What is Certificate Matching?

Zinc now uses technology that can read images of text, also known as Optical Character Recognition (OCR), allowing you to verify qualification certificates in seconds. This means you will no longer have to wait for days to get qualification checks verified. This instant verification method works for both academic qualification as well as professional qualification checks.

How do I verify qualification checks instantly?

Selecting a verification method
If you’re building a new check package, we’ll automatically select the instant Certificate Matching method for your qualification checks.

To modify these settings, navigate to Packages > Select the desired package > Default Qualifications > choose ‘Certificate matching’.



Creating a new package

When creating a new package with a qualification check selected, the default option will be instant certificate matching. If there is a mismatch, we will attempt to verify with the institution, which will be charged as an additional check. If you’d like to not have the results verified with the institution, you can update these settings in Packages > Automatically verify with the institutions when certificate matching shows mismatches > toggle off.

Certificate matching results

Viewing results

Certificate matching results are available instantly. You’ll be able to view the certificate on the report, and it’s available to download for 30 days from check completion.


What if there are mismatches on the report?

Once the results are available, you can automate what you want to do next on the Editor page. If there are mismatches between the certificate and the information provided by the candidate, you can choose to verify these results with the institution.

If you’re happy with the results from the Certificate Matching method, you can turn off the automatic institution verification setting.


What will show as a mismatch vs a warning?

In some scenarios, differing information may not be detrimental to an overall certificate match.

e.g candidates may unintentionally provide a date that is different to what the certificate states, this may be an insignificant difference such as them providing the date they had their final exam rather than the date the certificate was awarded. Because of this, we present date mismatches as a ‘warning’ rather than a ‘mismatch’ result.


What if the candidate doesn’t have a certificate?

Candidates who don’t have certificates are able to skip the certificate upload step so they can submit their responses to you quickly. In this instance, we’ll automatically verify the results with the specified institution.


What happens if I choose Verify with Institution?

If you select the "Verify with Institution" setting, we will not verify your candidates' certificates using OCR technology. Instead, the certificate will be attempted to be verified directly with the institution.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact your account manager.