Digital Wallets for Managing Professional Digital Skills: Enhancing Trust in the HR Recruitment Process

The rapid digital transformation has made verifiable professional digital skills essential for workforce competitiveness, yet traditional resumes and certificates suffer from high fraud rates (50–70%), lengthy manual verification, and failure to recognize non-traditional pathways. This paper investigates SSI-, DID-, and W3C VC-based digital skills wallets as a solution to restore cryptographic trust in HR recruitment. Adopting the Design Science Research Methodology (DSRM), we conducted a PRISMA 2020 systematic review of 42 high-quality sources (2022-early 2026). The review established the technical maturity of SSI/VC technologies for micro-credentials and Learning and Employment Records (LERs) while revealing critical gaps in enterprise HR integration and emerging-market (particularly China) applications. We designed a modular, blockchain-optional digital skills wallet architecture fully compliant with W3C Verifiable Credentials Data Model v2.0, 1EdTech Comprehensive Learner Record, and China’s RealDID national identity infrastructure. The artifact supports lifelong credential aggregation, selective disclosure via BBS+ zero-knowledge proofs, and instant cryptographic verification (<3 seconds). The design was demonstrated through three China-specific recruitment use cases and empirically validated via a mixed-methods survey with 42 HR professionals and recruiters from major technology companies in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou. Results indicated strong perceived utility: credential fraud was rated a major issue (M = 4.69), the wallet was expected to substantially reduce verification time (M = 4.57) and increase confidence in candidate claims (M = 4.45), with positive willingness to pilot or adopt (M = 4.19), especially when integrated with RealDID. These findings demonstrate that SSI-based digital skills wallets can near-eliminate resume fraud, collapse verification from weeks to seconds, expand talent pools through skills-first matching, and ensure privacy-preserving selective disclosure while aligning with national digital identity strategies. The study contributes a replicable DSRM template bridging verifiable credentials and skills-based talent management literatures, together with practical recommendations for HR leaders, ATS integration, and policy development.