Shareability.

Most hiring tools were built as destinations. To find candidates, you go to the platform. To apply for jobs, you go to the platform. The platform owns the URL, the audience, the distribution, and the matchmaking — and charges for access at every layer. The deeper problem is that the record itself — the resume, the profile, the listing — is owned by the platform, not the user.

This trapping creates real costs. Candidates have to recreate profiles on every platform. Verification done on one platform doesn't transfer to another. A barbershop's QR code on the door points to whichever platform they paid this month, and last quarter's candidates can't be reached on this quarter's platform. Both sides spend their time feeding platform-specific profiles instead of building one record that travels.

A 10-factor hire flips this. The user owns the record. The candidate's verified profile is theirs — to share, to reference, to take with them. The employer's job post is theirs — to distribute, to embed, to attach to their existing audience channels. The platform verifies; it doesn't gatekeep.

The pushback from incumbent platforms is real and predictable: this gives up control over the audience and the data flywheel. Correct — that's the point. The platform that locks distribution becomes a chokepoint, and chokepoints get routed around. The platform that supports user ownership becomes infrastructure, and infrastructure gets adopted by employers, candidates, and eventually competitors.

A second pushback is that genuine cross-platform portability requires industry coordination that doesn't exist yet — no shared verification standard, no interoperable profile format. That's true today. The standard sets the direction; the infrastructure follows. Heroku's 12-Factor App didn't have cross-cloud portability either when it was written; the principle came first, the interoperability followed.