A call with a recruiter went from casual to James Bond in a matter of minutes when we got onto the topic of candidate fraud. I jokingly asked, “who wants to scam work?” What he said next left me shocked. “Everyone on my team has dealt with at least one fake engineering candidate in the last month.” My head titled like a confused cat. I had so many questions.
My first question? How did he know it was a fake candidate? It wasn’t until the phone screen. While the email exchange and resume seemed typical of a human, the pixelation on the candidate when they joined the virtual phone screen was a little different than the typical Zoom background. The responses were stunted. After digging into it with their cybersecurity team and talking to the Department of Justice (yes, really), they learned that North Korean agents were attempting to get jobs at their company to steal code.
After over 15 years working in the recruiting industry, if you told me someday that I’d be talking about global agents trying to hack work, I would have laughed in your face. I come from a time when we were just trying to convince people they needed something more sophisticated than a spreadsheet to track candidates. This? Unexpected, to say the least.
Spammy Candidate Experiences Cause Long Term Headaches
This James Bond era recruiting issue comes at a time when it’s harder than ever for recruiters to get through the pile of applicants, let alone spot a fake. Roles are getting thousands of applications in less than a few hours. Many are spam, not even a little qualified, or filled with outright lies. I can understand why they get excited when they see a qualified candidate and want to move quickly without checking every little detail, but speed to response is becoming a more costly risk. So is that awful application experience.
According to Gartner, by 2028, 25% of job applicants will be fake job applicants. The U.S. Department of Justice has already reported that over 300 U.S. companies have been targeted by fake job seekers, including members of the Fortune 500. This isn’t just an inconvenience - this scenario could impact the economy and national security. Companies are having their entire code bases stolen and replicated in a matter of minutes.
Beyond the Hollywood movie worries, I’m far more concerned about the trust candidates will lose in digital hiring systems as the spam targeting them becomes more advanced. What do we do if most candidates don’t trust your ATS enough to even apply? That seems like a far off concept, but consider how much media use has changed just over the last 10 years. We still answered the phone 10 years ago and now, you only answer if you’re from a certain generation. It’s fair to suggest that if the standard application becomes increasingly spammy, we’ll stop using that, too.
Can You Assess Candidate Fraud Without Adding Bias?
Now, the solution for that tech company I mentioned at the beginning? It wasn’t advanced or scientific at all. They figured out that during the interview, if they asked the pixelated interviewees to turn their head to the left, the machine couldn’t do it. It wasn’t trained on that command (yet). Even that solution adds an element of bias, though. What if my internet sucks? Will they think I’m fake?
These hacks, while clever, also don’t work at scale. In a high volume engineering organization, you can’t have recruiters wasting their time interviewing even one fake candidate a day. If you assume they make $100,000 minus benefits and perks, that’s $50 an hour. The costs are much higher in most organizations. It’s a cost you just can’t afford.
While I believe final hiring decisions should always rely on human judgment, recruiters shouldn’t be left to fight fraud alone - especially considering just how recently some teams were using Excel sheets and calling it HR technology. However, most current tech isn’t really built for this problem either. We’ve been systematically finding ways to eliminate bias in screening. Establishing a method to screen people out without adding bias is a precarious balancing act at best. Any solution that isn’t put to an ethical test is going to make things worse, not better, for the real people.
Candidate Fraud Features: What Does The Answer Look Like?
That’s a bold headline, because really, the answer to candidate fraud is anyone’s guess. We don’t understand the full scope of what’s happening in regards to candidate fraud globally, nor have we experienced the full range of tactics that could be used (thanks, AI). What is the right data to prove you’re real? What can’t be fabricated?
There are a few features that would be important to making this work.
- Some kind of candidate verification. The current easy answer? A background check. The challenge that I know well as a former van lifer is that if you don’t have an address you basically don’t exist. As work, and even the concept of home, become increasingly mobile, we will need new ways of verifying, validating, and proving “I am a real person.”
- Prioritization of (real) qualified candidates. The right technology should not only flag fraudulent candidates, but also put the qualified candidates in front of recruiters faster.
- Fraud detection and trend analysis. These fraudulent resumes are going to have similarities and AI is really good at finding trends. Let the machine flag that work.
- Tested at scale. A solution that only works for hiring engineers with highly technical backgrounds, code bases, etc. isn’t going to work for everyone.
What else? Well, I’m going to find out.
I’m proud to be part of the solution, not just writing about this evolving issue. I was invited to work with the team at Greenhouse to discuss potential opportunities and ethical limitations of Greenhouse Real Talent™, the industry’s first solution designed to help recruiters find the right talent faster and avoid candidate fraud.
More on what I learn soon. Until then, sign up for the Real Talent™ waitlist so you can be the first in line and check out Greenhouse's recruiter's guide to bring simplicity back to hiring.
Oh, and look left.
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