Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?
In the past month we've seen a dramatic, seemingly coordinated, increase in engineering applicants whose resumés and backgrounds appear qualified, but who refuse to use their cameras during Zoom interviews and who often can't answer specific questions about their backgrounds. We've wasted a significant amount of time on comms and interviews with over a dozen of these candidates. Anyone else experiencing anything similar?
418 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 461 ms ] threadBut why? I feel like we devalue true respect by repeating phrases like this. I'm not saying they deserve to be abused, but why do they deserve respect for solely existing?
EDIT: All the replies seem to be conflating dignity with respect. Your birth gave you the right to your dignity, and no should be able to take that from you. Respect must be earned, and can only be given to you by others.
I'm generally polite to stangers I meet. Not because I respect them (how could I? I don't know them), but because it's morally good to behave decently.
By conflating respect with basic manners/decency, you really devalue what it means to deserve respect and to be respected.
Anyway, you still gota defend yourself like they are monsters. Tell your kids: they are masterful liers and manipulators, they look normal, they have a cover (they have jobs and all, they can go undetected for decades, their whole life even) and more importantly: pain is pleasure, even theirs, especially yours (not always physically but mentally as well). That last bit is the endgame but you and me dont have that so its very difficult to comprehend. They come in variations (think Joker and DoubleFace). Oh and one last thing: they are not rare (between 0.7% and 1% of the population afaik).
I'd use the word humanity to describe that level of respect, to contrast it with something more or less universally regarded as the lack of humanity, things we might even consider crimes against humanity, where people are deprived of the respect towards their humanity, denying them food, inflicting pain, eradication of culture, systematic murder, etc.
Obviously there's a lot of gray room between the two where, for example, cruelty for the sake of cruelty, in most circumstances, could be considered a lack of respect that people deserve for solely existing. That's certainly not on the level of crimes against humanity, but I wouldn't say that's respectful, either.
From https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/dignity/201304/what-...
"The most common response people offer is that dignity is about respect. To the contrary, dignity is not the same as respect. Dignity is our inherent value and worth as human beings; everyone is born with it. Respect, on the other hand, is earned through one’s actions."
a) Get hired, collect a paycheck or two while doing the absolute bare minimum (filling out onboarding forms, etc - no real work) and then move on to the next victim company.
or
b) Get hired with the goal of getting access to improperly secured company or user data.
I imagine a) is vastly more common than b).
I presume, after passing the gatekeepers, most of the people can hold and do the job required from them at bare minimum. The fakers who can not code at all will be found, but someone with an average amount of talent should be able to collect the fat paycheck for several years, as most of the jobs do not require much anyways.
Well, I guess this is really just a version of what I'm saying, about being feeling entitled but thwarted by forces outside one's control
"I'm a good coder, why do the expect me to 'grind on leetcode' and know how to invert a binary tree"
I agree largely, but if that's what they want and you don't want to do it, don't apply. Justifying cheating because of your perception isn't right
People are doing this, because probably, they think it does work. They probably passed some interviews like this before and landed on their job, which is just mundane configuration update tasks, or just making a new integration with a new data source, and realized that there isn't a connection on what is expected on the interviews and what is expected on their daily jobs.
Maybe we should be looking at the core cause instead, the interview processes being not aligned with the daily jobs.
a*) Get hired, collect paychecks until somebody notices, but then still stay employed because the KPI of a HR person in a fast-growing company is to fill seats, and firing people, no matter how terrible they are at their job, goes against that.
Some things you really do need the knowledge, experience and time spent on to navigate successfully, and you just can't fake that consistently as time goes on, especially around other people who do have that knowledge and experience.
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.
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.
What "damage" does being "overemployed" do in and of itself? If the person is meeting expectations, as long as they're not moonlighting for a competitor, who cares what other things they do to make money?
In the case I was referring to, the developer who showed up for the job couldn’t even write a single line of code. We caught this quickly, but not immediately. There were certainly monetary damages from onboarding costs and time wasted, and non monetary damages from reputation with our customers.
I didn’t realize the “fraudulent holding of two jobs simultaneously” had acquired this name.
Apparently there are other definitions as well, used in economics. One being when workers want to work less (even for less money) but can’t… which is sort of the opposite of the two-jobs thing I guess:
https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/applied-and-soc...
Good luck finding an employer who agrees to that.
Just look for the phrase "results only work environment."
Well you get what you pay for.
I prefer giving people a take-home with an original problem to solve. Then, follow that up with a live call where you ask them some questions about it.
I like to ask a very easy problem to start (some candidates spend the full 45 minutes on it) and then ask a similar problem after to build on it. If you work for a company there is some expectation of being able to work while people watch you. I don't like asking crazy dynamic programming problems, etc, but something simple and something slightly harder should be fine for someone who's good at their job.
I don't know what kind of company you work for, but, in spite of the fact that every single technical interview I've ever had involved live coding, I've literally never had to write code in front of anyone at work. By "write code" I mean "write code that's expected to compile and run." I've done plenty of whiteboarding at work, but never anything like what happens in a technical interview.
i brushed over this bit, which makes the critical difference:
write code that's expected to compile and run
for what it's worth, i never had an interview where this was required (except in a coding test, but that was without being watched while i worked on it) and to me it totally does not make sense especially for a whiteboard. making sure every semicolon or brace is in the right place would just be a colossal waste of time.
Of course. Anyone who lacks the ability to complete the assignment can submit a solution written by someone else and be told how it works. Where they’ll fail in follow-up questioning is when you dive into their decision making process.
I have only found one person to have cheated in an interview, and they were exceedingly easy to identify as a fraud when questioned in person.
If they are busy interviewing, putting aside 2-3 hours (which is not much really) per interview, limits how many they are willing to do per week. As its still a candidate driven market.
Keep in mind, people have to find the spare time while doing their jobs and living life. If they have a family - good luck finding spare time :-)
The best win/win I've found is to pair with someone for about 30 minutes. You help each other, just like you do in real life.
The person on the other end is probably just googling keywords from whatever question you ask. You can throw them off by asking followup questions or adding new constraints.
This only works if the helper couldn’t get the job. I just experienced one of these, and I don’t know what to do to protect us.
Glad someone said this. Also most programmers and developers knows how tech works, they just don't want to be profiled by some AI algorithm. And why use Zoom, or any of close source, when you have jitsi to use for a video/voice chat?
I used to make people write code in front of me. I've missed out on some excellent candidates that don't perform at their best with that kind of pressure.
What I do now is ask people to share some code with me that they're proud of. Before the interview I look through it. Then on the call we'll have a quick talk through anything good or weird I've spotted. That helps me know if they've actually written it, and understand it.
Secondly I ask them to talk me through an interesting (to them) project they've worked. Then I dig into the how/why on project specifics to see how deep their understanding is. I tend to navigate to specifics that'll be important in the work I'm offering.
I also give candidates a heads up that that's what I'll be doing so they're not caught off guard. It's hard for them to know exactly the path of our conversation, but if they know what they've done and why they perform well.
With those tactics I've been able to hire some excellent engineers - several of which get quite anxious at the prospect of writing code in front of strangers.
What if they dont have code to share?
You might ask "why spend your time walking through code for a candidate that won't make it through?" Well, it's important for me that if people aren't a good fit for the role, they would be happy recommend us to people that they think are a good fit. Interviewing with that mindset ensures I (and my team) treat candidates like people, instead of like numbers.
In the spirit of the actual Ask HN though, I have had a small number of candidates that were deceptive, or difficult. In those cases it's just a polite but firm "I'm going to have to draw this call to close because <xyz /> and I don't want to string you along." Fortunately I've not had a person different to the interview show up on day 1 though... that'd be a little more awkward.
I think there's always lots of arguing over what's the correct way to do this.
Ideally, I think you'd basically have any number of options, from which you (the candidate) could pick whatever feels the most suitable:
That would solve the issue of person anxiety and time sensitivity - e.g. some people's nerves getting the best of them, even though it wouldn't solve the issue of someone else being able to do the task for them.Then again, many companies/countries out there have a sort of grace period, for example, in Latvia that is 3 months - during which an employee's suitability for the work environment is assessed.
So, give them low priority issues to solve in non-core products, or even additional code tests to work on or prototypes to build, which should very quickly show whether they're suited or not.
More so, in some companies your salary during this period can be lower and the laws around quitting (or being fired) can also be more streamlined.
Of course, one could argue that some would exploit this to just rotate people after 3 months for low salaries, but I would at least hope that such attempts would be glaringly obvious and not much would get done in just 3 months of work.
As a candidate you should be able to detect easily during the interview that it would a bad place to work for.
Nobody collects "critical PII" using job interviews, no company has time for such nonsense. The companies that do collect such information don't do it using job interviews, there are much easier and less time and resource consuming ways of doing that.
And re deep fake/blackmail - why would a company you are applying to hoping to score a job and hiding your face from want to blackmail you?
Sorry but that's utter paranoia and bullshit.
HR these days can be done online -- sign the forms and post a picture of your identification to website that HR controls. 100% remote is a thing these days.
Don't assume that because in your field this is possible it is the case everywhere else.
I think you have a much bigger problem then.
This hasn't been a requirement in any remote position I've had since ~2016.
Not because the company really cares about those things but because the government (tax office, etc.) requires them to collect and forward this information so that you can be properly registered in the various tax, pension and healthcare systems?
Don't assume that what works in your niche is possible/works for everyone else too.
E.g. a nefarious actor could harm a competitor by overwhelming them with fake applicants that it takes time to sift through.
I've had companies offer $500 for a referral, if that person took the job and stayed with the company for at least 6 months (this was for a position with a salary of ~50$ per hour).
500 bucks is IMO on the low side for an employee referral in the US if it's for software engineering... the amount of money you save the hiring team alone in recruiting efforts is often in the thousands of dollars, and they often stay longer and are often the best hires - not surprising if former colleagues they like are already there...
For roles I've worked, I've never seen less than $2k offered for a successfully recommended technical hire, both at startups and BigCos. Most places I've worked have offered around $5k.
I think it just comes down to the quality of company.
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.
I'm old, and have seen plenty of rejection, even though I'm "the real deal." But that kind of behavior has been used as an excuse for ignoring me. The icing on the cake, was when I was told that "I probably faked" my portfolio.
At that point, I realized that I am radioactive, and might as well just give up.
That makes me feel better about not being able to.
For what it's worth, I think Chris Marshall looks like a great developer and a professional I aspire to emulate. However, a lot of companies do make decisions based on metrics, keyword searches, and standardized tests like leetcode (aka stuff that misses out on the human element), so it makes sense to try and balance both if one hasn't done so already.
There's no hope for me either; I'm not a "good cultural fit" most of the time.
I agree with your last sentence, although I would word it a little differently. :)
In fact, my last job was at a place where the salesman told me to not fix a bug I found until a customer ran into that bug so that "they'll remember why they need us." I was appalled.
I'm glad there are more programmers like me out there though. Thank you. :)
It's just the way things are. Shrug it off. Don't take it personally. Move on.
I followed up with a letter to the CEO with description of the event and proof of my credentials. No idea what happened to the interviewer, nor do I care.
I imagine these shell-game interview tricks work really well at large companies where the HR screen is considered to be perfect and thus managers rejecting numerous candidates at the interview layer will be penalized in some manner. "Look, Polly on the Cloud-X-AI team accepted 80% of applicants that reached the interview phase - why is your team accepting just 20%? Is this a culture fit issue that we'll need to intervene on?"
Ended up not continuing the interview, as giving out very sensitive information like candies to companies on the first interviews is not a good idea at all.
"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.
That sounds way more professional than any interviewing process I've gone through in the industry /hj.
My cover letter contains a standard phrase about "references available on request".
No one requested them.
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.
We speak fluent English and if we get up early we have a great timezone overlap with the US. There's no reason to settle for NZ rates with a US company.
That was kind of my point that while getting US rates is still and advantage for us here in NZ we can't compete based on price.
Salary seems to be around 150k +- 50k
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).
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.
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.
The company didn't want to disqualify those candidates, since we couldn't prove cheating, but it was pretty fascinating to witness.
(I do hate code interviews)
https://www.amazon.com/Cracking-Coding-Interview-Programming...
Some of it's probably just creative writing or people bullshitting on the internet though.
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.
If you're setting their hours, doesn't that make them an employee rather than a contractor, legally speaking?
people who no longer trust you and don't want to work with you any more generally don't have to prove it.
Usually the W2 is provided through an agency and you're getting a paycheck from them while the agency is billing the company for hours at a negotiated rate, often much higher than you're being paid.
My belief is that 20%-30% of what you're making is a fair number.
Though if it's somewhere where you could really get a foothold and make a lot of money as an employee, 50% might be acceptable.
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.
It's just like a lawyer's billable hours.
Even if he wasn't, he was a contractor, and checking code while being on site for another company was sus. Employment is "at will" in the US for the most part -- particularly contractors.
Edit: Misread your comment. If you're billing for specific and granular blocks of time, and doubling that up, then ya wage theft. But if you're doing that and also expected to be onsite anyway, then no not wage theft imo.
In the UK a contractor could be someone from an outsourcing company as you suggest or they could be an independent service provider working on their own. This is very common in software dev here when you require someone with specific skills.
If you’re the latter kind then you’d be wise to bill on deliverables rather than time.
If you don’t you could run into a well known tax reg called HMRC IR35. It bars independent contractors from acting like “disguised” employees. It’s a world of pain if that happens.
The US allows companies to fire long-term employees without cause and replace them with indentured servants.
We're the ones who actually hosted the cotton fields full of slaves, after all.
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.
/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.
[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/
and of course, plenty of Russians and Iranians are non-Asian (in appearance, Persia is in Asia of course)
I look forward to a post-racial future...
Basically, if you have smaller eyes, then you are Asian. Otherwise, you are Russian or Indian .. etc, sort of like how some people consider people from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh as "brown".
Continental unity doesn't mean much for Asia as much as it does for Europe or Africa.
Good luck correcting the millions. Just roll with it. Concentrate on whats most important to you.
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.
It is very hard to identify someone as smarter than you, if they try to avoid being identified as such. Even if we're talking about smartness in a very narrow technical sense.
For most academics (and more, the better they are), not being allowed to talk about what you're working on to the vast majority your peers, would be too high a price for money to make up for.
NSA circumvented this for many years by employing an obscene number of math graduates, effectively creating their own parallel academia. We can only imagine how expensive that was. Still, they were surpassed by the "open" world even in the narrow fields they were interested in, such as cryptography, by the late 90s at the latest. It's not just sad being cut off from the free world, it stunts you.
Now, to OPs point, on getting someone competent. Say, they want to infiltrate a crypto trading firm. Maybe the guy who knows crypto doesn't know English. So you end up with a team of guys playing telephone and hoping for the best.
I personally prefer asking the person to open the camera or reschedule to a later date if they can't.
Usually you’d get weird looking resumes from someone based out of New Jersey or Arizona. In most cases the employees were Indian and would phone screen well. When the person landed, usually they were green staff who would basically send their work back to a more senior person or team who would do the work elsewhere overnight.
With remote, there’s definitely more fraud in this space, from people lying about where they are, stealing information and just grifting.
Watch out, if she attends all those productivity sapping meetings, and turns in good code then she'll quickly be promoted to a position that requires no coding. Then that'll be the end of the fun coding :)
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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...
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.
Precisely, and they know what they're worth, so they won't be cheaper anyway.