The same work is posted, staffed and paid for thousands of times in parallel, inside companies that never compare notes. Duly Attested is a free public standard for that work: it reads every open role as a list of tasks, across every employer at once, and returns two verdicts: whether your agent can file the application, and whether the role should be hired at all, or pooled with every other copy and done once.
Candidates do not create an account. Tell your agent: Read dulyattested.com/agent.md and enroll me
For candidates. Free, permanently. One verified profile, held by your own agent, filed on every portal under the standard, with a receipt for each application.
For employers. A scan of your open roles before you post them. Agent-fillable, hybrid, or human-required, task by task. Copies can be pooled instead of hired.
For the work itself. One playbook, run across many employers, each employer’s data walled from every other’s. The playbook is shared. The data never is.
ILLUSTRATIVE INDEX. EXAMPLE ROLES AND FIGURES, SHOWN IN THE FORMAT THE LIVE INDEX RETURNS.
An operating team at a buyout firm will consolidate the back office of ten portfolio companies, because each one hired its own copy of the same finance, payroll and support functions. The saving funds the model. But ownership is the constraint: the fix stops at the edge of the portfolio, and it starts only after a purchase.
Postings remove that constraint. Companies publish their org charts in public, role by role, task by task. Read at scale, the duplication is measurable before anyone buys anything, and the remedy does not require a change of ownership. It requires a standard.
Illustrative proportions. The underlying ratio is Sequoia's, from "Services: The New Software": for every dollar spent on software, roughly six are spent on the services and labour around it.
A fund acquires a platform company, then a string of similar add-ons. Different owners, same industry, same functions inside.
The operating team inventories finance, payroll, procurement, IT and support in each company, role by role, cost by cost.
The same clerk, the same process, the same vendor contract, ten or fifty times over. The copies are the value creation plan.
One shared service centre performs the function for the whole portfolio, on one system, to one standard, behind data walls per company.
Duplicated salaries and contracts come out. The margin expansion is a large part of how the fund earns its return.
Illustrative model, assumptions printed so you can quarrel with them: each company carries $480,000 a year of duplicated back office (payables, payroll, HR administration, IT support). One platform costs $600,000 to run, plus $60,000 per company served. Duly Attested runs the same arithmetic without the first step: no purchase, because the copies are visible in public postings.
Each posting is decomposed into the work it actually contains: the data moved, the documents produced, the decisions taken, the people faced. Tasks are then matched across employers. A task performed inside four thousand companies is a standard task, and standard tasks are the ones agents already perform reliably. The Index’s core measure is not whether an agent could do a job. It is how much of the job is every employer’s job.
| Role | Principal tasks | Live copies | Agent share | Verdict |
|---|
ILLUSTRATIVE INDEX. VERDICTS STATE THE GROUND: PHYSICAL PRESENCE, LEGAL ACCOUNTABILITY, LICENSED JUDGMENT, OR NONE OF THE ABOVE.
A concrete case. Ten medical practices each need their billing done: the same payers, the same claim formats, the same denial codes. Today each practice hires its own biller, or goes without. Under the standard, one agent worker performs the billing for all ten, because the work was never ten jobs. It was one job, staffed ten times.
The precedent
Germany’s tax advisors solved this institutionally decades ago. DATEV, a cooperative owned by the advisors themselves, runs shared systems for hundreds of thousands of separate clients, with per-client separation as a legal duty rather than a feature. Pooled work with walled data is not an experiment. It is how a profession already operates.
The economics follow the structure. Each practice pays a fraction of one biller’s cost, because the playbook is written once and a payer’s rules are learned once, for everyone. The standard itself stays free. Operators and cooperatives earn their margin on the pooled work, not on access to the standard.
One session per employer. Work opens in a session containing only that employer’s data, and closes when the task ends. Two employers’ records are never in the same working memory.
Credentials brokered, per employer. Each employer’s logins stay in that employer’s vault and are issued as scoped access for the task at hand.
Separate stores, separate keys. Records sit in per-employer encrypted partitions. A breach yields one employer, not ten.
Rules may cross. Data may not. The only thing that travels between employers is a better rule for the shared playbook. Auditors plant canary records in one employer’s files and certify they never surface in another’s.
A ledger per employer. Every action is logged under the employer it was done for. Any employer can pull its complete ledger and verify that nothing else is in it.
Illustrative model: a dedicated biller costs a practice about $72,000 a year. The pooled service carries a playbook and platform cost of $90,000 a year, plus $9,000 per practice served, split across the pool. One practice alone gains nothing; the curve is the whole argument. Ten practices in, the same billing costs each of them roughly a quarter of the hire.
For candidates
There is no platform to join, no dashboard to learn, and nothing to pay. You point the agent you already have at the Duly Attested protocol, once.
For employers
Run a requisition through the Index while it is still a draft. The verdict arrives before the posting does.
Duly Attested publishes the document an agent reads to enroll a candidate, file under the standard, and perform pooled work behind the five walls. There is no SDK, no integration project, and no fee. Candidates pay nothing, agents need no one’s permission to implement it, and employers can require filings under it. What can be earned is the certification that a filing flow or a pool actually follows it.
agent.md · Agent Protocol v0.2 · Excerpt
## Enrollment candidate: fact_base # verified with the candidate attestations # human, always ledger # every filing, on record ## Replies Route application mail to an inbox the agent reads. Surface interview invitations immediately, with the exact next step. ## What this is not Not a volume tool. Not a credential farm. Not a route to roles the candidate would not take.
Verify live, twice. The posting is read on the employer's own board before drafting, and again before filing. Aggregator copies are leads, not evidence.
Never invent a value. A mandatory field with no verified fact behind it is a stop. The application parks, and the candidate is told why.
One application per role. The ledger is checked before every filing. A duplicate is a defect, not a retry.
Attestations stay human. Declarations and signatures are surfaced to the candidate in every case.
Log the confirmation. The portal's exact wording, the requisition identifier, the date. A filing counts when the portal says it does.
Credentials through the vault. Portal passwords are held in secure storage only. Never in the ledger, never in transit.
The standard was written from a live campaign run under it in October 2026: 37 applications across more than 20 portals, each confirmed in the portal's own words. The failure modes in the protocol were encountered in the field, not imagined: a captcha that accepted the correct answer and rejected the filing, a posting that closed between verification and submission, a mandatory grade field for a university that issues no grades.
Duly Attested · A public standard
The standard is free, and the data stays where it belongs: the candidate’s facts with the candidate’s agent, each employer’s records behind its own wall. What is shared is the playbook, and the record that the work was duly done.
Tell your agent: Read dulyattested.com/agent.md and enroll me