Requesting Work Email Address to Verify Employment: Best Practices

In the past, emails were used primarily for correspondence. Just take a look at your personal email account — sort by date — oldest first. You probably still keep the messages from your old friends, and memories of the good old days.

Since the email address itself serve as a unique identifier, it is also commonly used/ requested when we register accounts for different kinds of online services. After registration, the service provider can, through the same email address, send us updates about the account or subscribed service, and sometimes advertisements as well. If we forget the login password (which happen from time to time), the same email address is instrumental in the process of resetting the password.

Some email addresses can serve additional purposes, i.e. verifying employment status and place of work, as well as proving professional credential. Those are work email addresses which end with the company or organization domain, e.g. name@company.com. Some service providers require the new users to provide a valid work email address. Such requirement sets a threshold to exclude people without corporate affiliation from being a user.

Note: there are a number of online services like SaaS which cater to a company’s HR, finance, IT, sales and marketing needs. It is justified for…