How to verify an experience letter
Before you rely on a candidate's experience letter, here is how to actually check it — and why most of the traditional methods are slow, awkward, or both.
An experience letter is easy to produce and hard to check. That asymmetry is why employment history is one of the most commonly falsified parts of a CV, and why background-verification firms exist at all.
Start with the document itself
- Dates that do not reconcile. Compare the letter against the CV, the relieving letter and the payslips. Overlapping employment at two companies is a classic signal.
- Fonts and alignment. Edited PDFs often show a mismatched font weight or a baseline that sits slightly off on the altered line.
- A signatory who cannot be found. If nobody by that name and title appears anywhere at the company, ask why.
- Generic letterhead. A logo pasted into a Word document is not letterhead.
None of these is conclusive. A careful forgery passes all four.
Then contact the issuer — the slow path
Write to the company's HR address, not a phone number printed on the letter itself, which a forger controls. Expect delays: you are asking a stranger to do unpaid work about someone who no longer works there. Responses take days, sometimes never arrive, and are themselves unverifiable — an email saying "yes, she worked here" proves very little.
Use documentary corroboration
In India, provident fund records, Form 16 and bank-credited salary are strong independent evidence, because they involve third parties the candidate does not control. This is what a professional background check leans on.
The fast path: let the letter prove itself
If the letter carries a QR code from a verification service, scan it. You are taken to a page hosted by the issuer's platform — not by the candidate — showing the name, role and period of service as they were recorded when the letter was signed. If anything was altered afterwards, the check fails.
This inverts the problem. Instead of you chasing the issuer for confirmation, the document arrives already carrying its own proof. It takes seconds, costs nothing, and needs no account.
