Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?

Earlier this year, I interviewed this guy who gave me really strange vibes. He would stall for a good 15-20 seconds after each question I asked... and then spit out a perfectly worded answer. I google'd some specific, peculiar phrases I remembered him saying after the interview and found that the phrases came straight out of places like the Kubernetes documentation, word for word. He was googling my questions and then reading the documentation aloud to me.

His resume said he'd worked for a company called "Data Service Group" (https://dataservicegroup.com/) for the last 5 years or so. Their website contains this sentence: "Over the past decade, our customers succeeded by leveraging Intellectsoft's process of building, motivating."

Wait... Intellectsoft isn't the name of this company. Did these "Data Service Group" people steal Intellectsoft's website?

Turns out, if you Google the quoted sentence above, you get TONS of websites for other fake companies that all contain that sentence:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Over+the+past+decade%2C+o...

I'm still not really sure what was going on with that as we politely rejected him and never heard from him again.

If you look up the company on LinkedIn, it appears to be made up of hundreds of immigrant DevOps engineers: https://www.linkedin.com/company/data-service-group/

hackish · 4 years ago

> His resume said he'd worked for a company called "Data Service Group" (https://dataservicegroup.com/) for the last 5 years or so. Their website contains this sentence: "Over the past decade, our customers succeeded by leveraging Intellectsoft's process of building, motivating."

> Turns out, if you Google the quoted sentence above, you get TONS of websites for other fake companies that all contain that sentence

It looks like that text is part of the default template for a commercial WordPress theme named Engitech[1]. If you check the live preview and browse to the "Main Home" template, you'll find it there.

I wonder how many of these "companies" paid the $59 licensing fee? :^)

[1] https://themeforest.net/item/engitech-it-solutions-services-...

hnbad · 4 years ago

I noticed something similar when I looked into a "website optimization agency" offering their services to one of my customers. Their website was a nearly 1-to-1 clone of the content of another website whose company name they accidentally left in the footer. That company's website however in turn used a slightly different design and after digging a bit I found that it was a vanilla copy of a themeforest template down to the stockphotes and everything. So it was a copy of a copy of a template.

Their tactic seemingly consisted of running the website through a free tool like Lighthouse, picking one or two low hanging fruits and then presenting them as world-ending problems they can fix for cheap. I'm sure the follow-through would have left the site in a worse state and suspect they may actually have a backchannel income via SEO backlinks or malware as the price they would initially quote seemed low even for a country like Pakistan.

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that there are actually layers of these Potemkin company websites used for various purposes.

peacemaker · 4 years ago

My employer hired a guy from this company! I wasn't involved in the interview process but was tasked with mentoring him. His resume was covered with DevOps buzzwords and he obviously said the right things in the interview, but the guy could barely move a mouse around the screen...

He took extremely long to do anything and then when he presented the work, it was very wrong and obviously copied from a bunch of stack overflow answers.

To this day I'm astounded my employer hired him and even more so that it took 2 months to fire him. Just think, he was on a senior salary for a couple of months for doing nothing... not a bad scam if you can do that a few times a year.

mrweasel · 4 years ago

That illustrates perfectly my question regarding people like this: What do these people think is going to happen if they're hired?

In your case, sure he had a salary for two months, but that can not be the plan? Do people just expect that if they are hired, they'll sort of figure it out along the way? If that's the case, then maybe go for a more junior position and hope there is good on the job training.

Years ago, I worked as a test engineer. One issue that repeatedly turned up when trying to get information about one of the tools we used, was that forums, mailing-lists, you name it, would get swamped by Indians who just wanted the answers to some standard hiring quiz. They just wanted to memorize the 150 or so answers, so they could get a job. Knowing those answers wouldn't help me in my day to day work, or at least very little, so what did they expect would happen if they got hired? Sure you can scam your way though a job interview... Then what? Your new colleagues is going to notice your shortcomings rather quickly.

PenguinCoder · 4 years ago

This sort of experience frustrates me to hear. I'm out here trying my damnedest to be knowledgeable, well-spoken and engaging during interviews, and failing to get an offer. Someone with a buzzwordy resume and Google for interview answers gets hired instead...

Why even try?

onion2k · 4 years ago

He would stall for a good 15-20 seconds after each question I asked... and then spit out a perfectly worded answer. He was googling my questions and then reading the documentation aloud to me.

If he's just Googling everything then he sounds like a senior developer to me!

I'm half-joking. Obviously you want people who understand the problem you're asking, and who have a good knowledge of the domain, and who can answer based on their experience and knowledge, but if a few lines from the documentation answer your interview question then it's a bad interview question.

What if the candidate had an exceptional memory and had simply memorized the docs? Would that have been acceptable? Of course not. Your job as an interviewer is to ask questions that looking something up in the docs won't answer. After all, when you're in the job, Googling something is a perfectly acceptable strategy.

noufalibrahim · 4 years ago

Even so, I'd expect an candidate to say something like "this is something I know <some details> but I'd have to look at the docs for in depth information about the detail you're asking". That would convince me that he knows what he's talking about. Googling for every question and then reading back verbatim what's in the docs sounds shady to me.

sigmoid10 · 4 years ago

This whole problem seems like it would go away with more sophisticated interview questions. Interviews should be precisely about stuff that you can't just google. Googling information is pretty much a required basic competency nowadays, right next to reading and writing.

lobstersammich · 4 years ago

I'd reach out to Crowdstrike with the domains names (https://dataservicegroup[.]com). This follows the MO of APTs out of North Korea: https://www.wired.com/story/north-korean-it-scammer-alert/ If you share the list of similar phrases and the domain names that pop up when you search for those phrases the Crowstrike researchers can (a) probably help confirm which group(s) you're dealing with or at least (b) write up an analysis piece on yet another APT trying to gain a foothold in sensitive systems via the ol' fake candidate mechanism.

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bawolff · 4 years ago

I do feel that if its possible to google interview questions in 20 seconds they are bad interview questions.

bryanrasmussen · 4 years ago

interview fail: googled answers to questions

daily job: google answers to questions.

godmode2019 · 4 years ago

I was that thinking of a cool idea, where the conversion was translated in real time and gpt3 was giving you answers to common questions like give me an example of when XYZ

You could also do interview questions.

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drewcoo · 4 years ago

Or the candidate clearly showed an aptitude for the job!

tyingq · 4 years ago

My favorite bit is this:

"4k+ ACTIVE CLIENTS, 35+ PROJECTS DONE...10 GLORIOUS YEARS"

I imagine then, there's at least 3965 clients that aren't super happy. At 3.5 projects completed per year, it's going to be a long road.

vba616 · 4 years ago

Not at all, there is a perfectly reasonable explanation if you fit an exponential growth model to the numbers given.

You see, they must have started with one client, in year one, and thereafter achieved an average growth rate of 151.33% per annum.

My Excel model:

  Year Clients
  1 1
  2 3
  3 6
  4 16
  5 40
  6 100
  7 252
  8 633
  9 1592
  10 4001

In the tenth year, they would have 4001 clients. However, they would have passed 35 clients about five years prior, and therefore the implication is simply that that is the cohort that is completing now and projects last on the order of five years.

badpun · 4 years ago

Clearly, they forgot the "k" in the "35+ PROJECTS DONE". Would be even funnier if they misplaced it, and instead said "10k+ GLORIOUS YEARS".

EddySchauHai · 4 years ago

Wow, that company is 73% at Unix Administration AND 80% at Network Solutions. If only they were 70% at Python I'd have hired them for a project. I need a company with those stats.

shoo · 4 years ago

you're taking a gamble unless you engage a company with at least 25% elemental and regulatory resistances

ramraj07 · 4 years ago

So all these Indian outsourcing companies like Infosys, Wipro and TCS (just like FAANG, they accronymize to WITCH) hog the American H1B immigration system by submitting an application for as many candidates as possible, and get a large number of H1Bs approved and send their employees to the US.

The salary for these employees isn’t exactly great. If I’m not wrong they still work through these witch companies and get their wages garnished. So these employees generally try to jump ship once they come to the US.

A second pool is the metric ton of immigrant students who come study an MS in vaguely computer related degrees - typically CS MS degrees are a bit more discerning but one example is this MIS degree from a BUSINESS SCHOOL in TAMU that’s just an Indian immigrant degree mill churning out people without much coding abilities at all.

Both these groups now go to these “consultant firms” in the US which take their money, fill out their resume with fake experience and train them to pass your interviews. I have heard all manner of illegal crap including person A attending the interview (even in person) and person B actually turning up for work. How many times have you looked closely enough to confirm it’s the same dude anyway.

These people are shrewd. Doing all of this does take brains. They’re just shit at coding. Some do actually improve over time but some never do.

Source: Indian dude who had college roommates, relatives, friends, acquaintances, etc all do various versions of these shenanigans.

Only way to protect yourself is to have a culture fit interview component, confirm their LinkedIn history isn’t super shady and have at least an informal verification step post offer to ensure you don’t let a rat into the ship.

stephenhuey · 4 years ago

Half a decade ago at a large energy company, there was a group that had ramped up hiring of a lot of contract developers for full stack greenfield app dev (not Salesforce or SAP, etc). Lots of us employees were pulled into interview candidates that staffing agencies were throwing us. Many turned out great, but 2 in particular were suspected of being different people from the interviewee. There was a month or more since the interviews and the people managing the teams often weren’t the same as the people who had participated in the interviews but after comparing notes, we realized that the people on the phone were certainly more astute than those who had come on-site (this was before video interviews had taken off). All of these teams were using IntelliJ and one of the team leads I managed expressed concern about how he noticed a contractor assigned to his team was using Windows Notepad to write Kotlin for his Spring Boot server controllers. He also heard of some other developers seeing this guy with his laptop on the far side of the large floor quietly talking on a cell phone for an hour or so. I think we let him hang out for almost a week before we told the staffing agency.

sicp-enjoyer · 4 years ago

I find it strange that there appears to be international networks within American universities. I have noticed a large number of people from the same countries, attending similar vague programs (like you mentioned), writing theses with advisors from their home country.

It makes me wonder if they are just getting into a completely different program with the "American university" name. Do you have any insight into this?

TMWNN · 4 years ago

>MIS degree from a BUSINESS SCHOOL in TAMU that’s just an Indian immigrant degree mill churning out people without much coding abilities at all

I see what you mean (<https://mays.tamu.edu/ms-management-information-systems/>). Clear signaling toward foreign applicants.

drdec · 4 years ago

You mentioned H-1Bs and I'm running with it.

H-1B visas should be given out using an auction system. The minimum salary for the position should be some percentage of resulting price.

I think this would go a long way to ensuring that companies use the program for what it was intended for and stop the abuses.

faeriechangling · 4 years ago

I don't know how much I judge this candidate you're talking about. Somebody who can give you the right answer after 20 seconds despite apparently not knowing what he was talking about before seems like a pretty useful employee to me.

newaccount74 · 4 years ago

Many interview questions aren't about the right answer -- they are just questions that are designed to show how much the applicant knows about whatever is on the CV.

If you have Python on your CV, and I ask you how the garbage collector works, I don't want you to read some stack overflow summary to me. I want to hear your own description, so I can make a judgement how deep your knowledge of Python internals goes.

Anybody can type specific questions into Google. But if it comes to producing performant code, you need to have that knowledge in the back of your mind, because nobody is going to tell you to google that.

Lio · 4 years ago

I think this is more a test of honesty.

It’s one thing to openly use web search as a tool and another to pretend you know something when you don’t.

It’s usually fine to say “I don’t know, I’d have to look that up”. That’s what you’d actually want on the job, honesty and professionalism.

People make mistakes all the time. What you want is a culture where they can admit those mistakes so that the team can engineer them away from happening again.

If a candidate is willing to lie over something so small as looking up an algorithm then that would be a big red flag to me.

O__________O · 4 years ago

Weird, number of the site has a voicemail with the company’s name ("Data Service Group") — did not expect that.

800 419 2567

somehnacct3757 · 4 years ago

I've had this happen so I always check the websites of their last employer now specifically for copypasta.

It only happened once ever. But I just keep on checking.

nerdix · 4 years ago

The Google thing is very common now with remote interviews.

I've interviewed several candidates that were clearly googling questions. Some I thought were scammers, others not so much.

The funny thing is that they were all on camera. You can see the pause,you see the slight head turn and the eyes gaze away from the camera, you hear the click clack of typing and then the sudden recitation of a perfectly worded dictionary answer.

Melting_Harps · 4 years ago

> The funny thing is that they were all on camera. You can see the pause,you see the slight head turn and the eyes gaze away from the camera, you hear the click clack of typing and then the sudden recitation of a perfectly worded dictionary answer.

What was your reaction? Would you prefer they be more subtle of the poorly kept secret that most of this job is simply trying to figure out why the code isn't running and looking for specific error codes from other people's projects?

I'm being sincere, because I'm studying AI and ML and I kind of doubt most CS majors could describe 85% of the concepts we cover at the undergrad level let alone describe the use of the sigmoid function and soft max when building a gradient descent algorithm in a NN if put on the spot; I know this because when I went searching for this they often say that even their professor sucked at describing it so much that they had just glossed over it entirely and admitted they would look it up when working with TF in the future.

KennyBlanken · 4 years ago

This is really bizarre - one of the hits under that google search is for a university's IoT research group:

https://ceid.utsa.edu/iotsecuritylab/home-5/

Some time ago (~6 months) my company was looking to hire a programmer.

We don't have a established process for this as it was some years since we hired a coder, but then we are in the industry (hiring) so published a couple of adverts here and there and we got the thing rolling.

Most of the applicants were seriously under qualified, and my colleagues had to go through a lot of rubbish in the form of CVs in order to find suitable candidates.

But a few of them were good enough to at least make it to the interview step, and off the invitations went.

One of'em candidates - Let's call him "Rajeed" - promptly accepted the meeting, and due to the small amount of people that made it that far - let me remind you, first interview - my colleagues were slightly excited, but at the same time also weary as our experience with coders from India is far from stellar.

You can imagine my colleagues surprise when they opened the Zoom session and Rajeed was nowhere to be found. Instead, there were two person of whom we knew nothing about - apparently they were running some sort of coding shop - and when my colleagues asked for Rajeed they just said "Oh, it's OK, it's OK. You can talk to us."

For obvious reasons the meeting didn't last long.

We ended up hiring a coder from Poland that, even thought he was decent, was miles ahead of the rest of the candidates.

2143 · 4 years ago

Something you want to keep in mind is that stellar coders from India (I don't know if they're a huge majority or minority or whatever, but they do exist) already have stellar jobs and won't be up for hire.

The random people who are up for hire from India — there's a good chance they're up for hire because they couldn't get anything else.

You get what you pay for. And the best are probably not even in the market.

thombat · 4 years ago

My UK employer in 2004 had the brilliant idea to save money by establishing a subsidiary in Bangalore. Find some awesome engineers and only have to pay Indian salaries & office rental! Took them a depressingly long time to understand that interviews are a two-way street and what most of the best candidates wanted was a multinational that would support them living and working in an exciting new environment for better money, i.e. moving to London and using the London salary to see the world and have fun. Some really good guys, but would have been cheaper and less disruptive just to recruit them straightforwardly. OTOH the director in charge of the project moved to Bangalore on a London salary with his housing costs and domestic staff paid for, living like a Maharajah and filing following progress reports. So the exercise wasn't entirely futile.

mrweasel · 4 years ago

> Something you want to keep in mind is that stellar coders from India already have stellar jobs and won't be up for hire.

Precisely, and they know what they're worth, so they won't be cheaper anyway.

ericol · 4 years ago

I agree whole hearteadly with your comment. We don't pay good rates (at least compared to the US) so obviously we don't attract quality coders, at least from India. We've had very good success with people from the Eastern block, thought.

victorclf · 4 years ago

There must have been a time in the past when those stellar coders were unemployed and up for hire...

dkarp · 4 years ago

Just want to say that I work with and have worked with many stellar coders from India. I'd suggest not writing off over a billion people.

ericol · 4 years ago

Well, lucky you! ;)

I'm not "writing off" a billion people. But. It's like finding a needle in a haystack.

I did some research when this happened, and they even have a name for this [1]

Coincidentally, our experience with people from Easter Europe is quite the opposite: Of all the people we hired from there, all except one were stellar (And the "one" was also good, just that he had some greys ethically: Had a disagreement with our boss, and disappeared over a weekend after siphoning large amounts of data from our system)

[1] https://thepolicytimes.com/chalta-hai-attitude-holding-india...

replwoacause · 4 years ago

You’ve missed the point entirely

iaaan · 4 years ago

__d · 4 years ago

Early 2010's, Wall St software tech vendor: I had a candidate show up for an interview, in person, go through the preliminaries and then sit down in a meeting room for the detailed questions.

As we got into it, the candidate often asked me to repeat the question. I was happy to do so, but after a few times, I was already taking care to speak slowly and clearly, and it was still happening a lot.

Then I noticed a quiet murmuring sound after I'd asked a question. It was like .. a TV on in the next room or something. I ignored it at first, assuming it was someone else in the next room, but then it seemed like it was only happening after I'd asked a question, and before the candidate answered.

I was now pretty suspicious, but confused: what was going on? The candidate was flubbing the interview anyway -- their understanding was pretty shallow and they didn't appear at all confident in the material, so I wrapped up the interview, and showed them out.

As we were walking to the door, I stood beside them for the first time. And that's when I saw the earpiece: the candidate had a hearing aid-like earpiece in, with a wire running into their collar.

I was basically too surprised to do anything, and by this point we were at the elevator, so I just let them leave.

The way I figured it, afterwards, was that they had someone on a radio who they thought would help them with the interview. But either the radio was noisy or they just needed more time for the answer, so asking me to repeat the question was for the benefit of their remote assistant. If they'd been better at it, even had I seen the earpiece, I'd have assumed it was just a hearing aid. Fortunately, even with the remote assistance, they didn't pass.

Never happened again, but I can tell you I casually check everyone I've interviewed since for earpieces.

b800h · 4 years ago

Plenty of this in remote interviews, even if it's just people googling answers. I was slightly frustrated with one candidate and spelled the term I'd just used for him so he could search for it.

lumost · 4 years ago

Part of me suspects that this is a major reason for the push on RTO. If you hire people remote who used any one of dozens of mechanisms to cheat.. it can be hard to correct. You could have a candidate who does great on your interview then fails to produce a single PR in 3 months on the job.

myth_drannon · 4 years ago

Reminds me of an old Soviet comedy where a student taking exam in university with an ear piece. https://youtu.be/vADlGmX7-qU

assttoasstmgr · 4 years ago

Or the over-the-top cheating scene with Chevy Chase from "Spies Like Us"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaSUOFleNRU

It's nearly 40 years old and it still makes me laugh every time.

calculated · 4 years ago

In my country this isn't "common" but it's way more common than in other countries.

vceder · 4 years ago

There was a cheating scandal in Sweden a few years ago with students using earpieces and someone feeding them answers from a leaked test during the equivalent of SATs

shostack · 4 years ago

Or getting questions to secure placement for future candidates.

Yeah, I did wonder about that, but they could've just recorded the interview.

Although that did happen, but I think that was the recruitment agencies: they'd debrief their candidates after their interviews, and the next time they sent someone in, they'd be prepped for the whiteboard design exercises we'd used previously. I ended up with a dozen different questions that I rotated, which seemed to be enough.

General interview questions were often prepped too. Our phone screen question list had to grow quite long before it seemed like the effort to cram/prep was too much trouble.

nomel · 4 years ago

I had this happen in a remote interview recently. I think the candidates helper had a language barrier problem. They almost made it through.

atrettel · 4 years ago

The FBI and other US federal agencies have attributed similar tactics to North Koreans looking to infiltrate particular industries [1-3].

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/north-korean-crypto-job-cand...

[2] https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/17/fbi_korea_freelancers...

[3] https://www.wired.com/story/north-korean-it-scammer-alert/

closeparen · 4 years ago

There is no reason an intelligence-gathering operation has to use someone who is totally incompetent at the job and comes across as suspicious.

vintermann · 4 years ago

Yes, there is. The reason is that they aren't superhuman, and aren't very popular anymore.

This is something I've argued before: In the 40s, the US intelligence services could call up famous, brilliant people like Claude Shannon, ask him to fix some problem and never talk about the problem or his solution to it.

If they tried that today, most would tell them to go fuck themselves.

Now you may think things would be different in North Korea. In some ways they might be, but they obviously have a lot less top talent to commandeer in the first place, with their lack of modern technology and childhood nutrition. And even then, there are less confrontational ways to say no where open defiance is out of the picture. In North Korea, if you're very competent at anything, you might be quite careful in who you reveal that to in the first place.

bb88 · 4 years ago

This shit has been going on for the last 5 years or more. I've seen it with non-asian candidates.

fsckboy · 4 years ago

China employs non-Chinese to track and interfere with dissidents and critics of China in the US https://news.artnet.com/art-world/us-blames-china-operatives...

and of course, plenty of Russians and Iranians are non-Asian (in appearance, Persia is in Asia of course)

anonym29 · 4 years ago

If the FBI is accusing others of doing it, they're probably doing the same, or a more sophisticated variant of the same.

The FBI seem to be able to infiltrate any group they like, so I'm sure they know the tricks.

Infiltrate? They're the ones starting the groups - the demand for terrorism outstrips supply these days. No terrorism = no reason to increase / not reduce budget allocated to FBI.

It's a problem here too. Even if they use their camera, it doesn't mean they don't have someone feeding them answers to questions. Phone interviews are even more sketchy since the person who may be answering the questions is a completely different person who shows up on day 1.

We had one person we hired as a contractor, but then her voice changed on the phone, and started calling people by their last names in chat. It looked like it was someone that subcontracted another who then quit, and the first was trying to hold onto the contract as long as possible.

Another answered complex questions during the interview, but after the start they knew nothing.

A third contractor I knew was trying to do two jobs at the same time. Unfortunately while he was supposed to be working for one company he was making public github commits for the second. He was shown the door that day.

Tangentially, another contractor "lost" two macbooks assigned to him. Apparently right after travelling to Colorado after they legalized weed.

yardie · 4 years ago

> A third contractor I knew was trying to do two jobs at the same time.

I mean this literally how contractors work. Unless they were taking your IP and using it for another company I don’t see the issue.

noodlenotes · 4 years ago

At tech companies, "contractor" usually means someone contracted from a staffing company to work 40 hour weeks during normal business hours. They're not someone who is providing an end product with the freedom to set their own schedule, like you typically think of when you hear "contractor".

Not if you're charging hourly, it's not. Then it's time fraud.

It's just like a lawyer's billable hours.

By working two jobs at the same time, they mean working one hour and then billing two companies for that same hour of work.

claytonjy · 4 years ago

> while he was supposed to be working for one company he was making public github commits for the second

If you're setting their hours, doesn't that make them an employee rather than a contractor, legally speaking?

tayo42 · 4 years ago

Maybe it's not a real contractor. I had one job where I was a "contractor", I had set hours, got paid hourly, received a w2. It seemed like just an excuse to be cheap and not provide benefits.

vsareto · 4 years ago

May have billed a specific time span, but also had commits during that span. Dunno how they proved the github account belonged to the contractor though unless they just admitted to it or used the company email to register.

ralphc · 4 years ago

We had this happen to the company I was at around 2015. I heard about it after the fact, good phone interview, a Salesforce position, he's hired (contract I think). Day one the person that shows up barely speaks English and can barely log in to Salesforce. Maybe he thought he was going to a bigger department and could hide and blend in, but it was a small Salesforce team at a large company. He lasted less than a day and was escorted out. The placement agency apologized. A lot.

duxup · 4 years ago

> was trying to do two jobs at the same time

Happened at a company I worked at many years ago. Working from home was new, one dude who we all thought was suspect anyway got a call from his bosses boss and answered the phone with the wrong company name and it was over.

To make an example of him they made him pay back some of his salary (his contract had him on call and available 24/7). Ran into him a while later and he confirmed he paid them back.

Not a fake candidate but a slimy guy.

This started to become much more common post-COVID.

/r/overemployed is a sub full of people sharing strategies about how to maintain multiple jobs at once. Some of those folks have 3 or more jobs. Industries of focus seem to be tech and sales.

plebianRube · 4 years ago

Yes. In a fairly large public company I worked at, I remember a DBA on contract got fired because he knew absolutely nothing.

But only a few weeks later he was back, in the same building, but using a different name on a different floor working as a Senior Software Architect.

He got caught because someone in the DB department recognized him, called him by his old name and they pretended they never new him.

I can’t imagine the stress of trying that. Work can be hard enough, why add the complexity of lying about your name in a company people know you

givemeethekeys · 4 years ago

I knew someone who learned on the job until they got fired. They faired much better on the next job. Hard times call for hard people.

actually_a_dog · 4 years ago

Not terribly surprising, since companies have more or less refused to actually train anybody since the 80s or so.

pkrotich · 4 years ago

Huh... not calling cap - but did they get hired via Agency or by different company on the same building? I would assume a large public company does Employment Eligibility Verification (1-9 in US for example) - unless of course he was using a fake SS and name even in paperwork.

mistrial9 · 4 years ago

it may be that the contractor is not at all in control of this, but is instead used as a pawn by others; perhaps harsh life circumstances or maladapted psychology sink the lockin.

kube-system · 4 years ago

About 5 years ago at a previous company we had someone who interviewed well, and then the person who showed up was totally not the same quality person we had talked to previously. I guess the placement strategy at some low quality placement agencies is to just put someone good on the interview and hope the hiring company doesn't notice.

I haven't seen it recently, but I am now in a position where we have good recruiters who filter people before I ever see them.

pridkett · 4 years ago

I had this happen to me at a former large employer. I insisted on removing the agency from our list of approved agencies and was told that if we did that to every agency that did that sort of fraud then we’d have no agencies in our budget range.

The damage an individual can do by being overemployed or fraudulent pales in comparison to what some of those agencies do, and they can be fucking over the candidate and company at the same time since they are middlemen.

Tons of calls for technical tests of individuals to prevent fraud/bad hires. No one does a technical interview for talent agency recruiters to make sure their company can filter candidates well though.

In our case, management was quite unhappy, and I believe legal got involved. As you say, budget certainly has a role in determining the cross section of applicants you get, so… that’s just one more reason they’re my former employer.

Nextgrid · 4 years ago

> we’d have no agencies in our budget range

Well you get what you pay for.

xupybd · 4 years ago

Ug... as someone that one day would like to work remote this is infuriating.

Anyone who is doing this, you're destroying trust and making life hard for the rest of us.

odshoifsdhfs · 4 years ago

Maybe if companies haven't been fucking over people, colluding to keep wages low, offshoring, unpaid overtime, layoffs to protect investors and not employees, etc etc, maybe, just maybe I would feel like I should be honest/hard working. But since in 20+ years the amount of shit I've seen companies do to their employees, I seriously don't care anymore.

And guess what, when I decided to be an asshole, think only of myself and not give a fuck about the companies, voila, my renumeration started to go up and up and up (making 10x more now than when I was a 'company man').

Stop being an idiot (not parent, in general) and start looking for yourself only, in a few years you will see the rewards.

You have to look out for yourself but fraud is not the way to go

defterGoose · 4 years ago

As a current job searcher, I literally tried to explain this to my mother a few hours ago. Basically, "I can't get anyone to hire me despite the fact that I interview very well because there's literally no trust that I've done the things I say I've done/worked on, and that are hard to substantiate because of the simple fact that I was making the products instead of making landing pages for the products."

FpUser · 4 years ago

>"I was making the products instead of making landing pages for the products"

Designing and making products is what I do for living as my own business. Never really had people's distrust when explaining them what / how I've done things. Of course I also have list of clients and reference letters from them along with phone numbers so if someone is in doubt they can check.

gedy · 4 years ago

I'm not sure if it's just "remote" or also aiming for cheap overseas contractors.

As a senior remote US employee I don't see how any of the companies I interviewed with would even allow past screening not turning on camera or other tricks like this.

ThePadawan · 4 years ago

Sometimes, the problem is just getting to that first call.

If a job offer results in 20 genuine applicants, the company might set up 20 calls.

If the same job offer results in 20 genuine applications and 480 fraudsters, the seconds spent on a CV need to drop drastically for a HR person to make the decision to interview a candidate. And if the fraudsters do well faking a CV, and HR only has time for 20 calls, there are going to be a lot of false negatives (genuine candidates not getting a call back).

As a New Zealander, unfortunately, I fall into the category of cheap overseas contractor. With our weak dollar working for a US company is a good way to earn above average. We're still much more expensive than some of the cheaper countries. In fact we're currently working with a Vietnamese contractor. He is very good and much cheaper than a local hire.

Dead Comment

ChrisMarshallNY · 4 years ago

> Anyone who is doing this, you're destroying trust and making life hard for the rest of us.

Sadly, they don't care.

This is why we can't have nice things.

SavageBeast · 4 years ago

On the other hand, next time I'm on a 30 minute screening and end up getting left with 10 minutes to show them I can write a functional program they will be too worn out to ding me for silly stuff like concatenating Strings instead of properly using StringBuilder.

"You really should have used the enhanced for loop for that .." or "You really should have used a Lambda there" etc.

After years of tech screens like this over the course of my coding career I can't say Im not enjoying a little schadenfreude over this.

Yeah, I know. I'm just venting really.

xwdv · 4 years ago

Um we can still have nice things if people stop being naive. It’s not hard to verify someone actually exists… there are ways.