What happens after you submit a proof
Every proof carries a status. Here is what each one means, what approval actually awards you, and what to do about a rejection or a stale link.
A submitted proof is reviewed by a person. Automated checks can confirm that a GitHub commit is yours, but nothing automated can judge whether the work is any good — so a human reads the evidence against the skills you claimed.
The statuses
- Pending. In the queue. Nothing is wrong; nobody has read it yet.
- Partially approved. The automatic check confirmed your authorship, but the demonstration video has not been watched yet. The proof counts, and you cannot build a certificate from it until a reviewer has signed the video off. This is the status people are most often surprised by — it is not a problem, it is the second half of a two-part check.
- Verified. Fully approved. The skills are awarded, the proof is public on your profile, and it counts toward your tier and score.
- Rejected. A reviewer declined it, with a reason you can read.
There is a fifth state, stale, that you will not see on your own page. A verified proof whose evidence later stops working — a link that 404s, a repository that went private — is marked stale internally so a buyer is shown "the evidence changed" rather than a dead link. Your own list keeps showing it as verified.
The practical version: your evidence has to keep working after approval. If you take a repository private or retire a demo URL, fix or replace that proof rather than assuming approval is permanent.
What approval actually gives you
Approval is not a badge. It moves four things at once:
- The skills on the proof are awarded and become searchable — this is how buyers filtering by skill find you at all.
- The proof becomes public on your profile, with its evidence and its outcome.
- It counts toward your standing — verified proofs are the main input to your Rework Score and trust tier, which feed marketplace ranking.
- It becomes certifiable — you can bundle verified proofs into a shareable build certificate.
That last one has one rule worth knowing up front: a proof can only be used in one certificate. Certificates are meant to be a claim about a body of work, not the same proof re-issued under several names.
If a proof is rejected
You get the reviewer's reason, and the proof stays in your list so you can fix it and resubmit rather than starting again. A rejection also releases the evidence, so the corrected version is not blocked as a duplicate of your own earlier attempt.
The most common reason by a distance is evidence a reviewer could not open or could not follow: a private repository, a dead link, or a video that shows the interface but never the thing working. That is a fixable rejection almost every time — it is a statement about the evidence, not about you.
While a proof is rejected, its skills are removed from your marketplace profile. They come back when it passes.
How long it takes
Automatic checks come back in seconds. Human review is a queue, so it depends on what is in front of you. The single biggest thing you control is how easy your proof is to judge: a reviewer who can open the evidence, watch it work and match it to your claimed skills in two minutes will not leave it in the queue.