Fake job seekers are flooding US companies that are hiring for remote positions

We've had more than a few in my company. We work in Cybersecurity for the company, so we've definitely seen them and seen the details. I don't actually think they're that hard to avoid .. but to say they're not a problem at all is not fair. I agree with you that if taken the wrong way that this is just ammunition for "return to office" efforts.

A LOT of people are far worse at interviewing than they think they are. And so, a bullshit artist can get hired. Technology now allows these bullshit artists to propagate more, and do more damage than would have previously be possible. AI in the workplace is a similar problem. Can you tell the different between someone who really just leans on ChatGPT all day but is actually incompetent? Probably so, but someone who was that incompetent just wouldn't have previously been able to hang on for quite as long, or deceive so many people.

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It's clear that my comment was not clearly written -- when I said "A LOT of people are far worse at interviewing than they think they are," I was referring to the people holding the interviews, and not referring to candidates. I'm shocked at just how bad a lot of folks are at holding interviews, and just how misplaced their confidence in their ability seems to be.

My experience was similar but with on/offshore companies in India. We just started requiring camera on (it was pre-pandemic) and it was obvious if candidates knew their stuff or were just prepped and/or reading responses. Most of those contracts were setup where the company was providing a "service" with fake cost recovery wordings if the service was not provided. Money only went one way, the contracts had wording about penalty payback but the reality after talking with people in finance was the financial process/systems weren't setup for that, lol.

Ways to combat bait and switch is to alter interview questions, add new questions to every interview, ask deeper level questions, and observe the candidate in how they respond. It should be a more conversational tone the entire time, random discussion paths pursued, especially if the candidate's interests perk up about something. Every candidate has a different background so getting them to talk about that and problems they solved and diving into those in detail should be a good gauge of ability.

> putting recruit A in front of the interviewer and then slotting recruit B in after the position is secured

reality is way more messy and worse. There are multiple actors involved in each part. Eg 2-3 "actors" for visual screen are ready for each call, 2-4 "audio" knowledge only experts on the call, 1 dedicated speaker, 1 person coordinating answers from audio folks to actor folks.

they are even ready for once in a while visit to offices in us, so they have actors there on the field as well ready to attend calls (probably 1 to 1 mapping after first visit)

and the work assigned is assigned to a completely different set of people, not involved in any of above. those folks and these folks dont interact.

i have worked part time as one of the "audio" person in above interviews. also involved on work side. ama.

I had 4 instances where a sketchy Asian guy showed up to an interview. Something was always off. Twice it was the same guy under two different names. In the final case I called the candidate out that the they are from North Korea. They were frazzled and when they began talking the connection dropped mid-word.

It’s as if someone else disconnected us.

I am sure they are North Koreans. Next time I will have a picture of fat leader printed out and I am asking the candidate what they think of Kim.

We're hiring for a software engineer right now. The amount of time our single HR professional has had to invest in sorting through scam candidates is ungodly. We had someone apply to the job three times, using different names and resumes each time. We've had two candidates who we suspected were responding to questioning with an AI tool that was listening to the interviewer's voice (poorly, which might be the only reason why we caught them). We had one candidate who said they were on the east coast, but upon further investigation, the person didn't exist; and following a hunch, upon casually bringing up that it seemed pretty dark where they were at, they disconnected from the call and we never heard from them again.

If you think these scams aren't real, you aren't looking. We're a remote company, but our policy is now to only hire candidates from internal referrals, or candidates who are in a location where someone on the team they're hiring into can grab coffee with them.

> Many of these agencies are from collectivist cultures, so in the mind of the agency, they all work in our project. This may not be true, but the agency sees the position as theirs, not the recruit's. So they typically don't the issue with putting recruit A in front of the interviewer and then slotting recruit B in after the position is secured.

Guess France is a collectivist culture. That's 101 of many consultancies: get the contract by presenting the A-Team then switch with junior employees a couple weeks in.

There's a simple solution to people cheating in interviews.

In-person interviews.

And if you don't want to pay for that, proctoring.

And if you don't want to pay for that, I have next to zero sympathy for you.

> Typically the scam is that an offshore consultancy wants to place some roles to collect wages. Many of these agencies are from collectivist cultures, so in the mind of the agency, they all work in our project. This may not be true, but the agency sees the position as theirs, not the recruit's. So they typically don't the issue with putting recruit A in front of the interviewer and then slotting recruit B in after the position is secured.

I've run into this with a Ukrainian consultancy. It wasn't even a scam. They told us up-front that they were prepared to pull their best engineers from some other clients and put them on our team in order to win our business. Our obvious reaction: and when you get another opportunity, you will pull those engineers from us and we'll get the B-team, just like you're about to do to someone else.

Naturally we didn't move forward with them (this was before the war, so very lucky decision)

Anyone wanna put a bet down if Pindrop is using AI to detect AI? Now we can burn one rainforest down to generate deepfake content and burn another rainforest down to detect it and filter it so we don't need to look at it.

Christ the future is stupid.

Just as Pindrop's CEO says "Ivan X" is a scammer, the whole incident can be a cooked up situation to drump up Pindrop, or a set up Pindrop created just to sell their product.

Funny how you can be a CEO of 4 companies and nobody bats an eye. You can be a retail worker holding down 3 minimum wage jobs to make ends meet and they say you are a hard worker, busting your ass for your family. But if you’re a white collar knowledge worker juggling two jobs, and still meeting both jobs’ expected performance goals, they call you a fraud and a thief and if you are open about it, they will fire you.

I have approximately zero sympathy for companies in this situation. They've done everything possible to quash worker's rights, collude on wages, and commit billions in wage theft against the very poorest of workers.

As they say, "Turnabout is fair play".

I don't really see the hyperbolic language about it. I've definitely worked some process-heavy corporate jobs where I could be perfectly satisfactorily productive as far as my management was concerned while only doing actual work like 20-30% of the time. Maybe I'm super smart or maybe they're just terrible at generating and assigning tasks, I don't know. Not my problem either way.

Especially in the WFH era where it's much easier to get away with it clean, I don't see anything all that wrong with working 2 or 3 such jobs at the same time. If all of them are happy, or at least not too terribly upset, with your performance, what's the harm. There's definitely been times in my life where I could see myself doing that just for the sake of being bored.

I'm doing exactly this, while working at a FAANG. My second and third jobs actually know I have a main FAANG job, and they have no problem with it. And I have no qualms about "stealing" from FAANG this way, sorry. In fact, my perf review at my main job is a mixture of "meets expectations", and "exceeds expectations".

Overemployment is just a symptom of the real problem: the company's performance management procedure is not adequate. It's no worse than someone merely slacking off or being incompetent and unable to do the job... and I bet there are many more of the latter than "overemployed" folks.

If it's not illegal then why are you using words like "fraud" and "steal"?

I don't see the problem. How many CEO are also on the board of multiple companies? If people at the top can be employed by multiple companies, anyone with a job involving less responsibility doing the same should be ok.

Take as much as you can as fast as you can. You know the lovely, benevolent companies that are generously offering you a position will find any and every opportunity to cut as many people as fast as they can. It's been made pretty apparent at this point in the giant dumb game that the average worker is not worth much to a corporation.

And as others have pointed out, apparently it's only ok when a genius-level CEO takes four different CEO spots and a few board seats and continues to play video games all day. Yep, totally ok and not for anyone else.

HN doesn't seem like a very lucrative pool for scams like this one. You don't see many meh corporate development jobs posted here, which are they ones you can fake for months or years. Hard to do that when you're working daily with the founder or a smaller team.

I agree, but as a non-American I wouldn't want to travel to America for anything work-related at the moment without a business visa, and the hassle of getting one would make hiring foreign workers much more of a chore.

So many visa and proctored exam consultancies in India and I never heard of any of them verifying interviewees for remote jobs.

The irony isn't lost on me how employers will post ghost positions, and use automation to sort through applications faster. While at the same time condemning automation from the applicant side, even if the automation is used in good faith.

Does it feel shitty? None of the CEOs interviewed in the article appear to be particularly distressed by it, and two of the three seem to be selling solutions to the problem. If anything, this ought to feel even worse for candidates - now I have to worry if Pindrop Security gave my Linkedin profile picture a 0.009 deepfake score.