Documents are your hardest evidence.

§1The full checklist

Work through every category — most people find 20–30 items. Under each item, the fine print says what it proves. Weight chips show how much an item counts on its own: anchor items are near-incontestable, supporting items strengthen the picture, and context items give your advocate substance but need backing from elsewhere.

Education anchor

• Degree certificates — every degree, including incomplete ones with transcripts The single most-checked fact in any background verification. Bringing it yourself means it’s answered before it’s asked.
• Final marksheets / transcripts, all semesters or years Grades — including weak ones — build a truthful academic picture. A weak semester with context beats a gap someone else discovers.
• Matriculation / school-leaving certificates (10th, 12th or equivalent) Establishes your verified timeline from the start — names, dates of birth, and institutions that everything later must agree with.
• Co-curricular certificates from school and college — debate, sport, music, clubs, olympiads, NCC/scouts Early, institution-stamped evidence of traits you’ll claim later: leadership, discipline, competitiveness. Individually small; together they draw a long arc.

Professional certifications & licenses anchor

• Professional certifications — cloud, project management, finance, language, trade Third-party-examined skill. Include the credential ID or verification URL printed on the certificate.
• Licenses and accreditations — engineering, medical, legal, aviation, real estate A license is a regulator vouching for you. Include current and past; expired licenses still prove the qualification and the period.

Standardized exam scorecards anchor

• TOEFL, IELTS, GRE, GMAT, CAT, GATE, SAT, or any national/international exam The rare evidence that is both objective and comparative: a measured score with a percentile against a known population. Include the percentile, not just the score.

Employment records anchor

• Offer letters and appointment letters, every employer Anchors your title, start date, and level — the facts your whole work history hangs on.
• Experience / relieving letters The employer’s own statement of your tenure and role — the exact document background-check firms exist to chase.
• Promotion and increment letters Progression, dated and signed. “Promoted to lead in two years” becomes fact, not claim.
• Termination or separation letters, if any — yes, include them Counterintuitive but critical: an exit you disclose with context is a closed question. An exit you omit is an open contradiction waiting to surface — and that costs far more.

Recommendation letters supporting

• Signed letters from managers, professors, or clients — on letterhead, dated, with the signer’s name, title, and contact A signature is a person staking their name in writing. Specific letters (“led X project in 2021, delivered Y”) corroborate your stories; generic ones (“hard-working, sincere”) add almost nothing — if a referee offers to write one, ask them to name projects and dates.

Awards, honors & public recognition anchor

• Award certificates and citations — employee of the quarter, dean’s list, hackathon wins Someone else judged you against others and put it in writing.
• Competition results — leaderboards, rankings, published results pages Verifiable and comparative; link the official results where they exist.
• Press coverage — articles naming you or your work Independent media attention; a third party found the work worth writing about.
• Patents and publications — patent numbers, DOIs, conference papers Examined by patent offices and peer reviewers — among the hardest evidence a knowledge worker can hold.

Public profiles & live links supporting

• LinkedIn profile — brought fully up to date first The most-checked profile on earth. Titles and dates here must match your letters and resume exactly — see §3.
• GitHub or equivalent — if you build software Years of timestamped commit history can’t be back-dated. Public repositories are a portfolio that verifies itself.
• Published apps, products, or stores pages you can point to A live product with your name attached is proof the work shipped.
• Scholarly profiles — Google Scholar, ORCID, ResearchGate Citations are the academic world’s own verification network.
• Portfolio platforms — Behance, Dribbble, Kaggle, personal site Shows the work itself; strongest when entries carry dates and collaborators.

Your own written material context

• Resume — cleaned up against §2 below The index of your professional story. Every line on it should be traceable to something else in this pack.
• 3–5 written accomplishment stories, blog posts, or articles you’ve authored Depth and voice for your advocate. As evidence they’re your own words — pair each with a witness or document from above.

§2Resume guidelines

Your resume plays a different role here than in a job application: it’s read as the index of claims the rest of your evidence must support. That changes what “good” means.

• Every line must be backable. For each bullet, ask: which document, person, or link in my pack confirms this? If nothing does — get the backing, or cut the line. An unverifiable claim quietly weakens the verified ones around it.
• No repetition, no overlap. Don’t restate the same achievement under two roles, and never let date ranges overlap unless you genuinely held roles concurrently (then say so explicitly). Repetition adds nothing — the same fact stated twice is still one fact — and unexplained overlaps read as inconsistencies.
• Kill generic statements. “Team player”, “results-driven”, “excellent communicator” — nothing checkable survives from these lines. Replace each with the specific incident that made you want to write it.
• Quantify with the X-Y-Z pattern. “Accomplished [X] as measured by [Y], by doing [Z]” — e.g. “Cut checkout latency 40% (2.1s → 1.26s) by rewriting the payment service, Q3 2022.” Numbers and dates are what verification grips onto.
• Dates to the month, everywhere the same. Resume, LinkedIn, and experience letters must carry identical titles and dates. A “Senior Engineer” resume line against an offer letter saying “Engineer II” is a contradiction you handed in yourself.
• Explain gaps in one line. “2019: sabbatical, family care” closes the question. Silence leaves it open.

For general resume craft, these are worth an hour: Laszlo Bock’s X-Y-Z resume formula · Purdue OWL — résumés and CVs · Harvard Mignone Center — resume & letter resources

§3Scanning & preparing files

What to mask, what to keep

• Mask freely: government ID numbers, bank details, salary figures — anything a document reveals that verification doesn’t need.
• Never mask: your name, dates, titles, institution names, seals, signatures, credential IDs. Those are the parts that make a document evidence — a letter with the signature blacked out has lost its value.