Verified means one thing on Credda: a named person who is not you confirmed a specific fact, and Credda's checks accepted that confirmation. Nothing else is verified, however true it is.
A job title you typed, a license number you typed, an expiry date you copied off your own certificate and a job you recorded yourself are all things you said. They sit on your record as claims. They become verified only when somebody else says the same thing and the confirmation clears.
There are three states, not two
Most people expect verified or not verified. There are three.
Not verified. You entered it and nobody has confirmed it. This is the ordinary state of a new record and it is not a mark against you.
Recorded, but not counted. Somebody confirmed it, and the checks did not accept the confirmation as independent. The confirmation is real and it stays on your record and on your timeline. It is not treated as evidence.
Verified. Somebody confirmed it and the checks accepted it.
The middle state is the one that surprises people. When a client clicks confirm, the screen says the answer was recorded against the record. It does not say it counted, because at that moment nobody knows. Any guide, email or sales page that tells you a click makes something verified is wrong.
Recorded but not counted is a real row on your own view of your confirmed outcomes, and it is not a fault. It usually means the checks could not tell two parties apart, not that anybody did anything wrong.
Why a confirmation might not count
Credda is trying to answer one question: did an independent party say this, or did the record confirm itself. So it looks at the shape of the confirmation rather than at the person.
Confirming your own record is blocked outright. Nothing is written. Addresses are tidied up first, so an alias of your own inbox is still you.
Confirmations from throwaway inboxes, from addresses that cannot receive mail, or that arrive in patterns that look like one person operating both ends are recorded and not counted.
Your client does not need a Credda account. A confirmation from somebody who has never heard of Credda counts exactly as much as one from a member. Requiring every client to sign up would make the whole thing unusable.
Credda will not tell you which check held a confirmation. That is deliberate, and it is not aimed at you: naming the rule to the person who tripped it is a lesson in getting round it next time. If a confirmation you expected to count did not, ask the person to confirm from a work address they normally use, and if it still does not, email support@credda.io.
Where an employer is the confirmer
There are three results here too, and the middle one catches out every new business.
Blocked. The person doing the confirming is the worker. Nothing is written.
Recorded, not counted. The two parties are genuinely different people, but the organization itself has not been corroborated as a real employer.
Verified. Distinct parties, and a corroborated organization.
If your employer's confirmations are showing as recorded rather than counted, the reason is the organization, not you. Why a shift you recorded may not count as verified explains what clears it, and none of the routes requires anybody to pay.
What verified never means
A dental practice, a care agency and an electrician all get asked to prove things by people with real duties, so it is worth being blunt about the edges.
Verified does not mean an issuing body checked anything. No licensing board, register or awarding body is asked. A witness who confirms that you hold a certificate is confirming that fact as they know it. They are not the board and they did not look your number up. Why your license number is not marked as verified goes into it.
Verified is not a background check. Nothing on Credda is screened against criminal, credit, identity or public record sources, and no such check has been run.
Verified is not a judgment about you. A witness confirms a fact. There is no rating box, no stars, no question asking what they think of you. Nothing on Credda says hire, do not hire, approve or deny.
Verified is not a statement about quality. A confirmed job says the job was delivered and accepted. It does not say it was done well.
What verification actually changes
Two things, and it is worth knowing which is which.
The confirmed share of your work. Your reliability score includes a factor for how much of your recorded work a third party confirmed. It is the confirmed outcomes divided by the total outcomes on your record. Ten jobs with nine confirmed reads better than fifty jobs with five confirmed. Recording work nobody can confirm pulls that share down.
Whether you have any confirmed employment at all. The score reads employment once, as a yes or a no. One third party confirmed role counts as much as fifty. A self-entered one counts as zero. The employer's name is never read and neither is how long you were there.
Verified qualifications, education, skills, projects and awards are on a published list of things that cannot move the score in either direction, verified or not. They are recorded and displayed and they are not scoring inputs. The reasoning is on the trust page: the score measures how you deliver work, not what you hold.
What never changes it
No plan and no payment moves your own score. There is no code path by which money could. There is no human decision and no AI in the loop either: the score is worked out from the record by a fixed calculation, and the same record always gives the same number.