AI generated recruits are a fiction. That's not to say there aren't fake or bait and switch recruits but this idea makes no sense.
Some background. I'm a senior developer who has performed hundreds of interviews and seen dozens of questionable recruits long before AI. 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 seen this done with A talking while B moves their lips on camera. Now with chatGPT (and earlier to some degree with just Google Search) we just see applicants eyes focused on something they're reading when we ask questions. All of this is just as easy as an AI generated applicant (if not easier) and quite likely to get the recruit hired.
A lot of this narrative is pointing the finger at China, North Korea and Russia/Ukraine. The best candidates I've fielded have been Ukrainian, Russian and Chinese. These are countries well known for their tech sectors. North Korea has executed the largest crypto heists in history. These are not groups who need to fake it.
So who does this narrative serve? It serves the RTO CEOs. This makes CEOs scared to hire remote workers and lets the ones who demand it have a reason.
If anything the panic around AI should reinforce the need to think critically about these things.
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.
[edit]
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.
> A LOT of people are far worse at interviewing than they think they are.
This works both ways right? Would it be fair to say that interview processes don't differentiate good hires from bullshit artists? Feels like framing the problem differently might make it tractable.
> A LOT of people are far worse at interviewing than they think they are.
A LOT of interviews are one-sided bully sessions, so people don't jump through the hoops they are expected to.. especially in hazing-friendly cultures like the security and finance sectors
Just spent a day coding in C using intrinsics with the help of ChatGPT - trying to get it to produce results - purely as an experiment, and i can say someone who'd copy-paste from it without understanding things, will never pass an interview with me and i'm by far not the toughest guy to get through.
> 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.
They've all drunk the leetcode / cs question koolaid, instead of just talking about projects, and how they would solve some things, and checking their personality (this is like 70% of the weight for me for new team members) if nobody likes you because of your attitude / personality, you'll bring down the team with your personality.
> Can you tell the different between someone who really just leans on ChatGPT all day but is actually incompetent?
More relevant question: even if you can easily tell the difference, can you convince the person who makes the hiring decisions that your colleague is incompetent and only relays words to/from ChatGPT?
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.
A friend of mine - against my loud objections - hired some Pakistani offshore group to build an app for him around 2015 or so. $15k "estimate" but it was all time & materials not flat rate. They had an "office" with a "CEO" in NYC but no staff, just a PO Box. The whole thing was super fishy and I said as much but he didn't care because they were cheap.
Fast forward nearly 18 months into the 6 month contract, and about $40k later, there is no working app and the "CEO" says "well I would love to give you some of your money back but the contract has expired so I am no longer able to do that, we could sign another one for $20k to finish if you'd like."
I've worked with probably a dozen offshoring companies in my life in one way or another and every single one of them has been deceitful to the point of being fraudulent, and puts out some of the worst code you have ever seen.
I tell everyone considering it that if you can afford it, you're getting scammed in one way or another. You're better off going with a US-based firm that guarantees you'll get American workers who are physically in the US working on your product.
I'd rather hire Deloitte or Accenture for 10x the price - I know they offshore a ton but you'll at least have avenues to get your money back if they don't deliver.
> It should be a more conversational tone the entire time, random discussion paths pursued, especially if the candidate's interests perk up about something.
Will we get AI to determine if the candidates are using AI?
> 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.
Asking a candidate to do an outdoor interview at a public park so you can cross reference the sky with their time of day and weather and google maps photos sounds interesting.
> 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 is a difference between engaging with a consultancy and hiring for a position. They know that too, or the lip syncing mentioned wouldn’t be a thing.
> 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)
They are not a fiction. I’m dealing with LLM generated resumes right now. I just one that wasn’t too smart, and it claimed to have led a project for our company despite never having worked there.
Spark / Readdle. Not a unicorn, but I've been a happy user for years.
(Their response to a customer-service request a year or so ago was sobering. Along the lines of "yes, that's a bug we know about, but the developer who owns that feature lost his home in a missile strike last week. Once he's got housing and a new laptop he'll fix it." A week later he fixed it.)
Guess what happens with any promising European startup (including Eastern European ones). It's acquired by American companies.
Europe doesn't have a ton of large and high paying software companies, but it does have a ton of good developers.
Romania probably has produced half a million software developers over the past 30 years (in a population of about 20 million), yet it basically doesn't have any large software companies. Probably the biggest you might have heard of are Bitdefender or in the past Softpedia.
Or the alternative, foreign companies set up shop there to scoop up the local developers. Using Romania as an example, Bucharest has R&D centers with at least hundreds of developers each (some with thousands), for: Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe, SAP, UIPath, Huawei, Honeywell, IBM, Cognizant, Ericsson, Ubisoft, HP, etc.
I've always had the impression that Ukraine's tech sector is primarily focused on outsourcing or outstaffing for Western companies, so they typically don't own what they build (and it's very custom, boring enterprise stuff anyway).
Russia, on the other hand, has traditionally focused more on building its own products and brands, both for its domestic market (Yandex, VK) and the global market (Karsperky, ABBYY, JetBrains). When a technology they create for themselves turns out to be pretty good, it often spills over to the West and gains global popularity - examples being ClickHouse (originally to support metrics collection at Yandex), nginx (originally a reverse proxy at Rambler), etc. I have a hard time remembering something similar coming out of Ukraine?..
I may be wrong, it's just my impression of it (reading Ukrainian/Russian job postings etc.)
parts of remote Eastern Europe have produced excellent techs for decades.. they seem to deny it now but JetBrainz is from there, which is hugely successful.
While I agree that this narrative is fodder for RTO-hungry CEOs... it is something that happens albeit typically in a different way. You'll have someone do the interview on behalf of another candidate.
A deepfaked recruit is a slight extension of that.
Yes, AI is used a pretext for many things. RTO, cost cutting, you name it. But since the fact remains though that there are fake recruits for remote positions, if you strip out the AI rhetoric, it remains a legitimate argument in favor of RTO.
It’s a legitimate argument to fly the person in for interviews.
I got my only remote BigTech job post Covid where the entire loop was remote. But it was customary before then to fly people into the office for the final interview.
Yes I realize “remote first” companies may not have an office. But even then, you could fly the interviewees to the location of the interviewer and use a hotel conference room.
I refuse to believe a country as isolated as NK is pumping out genius hackers better than any other country. They speak one of the few languages isolates in the world. They don’t attract high-quality foreigners, if any at all. They don’t get access to the larger scientific community. Their universities don’t allow extended discourse for local students with the few foreigners they allow. Their internet infrastructure is pathetic and their citizens are poor.
Call me a conspiracy theorist but it seems vastly more likely that China and Russia (far and away NK’s strongest, nearest, and largest allies) are executing these hacks and blaming them on the NKs to avoid retribution.
You either believe that or that NKs are genetically superior specimens because they’re not doing anything else that would yield the superior results they attain.
Just speculating. I would also guess maybe Russian and Chinese candidates have more domestic opportunities or the NK government sponsors more activity like this.
The title alone reeks of pro-RTO-at-all-costs "there's nothing wrong with driving an hour each way to your office because work should be the most important thing in your life here's $70k for the year thanks so much" bullshit.
I'm 100% sure there are some people there using AI to try to get through interviews, but what's the end game? The article mentions faking identification documents and work history. Well the first is a crime, and the second takes about 5 minutes to verify. "RTO to prevent crime" is so dumb even the RTO CEOs aren't pushing that one yet.
I also see this as spreading FUD. I have led quite many remote interviews recently with European candidates and I can guarantee that not one of them was an AI generated pretender. Also, since LLMs is a popular topic nowadays, it was easy to have candid conversations about their use. I have also seen recorded videos of these AI-generated candidates and with two brain cells working it's easy to identify them. It's also easy to see and feel if a candidate is having a genuine conversation with you or is trying to use AI-assistant tools.
Maybe in the future it will be a more significant problem but not this year, not next year and probably not even this decade.
> When voice authentication startup Pindrop Security posted a recent job opening, one candidate stood out from hundreds of others.
> The applicant, a Russian coder named Ivan, seemed to have all the right qualifications for the senior engineering role. When he was interviewed over video last month, however, Pindrop’s recruiter noticed that Ivan’s facial expressions were slightly out of sync with his words.
> That’s because the candidate, whom the firm has since dubbed “Ivan X,” was a scammer using deepfake software and other generative AI tools in a bid to get hired by the tech company, said Pindrop CEO and co-founder Vijay Balasubramaniyan.
Hm, let's read on.
> As for “Ivan X,” Pindrop’s Balasubramaniyan said the startup used a new video authentication program it created to confirm he was a deepfake fraud.
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.
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.
Another remote employment fraud that is much more prevalent is "Overemployment". You will get an applicant that is very skilled and hits the interview out of the park. But then when hired they are working many jobs and just trying to steal as many paychecks as they can until you fire them. They keep their first jobs resume clean and they all check out.
There is a Reddit community with over 400k members to show how prevalent this is [1]. There's lots of tactics like not allowing mentions on LinkedIn so they can't be publicly mentioned and seen by other unsuspecting employers, and just maintaining plausible deniability about why they can't make an on camera meeting. It is technically not illegal so it is very lucrative and hard to detect.
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.
It is a LOT different to be working multiple jobs at different times of the day. This is not what this is. This is trying to get away with working 2 or more jobs at the same time and making up excuses about why you can't make an on camera meeting. Also in the case of CEOs it is known they are doing that. If someone said yeah I have another job I will be working the same hours as your job that is totally fair. But they don't say that. They say their pipes froze, doctor's appointment, etc. It is also fair that the worker can do what they would like in their time including working another job. I have also had people who honestly said they were wrapping up their consulting gig and would need some time periodically to take off and that was fine too.
1. If you're upfront with it, and everyone involved has signed off on it, it isn't ethically wrong. Its not the overemployment that's the problem; its the deceit. I've seen this happen multiple times, including once myself. Communicate, set boundaries, be a professional. It isn't common to be fired for asking if working a second job is within the bounds of your first job's employment. On the other hand, if you're already working the second job, and you inform them about it; that's deceit.
2. I'm not aware of anyone who is the CEO of 4 companies; well, except Mr Musk, but don't you dare say for a second that no one is batting an eye at that. Most CEOs I know barely have enough time for one company; and obviously the performance of Musk's companies recently suggests he's in the same boat.
3. The original poster pretty clearly inferred that, in these situations, generally speaking these workers are not meeting performance expectations.
Is the CEO working at 4 companies in a transparent manner, approved by the boards of their companies? Then I don't see any problem.
If you want to work at 4 companies and your 4 managers don't have a problem with it, then go for it. Real problem arises when one lie about it and does it stealthily. Lying shouldn't be allowed, neither for CEOs nor for worker bees.
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.
I am of the same opinion. Employers get to jerk employees around. Look at union busting, look at how they fight tooth and nail against any pro labor regulation. Arguably unjustified mass layoffs. The tech salary suppression case and there are so many other examples that simply aren't jumping to my head right now.
But god forbid the laborers do anything that takes advantage of a situation to better their lot in life.
For the record, I ain't one of those folks either. I'm not looking to hold more than one job at a time, and I suspect the actual majority of workers are like this too, so even if the argument held water for someone, 400K people is less than 0.1% of the workforce. That is hardly worth worrying about beyond simple precautions if it something you think is an issue
I don’t agree - working remotely is (in most respects) beneficial to the employee, and requires a lot of trust from the employer. So I think employees should do their part and honor that trust by being at least as productive as they would be at an office.
(I work remotely for a big corp and this is how I feel and act as well.)
You should have some sympathy for the person who got robbed out of a job because someone else just wanted to make even more money. Companies aren't the main victims of the overemployed.
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 you look at the history of fraud, people are always coming up with new ways to steal from people that are at the margins of legality. Consider the category "wire fraud", for example. It's not like some lawmakers looked at the nascent telephone and the telegraph and said, "Well boys, we'd better make sure these aren't used for crime." No, innovative scammers found ways to use the new technology for new crime for a few decades before the laws were updated. See Joesph "The Yellow Kid" Weil's autobiography for some examples.
Just because the fraud or theft isn't at the moment illegal doesn't meant it isn't fraud or theft.
Because it is the technical definition of the words and that is exactly what it is. Something not being illegal does not mean that it isn't fraud or stealing. Misrepresenting your availability and willfully trying to cover that is is fraud. Taking someone's money while fraudulently not working for it is stealing. I know overemployment people will rationalize it some other way but it doesn't change that.
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.
Founder-CEO of three companies, on the board of another, "advisor" for another startup. On a non-profit board, too.
You notice that they have two "executive assistants" on staff at the 30-person company you're applying to. Gee, I wonder if this "CEO" does any actual work? No, of course they fucking don't. Linkedin post about how they balance work with family despite all this, LOL, it's because all your "jobs" are fake and you have enough money to pay to make all your personal work go away, too. You're a goddamn part-time worker dilettante playing pretend that you're a "hard worker" with amazing time management skills.
Yeah, demands that employees operate under far greater constraints and give more than the near-zero shits about the company than the owner- and executive-classes for way less compensation are totally reasonable and should be respected. /s
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.
Board membership is more like volunteer work, they meet for a few hours once a month to rubberstamp the CEO's strategy. It's oversight rather than 'work'.
I'm always torn on this, on one hand there are companies that are so inept that they really only need people 4-10 hours per week, and they are happy with that.
On the other hand, I am the hiring manager at a healthcare company and I have to layoff 1-2 people per year who do this. I know all the tell tale signs, random blocks on calendar, missing meetings, sudden health issues when there are production incidents, getting stuck on simple problems for days at a time. Of course you can always back it up by looking at their stats (staring at Microsoft teams 4-5 hours a day).
The term I've heard is "moonlighting" but same concept. As someone that's seen really smart guys at my company get sacked over this, my takeaway is you can do it but you gotta be real good to not get caught and don't be surprised if you're fired. There was one guy we had to fire over this and he had no remorse and took is super well. I could tell for him he understood this was part of the gig and probably had higher paying jobs to fallback on.
I just close that company’s laptop and never think about them again.
There is no linkedin to update, no resume to update, no desperate dash or networking for another role.
Although there is less sympathy for being sacked for performance issues when thats the reason, the realities in my overemployment journey have been companies running out of runway for reasons not solvable by engineering direction, furloughs, government contracts where the top performers only lasted 5 more weeks longer than I did after being promised that the project was a 5 year contract, whole org adjustments, “we are going in a different direction” and more. Tech is not a stable sector. This is a far superior position to be in.
I’ve met expectations and gotten raises from simultaneous full time roles as well.
Moonlighting is working a second job at night (“by the light of the moon”). Overemployment is fraudulently charging two companies for the same hour of time.
And I think there are plenty of people who aren't even consciously intending to scam. A while back I interviewed somebody for a 100%-time contracting position that will convert to employment. His LinkedIn listed him involved in a couple of other companies that he started. When I asked about this glaring incongruity he looked startled and said that, yes of course he was shutting those down. It felt to me like a lie made up on the spot.
He struck me as somebody who was just overextended and flailing around for immediate cash revenue. So I think he had convinced himself he could do his two companies and a full-time job. But I expect that in practice he'd stint us on hours and be so sleep-deprived during them that he'd be somewhere between marginally and negatively productive until we fired him.
But then it's hard to tell the difference between a desperate schmuck and a scammer, as I think it's a continuum. A lot of out-and-out scams get started like that.
> But I expect that in practice he'd stint us on hours and be so sleep-deprived during them that he'd be somewhere between marginally and negatively productive until we fired him.
To be fair, I could probably replace children with running a company on the side and still end up less sleep deprived.
i am wondering, how would that even work for any subsequent jobs, past the first set of multiple jobs done at once?
A pre-employment background check (which you typically do after accepting an offer and right before starting the job) would clearly show all your previous places of employment (for up to 7 years at the very least), along with the timelines. How would one explain that to the employer?
What kind of background check would reveal all previous employers? Where I’m from a background check usually consists of checking one or two (candidate provided) references and possibly googling their name for red flags.
If you agree to work for someone a number of hours per week, and you don't do it, while having no intention of doing it, and they are paying you while you are lying about it, that is fraud in most jurisdictions.
Violating an employment contract is not a criminal issue, it is a civil issue at best.
The most they can realistically do to you for violating that section is just firing you. I don’t see them trying to collect the “damages” in the civil court.
I mean I am a member of the nba subreddit and I don't play in the nba. Heck I haven't watched a single game this year. A lot of it is just people fantasizing about it rather than doing it.
From this month's HN hiring, we might have received 30-40 resumes so far. Out of that, we have interviewed (or scheduled) around 20. There were no fake resumes; in fact we got very high quality resumes this time. There weren't any fakes in the previous months as well (in noticeable numbers).
I am not saying it's not happening. But we haven't seen it happen on HN.
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.
You give way too much credit to the types of companies that get YC funding. I’ve seen a lot of meh corporate jobs posted here with corp dev type wages.
Solution is extremely simple, fly the candidate out for an in-person interview. A one-time plane ticket is a tiny expense compared to paying for the company to be a fully in-office operation, or paying a fraudster's salary.
Onsite interviews were a normal practice just a few years ago.
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.
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.
Had one apply to my team last week, they had on their resume they worked with a tech company from 2019 to 2022 in a very specific role which would have been managed by my brother in law. Checked with him and he called BS on it. Wanted to drag them out a few rounds and do some last minute reschedules, but HR just slammed the door, saying they get lots of these now.
"Fake job seekers are flooding US companies that are hiring for remote positions"
Getting a taste of their own medicine after all those fake or evergreen postings. Feels shitty doesn't it? At least the people looking for hires still have a job to feed their families, unlike many on the job seeker side.
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.
Readit News
Some background. I'm a senior developer who has performed hundreds of interviews and seen dozens of questionable recruits long before AI. 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 seen this done with A talking while B moves their lips on camera. Now with chatGPT (and earlier to some degree with just Google Search) we just see applicants eyes focused on something they're reading when we ask questions. All of this is just as easy as an AI generated applicant (if not easier) and quite likely to get the recruit hired.
A lot of this narrative is pointing the finger at China, North Korea and Russia/Ukraine. The best candidates I've fielded have been Ukrainian, Russian and Chinese. These are countries well known for their tech sectors. North Korea has executed the largest crypto heists in history. These are not groups who need to fake it.
So who does this narrative serve? It serves the RTO CEOs. This makes CEOs scared to hire remote workers and lets the ones who demand it have a reason.
If anything the panic around AI should reinforce the need to think critically about these things.
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.
[edit]
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.
This works both ways right? Would it be fair to say that interview processes don't differentiate good hires from bullshit artists? Feels like framing the problem differently might make it tractable.
A LOT of interviews are one-sided bully sessions, so people don't jump through the hoops they are expected to.. especially in hazing-friendly cultures like the security and finance sectors
They've all drunk the leetcode / cs question koolaid, instead of just talking about projects, and how they would solve some things, and checking their personality (this is like 70% of the weight for me for new team members) if nobody likes you because of your attitude / personality, you'll bring down the team with your personality.
Age old question, who will judge the judge?
More relevant question: even if you can easily tell the difference, can you convince the person who makes the hiring decisions that your colleague is incompetent and only relays words to/from ChatGPT?
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.
Fast forward nearly 18 months into the 6 month contract, and about $40k later, there is no working app and the "CEO" says "well I would love to give you some of your money back but the contract has expired so I am no longer able to do that, we could sign another one for $20k to finish if you'd like."
I've worked with probably a dozen offshoring companies in my life in one way or another and every single one of them has been deceitful to the point of being fraudulent, and puts out some of the worst code you have ever seen.
I tell everyone considering it that if you can afford it, you're getting scammed in one way or another. You're better off going with a US-based firm that guarantees you'll get American workers who are physically in the US working on your product.
I'd rather hire Deloitte or Accenture for 10x the price - I know they offshore a ton but you'll at least have avenues to get your money back if they don't deliver.
Will we get AI to determine if the candidates are using AI?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
Out of curiosity, what tech sector does Ukraine have? I don't remember ever hearing of any large successful Ukrainian SW compony or unicorn.
(Their response to a customer-service request a year or so ago was sobering. Along the lines of "yes, that's a bug we know about, but the developer who owns that feature lost his home in a missile strike last week. Once he's got housing and a new laptop he'll fix it." A week later he fixed it.)
Europe doesn't have a ton of large and high paying software companies, but it does have a ton of good developers.
Romania probably has produced half a million software developers over the past 30 years (in a population of about 20 million), yet it basically doesn't have any large software companies. Probably the biggest you might have heard of are Bitdefender or in the past Softpedia.
Or the alternative, foreign companies set up shop there to scoop up the local developers. Using Romania as an example, Bucharest has R&D centers with at least hundreds of developers each (some with thousands), for: Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe, SAP, UIPath, Huawei, Honeywell, IBM, Cognizant, Ericsson, Ubisoft, HP, etc.
Russia, on the other hand, has traditionally focused more on building its own products and brands, both for its domestic market (Yandex, VK) and the global market (Karsperky, ABBYY, JetBrains). When a technology they create for themselves turns out to be pretty good, it often spills over to the West and gains global popularity - examples being ClickHouse (originally to support metrics collection at Yandex), nginx (originally a reverse proxy at Rambler), etc. I have a hard time remembering something similar coming out of Ukraine?..
I may be wrong, it's just my impression of it (reading Ukrainian/Russian job postings etc.)
JxBrowser: https://teamdev.com/jxbrowser/ DotNetBrowser: https://teamdev.com/dotnetbrowser/
A deepfaked recruit is a slight extension of that.
I got my only remote BigTech job post Covid where the entire loop was remote. But it was customary before then to fly people into the office for the final interview.
Yes I realize “remote first” companies may not have an office. But even then, you could fly the interviewees to the location of the interviewer and use a hotel conference room.
Call me a conspiracy theorist but it seems vastly more likely that China and Russia (far and away NK’s strongest, nearest, and largest allies) are executing these hacks and blaming them on the NKs to avoid retribution.
You either believe that or that NKs are genetically superior specimens because they’re not doing anything else that would yield the superior results they attain.
I'm 100% sure there are some people there using AI to try to get through interviews, but what's the end game? The article mentions faking identification documents and work history. Well the first is a crime, and the second takes about 5 minutes to verify. "RTO to prevent crime" is so dumb even the RTO CEOs aren't pushing that one yet.
Maybe in the future it will be a more significant problem but not this year, not next year and probably not even this decade.
Dead Comment
> The applicant, a Russian coder named Ivan, seemed to have all the right qualifications for the senior engineering role. When he was interviewed over video last month, however, Pindrop’s recruiter noticed that Ivan’s facial expressions were slightly out of sync with his words.
> That’s because the candidate, whom the firm has since dubbed “Ivan X,” was a scammer using deepfake software and other generative AI tools in a bid to get hired by the tech company, said Pindrop CEO and co-founder Vijay Balasubramaniyan.
Hm, let's read on.
> As for “Ivan X,” Pindrop’s Balasubramaniyan said the startup used a new video authentication program it created to confirm he was a deepfake fraud.
Oh, I get it, it's an ad for Pindrop.
Christ the future is stupid.
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
There is a Reddit community with over 400k members to show how prevalent this is [1]. There's lots of tactics like not allowing mentions on LinkedIn so they can't be publicly mentioned and seen by other unsuspecting employers, and just maintaining plausible deniability about why they can't make an on camera meeting. It is technically not illegal so it is very lucrative and hard to detect.
https://www.reddit.com/r/overemployed/top/
2. I'm not aware of anyone who is the CEO of 4 companies; well, except Mr Musk, but don't you dare say for a second that no one is batting an eye at that. Most CEOs I know barely have enough time for one company; and obviously the performance of Musk's companies recently suggests he's in the same boat.
3. The original poster pretty clearly inferred that, in these situations, generally speaking these workers are not meeting performance expectations.
If you want to work at 4 companies and your 4 managers don't have a problem with it, then go for it. Real problem arises when one lie about it and does it stealthily. Lying shouldn't be allowed, neither for CEOs nor for worker bees.
As they say, "Turnabout is fair play".
But god forbid the laborers do anything that takes advantage of a situation to better their lot in life.
For the record, I ain't one of those folks either. I'm not looking to hold more than one job at a time, and I suspect the actual majority of workers are like this too, so even if the argument held water for someone, 400K people is less than 0.1% of the workforce. That is hardly worth worrying about beyond simple precautions if it something you think is an issue
(I work remotely for a big corp and this is how I feel and act as well.)
This is the same as grouping all workers together as being lazy.
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.
What do you do in your second and third job? How did you find it?
Just because the fraud or theft isn't at the moment illegal doesn't meant it isn't fraud or theft.
You notice that they have two "executive assistants" on staff at the 30-person company you're applying to. Gee, I wonder if this "CEO" does any actual work? No, of course they fucking don't. Linkedin post about how they balance work with family despite all this, LOL, it's because all your "jobs" are fake and you have enough money to pay to make all your personal work go away, too. You're a goddamn part-time worker dilettante playing pretend that you're a "hard worker" with amazing time management skills.
Yeah, demands that employees operate under far greater constraints and give more than the near-zero shits about the company than the owner- and executive-classes for way less compensation are totally reasonable and should be respected. /s
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.
Somehow that's fine for higher ups to 'sit' on 10 boards. And they do not see that like 'steal as many paychecks'.
On the other hand, I am the hiring manager at a healthcare company and I have to layoff 1-2 people per year who do this. I know all the tell tale signs, random blocks on calendar, missing meetings, sudden health issues when there are production incidents, getting stuck on simple problems for days at a time. Of course you can always back it up by looking at their stats (staring at Microsoft teams 4-5 hours a day).
I just close that company’s laptop and never think about them again.
There is no linkedin to update, no resume to update, no desperate dash or networking for another role.
Although there is less sympathy for being sacked for performance issues when thats the reason, the realities in my overemployment journey have been companies running out of runway for reasons not solvable by engineering direction, furloughs, government contracts where the top performers only lasted 5 more weeks longer than I did after being promised that the project was a 5 year contract, whole org adjustments, “we are going in a different direction” and more. Tech is not a stable sector. This is a far superior position to be in.
I’ve met expectations and gotten raises from simultaneous full time roles as well.
He struck me as somebody who was just overextended and flailing around for immediate cash revenue. So I think he had convinced himself he could do his two companies and a full-time job. But I expect that in practice he'd stint us on hours and be so sleep-deprived during them that he'd be somewhere between marginally and negatively productive until we fired him.
But then it's hard to tell the difference between a desperate schmuck and a scammer, as I think it's a continuum. A lot of out-and-out scams get started like that.
To be fair, I could probably replace children with running a company on the side and still end up less sleep deprived.
A pre-employment background check (which you typically do after accepting an offer and right before starting the job) would clearly show all your previous places of employment (for up to 7 years at the very least), along with the timelines. How would one explain that to the employer?
The most they can realistically do to you for violating that section is just firing you. I don’t see them trying to collect the “damages” in the civil court.
I am not saying it's not happening. But we haven't seen it happen on HN.
Onsite interviews were a normal practice just a few years ago.
Getting a taste of their own medicine after all those fake or evergreen postings. Feels shitty doesn't it? At least the people looking for hires still have a job to feed their families, unlike many on the job seeker side.