/projects/open-employment-protocol
Open Employment Protocol (OEP)
An open, federated protocol for hiring — a reconciler that poses the candidate and employer positions and settles a net outcome no single party owns.
The problem
Hiring has become a race to the bottom: candidates spam AI-optimized résumés, employers auto-reject with AI, and the engineers who would actually work together never speak first. Identity and trust stay locked inside walled gardens that profit from the friction.
My role
Creator — protocol design and candidate-side reference implementation.
Highlights
- Candidate-side reference implementation is live and open-source (resume-agent + resume-agent-web, MIT); identity derived from a queried profile so a fork points two env vars at its own backend and becomes that person's site
- Public, browsable evidence trail (/observations): each dated premise individually addressable and citable — verify-me-not-trust-me
- Names its own biggest open problem — how a reconciled position becomes a governed, published standard — and turns it into a call for standards-experience collaborators (GOVERNANCE.md)
- CA-style federated trust that stores nothing: DNS-TXT domain verification + Ed25519 co-signatures
Architecture
Open Employment Protocol acts as a neutral reconciler between sovereign candidate agents and employer-side role agents to settle hiring outcomes through a verifiable evidence graph. The architecture consists of three independent repositories—a candidate-side agent, an employer-side recruiter, and the OEP reconciler—utilizing DNS-TXT domain verification and Ed25519 co-signatures for a certificate-authority-style trust model. Engineering is centered on a stateless handshake mechanism where every claim resolves to falsifiable evidence via a dated observations endpoint, ensuring no single party owns the standard. This design prioritizes value transfer over black-box automation by maintaining an open, queryable graph that routes the matching market around centralized captors.
Impact
Reframes hiring from value-extraction to value-transfer — turning a static résumé into a queryable, verifiable, self-sovereign node. Exercised in the wild before any formal launch: 66 real external queries over 62 days from interviewer, ATS, and AI-agent callers.