What a verifiable certificate actually proves
By Sami Arfi, CEO and Co-Founder
Every internship platform eventually promises a certificate. Most of them mean a PDF with a name, a date and a logo, the same shape as every diploma mill artifact that made “certificate” a word people quietly distrust. We didn't want to add one more.
So the question we kept coming back to wasn't “how do we make it look official.” It was “what would actually convince a hiring manager who has seen a hundred fake ones.”
A claim versus a record
A traditional certificate is a claim: “this person did an internship here.” Nobody can check it without calling the company, and most people never do. Inturn's certificate is a record instead: it links to the actual deliverables, timestamped and versioned, the supervisor's structured rating at each one, and the dates the internship ran.
“A verification link either resolves to real, dated work, or it doesn't. There's no version of that a company can fake for a candidate who didn't do the work.”
What's actually on the record
Open a certificate at inturn.app/v/{id} and you see, in order:
- The project brief, exactly as it was scoped before anyone was hired.
- Every deliverable submitted, versioned, with the supervisor's review on each one.
- The supervisor's final rating and a short written assessment.
- The dates the internship actually ran, matched against the workspace's own activity log.
None of that is generated after the fact. It's assembled from the same workspace the intern and supervisor used the whole time, which is the part that actually makes it hard to fake: there's no separate “certificate step” where the story could quietly change.
Why this matters more than the design
We spent very little time on how the certificate looks. We spent most of it on making sure the link behind it can't lie. That trade felt obvious once we'd talked to enough companies who'd been burned by a resume line they couldn't check: the credential that matters is the one you can click on.
