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Are Fake Job Candidates Bypassing Your Company’s Filters? Here’s How Our Recruiters Spot Them

May 29, 2024

Are your candidates really who they say they are? Though we wish everyone was genuine and truthful, we’ve been in the staffing business long enough to know some people will take the phrase “fake it until you make it” to extreme levels.

A survey conducted by ResumeLab of 1,500 people found that 7 out of 10 had lied on their resume. Additionally, video interviewing, artificial intelligence, and social media platforms have lowered the bar and offered novel ways for dishonest people to fool hiring teams into giving them job opportunities.

Regardless of whether fake candidates are embellishing their skills or outright fabricating them, your organization needs to be prepared to actively filter them out of the hiring process. From our experience, there are some signals indicating when someone might not be above board about their actual skills, experiences, and connections.

Following these tips and working with the right staffing and talent solutions partner can help to screen out fake candidates, allowing you to spend your efforts identifying the best person for your job.

Spotting Resume Inconsistencies

Fake candidates aren’t afraid to cut corners and their inattention to details often shows up in their resumes. However, their mistakes are not always going to be obvious. Staying aware of common slipups can help spot people who don’t qualify for open positions.

For starters, closely inspect the numbers. How much experience does a candidate have with a particular technology, skillset, or knowledge area? If someone claims to have 10 years of experience with HashiCorp configuration language (HCL), a tool popularized with IaC practices, they’re probably lying (it’s only been around since 2016). Or if they’re a cybersecurity professional who claims 5 years of helping companies adhere to the Anti-Money Laundering Act (AMLA), they’re not being honest.

Additionally, if a fake candidate is using an AI generated resume and didn’t check the results, there might be a disparity in their numbers. Do their years of experience not add up on the job? Is their overlapping working experience almost implausible? Though not unthinkable (some people are just driven), recruiters need to ask questions that validate these experiences.

A possible yellow flag is that a candidate’s resume is a little too close to your job advertisement. Though our recruiters often tell candidates to customize their resume to highlight the skills that coincide with a particular position, that doesn’t mean it should copy everything. If a candidate looks too good to be true, they probably are. Skilled recruiters will see the difference between alignment and wholesale copying.

Reviewing Their Social Presence

As part of the screening process, we evaluate a candidate’s social profiles to get a sense of who they are. After looking at thousands of LinkedIn profiles, we’ve noticed some strange details. Sometimes, that means candidates faking entire profiles to increase their chances of deceiving you.

For instance, do they have a network of connections? If they’re a mid-level or senior level professional, it would be almost suspicious for them not to have at least a few dozen professional relationships. Yellow flags arise for our recruiters if we have extensive connections with a candidate’s current or past employers and they’re still only a third-degree connection or more.

Also, review their profile images before the interview. Being able to recognize them during the interview can help to spot if there’s something fishy going on. That said, you shouldn’t outright disqualify someone without an image, with an illustration, or an AI-enhanced picture (LinkedIn now has an AI photo generator). Just tread with caution.

Spotting Warning Signs in the Interview

The interview is often when the fake candidate’s veneer collapses. It’s hard to hold up the illusion when they are being scrutinized by people in real time, but a combination of skill and technology are making their ruse easier.

Since more companies are conducting video interviews, there’s a greater chance for fake candidates to have a copilot helping answer their questions. Some candidates will fake bandwidth delays so they can allow an offscreen person to feed them answers or even respond in their place.

With artificial intelligence, we’re seeing the rise of real-time deep fakes, where people can digitally graft their faces over a surrogate who will take the virtual interview in their place. If the signal is bad, you might believe that the pitch hitter is the actual candidate.

Our recruiters are always wary whenever anyone is off camera. That’s been a clear way some underqualified job seekers have outsourced their interview to more skilled professionals. For when AI fakes are too convincing for the naked eye, there are a growing variety of tools or plugins that can integrate with your video conferencing platforms to help you catch real-time deepfakes.

The Advantage of Working with a Staffing Partner

Catching fake job candidates can be a time-consuming and exhaustive process. If you flounder for a moment, there’s a chance that a less-than or completely unqualified person can squeeze through your filters. That’s where an experienced staffing and recruiting partner can better protect your business.

Our recruiters are completely focused on evaluating candidates so we can find and place exceptional people within your organization. On average, professional staffing companies spend more time with a candidate prior to hire than the typical organization. w3r Consulting recruiters put the time and effort into creating trust and fortifying relationships that last beyond any individual role.

By building a relationship with a candidate, we’ll have multiple touchpoints to verify that candidates possess the skills, experiences, and credentials they’re claiming. Eventually, lies collapse under their own weight and inconsistencies soon stand out. Exceptional recruiters can help that happen much sooner.

Are you looking for help removing fake job candidates from your talent pipeline? Reach out to w3r Consulting for assistance.

 

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