certain user is an employee or not. I would rather be sending an email to the registered user claiming to be an employee stating that your application is being moderated and we shall get back to you shortly once moderation is completed.