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Ask HN: Handling Two Identical Resumes?

7 points by jenthoven ↗ HN
Two candidates with genericish names apply for our open SWE role through Indeed.

The resumes are nearly identical resumes, and I mean IDENTICAL.

Exact same words used to describe past projects, exact same skills listed, and the same most recent position.

There are slight differences. They attended different universities, supposedly. One worked at Redfin and the other Amazon, but both "Collaborated on Amazon's internal resource management platforms."

The resumes list the candidates' LinkedIn profiles, and both are active profiles with connections and the resume matches the profile info. Both email addresses are valid and match the name (i.e. "JohnDoe382@gmail.com")

We did a phone screen call with the first of these candidates. He appears to be a fraud. His interviewer left this feedback: "I'm pretty sure they were using GPT for the interview. The answers that he was reading off the screen made no sense, and he left the call abruptly after 15 minutes."

Should we auto-reject the second candidate? What is going on here? I feel that we're being set up for some kind of scam.

12 comments

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sfmz
Maybe they are using the same OpenAPI wrapper to blast out resumes?

How did the LinkedIn signal degrade so substantially I wonder?

Bring back the in-person job fair!

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orionblastar
It sounds like they are using GPT to make the resume from the same template. People are desperate for jobs and will lie on their resumes and even submit false names and resumes so if one resume isn't chosen the other might be?

I'd call just for the giggles and see if it is the same person or using GPT.

jenthoven
LLMs don't make up identical resumes twice. For example, the second position on both resumes has this description: "Worked on first class video conferencing platform for qualitative research using Typescript, Go and React.js."

What are the odds that GPT makes up that same copy for two different users?

Re: calling them -- There is no phone number listed on either resume! Also makes me suspicious this is a scam...

dave4420
Not saying this isn’t a scam, but on the phone number thing…

I sometimes leave my phone number off my CV, because

(a) I hate phone calls: the sound quality is shit and I have trouble understanding people. I much prefer zoom/teams/whatever

(b) I hate it when people (either hiring managers or recruiters) phone me while I’m in an interview… not handing out my phone number to all and sundry helps me avoid that

I’d really hate it if people interpreted “no phone number on CV” as meaning “probably a scammer” :-(

mdaniel
I can appreciate the idle curiosity, but for your consideration any call made to a presumed-fake candidate is an opportunity expenditure that could go to an actual candidate. As someone who never even got rejection emails from a bunch of companies from the whoishiring thread, I'd prefer if that precious time on Earth were spent accepting or rejecting candidates
jenthoven
Sure. We accept or reject all candidates as quickly as we can. But do you think this candidate should be progressed or rejected?

Our actual decision was to ask them to send in a video introduction before we schedule a phone screen with one of our engineers.

mdaniel
I like that and wish that was the new resume practice since I'd bet someone could get a lot more signal from hearing me talk about why I'd be a good fit rather than ATS screening my PDF out

The bad news is that I bet listening to 50+ video pitches is more exhausting than reading 50+ PDFs

bdangubic
same experience recently. we interviewed both but cut the interview after 10-15 minutes. both candidates had american names but appeared to be of asian descent with heavy accents
eddd-ddde
Applying two times with the same resume seems dumb. Isn't it more probable that someone stole the other person's resume and just attributed it to themselves? Maybe that second person is authentic.