[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Have you experienced "hiring fraud?"
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Ask HN: Have you experienced "hiring fraud?"
I put hiring fraud in quotes because I'm not sure what else to call
this and there isn't enough space in a title to explain it.
Basically my company interviewed a candidate who was fantastic.
Checked all the boxes, nailed the interview, and had extremely
relevant work experience. We made an offer. He accepted. A few
weeks later on his first day the guy in the Zoom was definitely not
the guy I interviewed. All the other interviewers agreed. Not the
same guy. We've had a number of candidates in the pipeline who
seemed to be obviously lying about their identities who didn't make
it to an offer but this case seemed different somehow. I cant quite
put my finger on it. I'm just curious to hear how many of you have
experienced something similar. Is it common? Is there something
obvious I'm not thinking of to help avoid these situations? We may
have passed on other candidates because of the strength of this one
guy. This has put us in a pretty unfortunate position. Some maybe
noteworthy facts: we're a 100% remote company. The candidate was US
based and said they didn't need visa sponsorship. They only spoke
to one in house recruiter, an HR rep, and 3 people in engineering
for the interviews. I discovered after the fact that one of the
name brand companies on their resume was actually not the company
we thought it was but one with the exact same name in a different
industry.
Author : dopamean
Score : 338 points
Date : 2022-09-27 15:18 UTC (7 hours ago)
| seren wrote:
| Someone just posted a story on "being impersonated" :
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32996953
| jethronethro wrote:
| Something like that happened with a team at my previous employer.
| The person nailed the interview, but when the person started they
| seemed pretty clueless about the position, the programming
| languages, and the tools that the team used. Plus the person's
| personality seemed a little different. The company quickly
| figured out that a front did the interview of this person, and
| that they were hired under false pretenses. Immediate dismissal.
|
| This sort of situation seems to have become _very_ common in the
| last couple or three years.
| fundad wrote:
| No ID check and he was given a job? Does this happen to anyone
| here?
| dopamean wrote:
| It's not clear to me that the person who we talked to was not
| who he said he was. It's that the person who showed up was
| definitely not that person.
| frellus wrote:
| Usually ID checks happen at on-boarding, not interviewing, but
| still you would think it would be a perfect place to verify and
| then dismiss the person the same day.
|
| Actually I wouldn't even dismiss them... I'd list them as
| "never having shown up" so they were terminated for cause. Last
| thing I would do is give an unsub login credentials, e-mail
| access, etc. so they can continue to perpetuate their fraud.
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| Most government issued ID's have a date of birth on it. By law,
| employers cannot ask for DOB prior to making a hiring decision,
| as age discrimination is illegal and something the employer can
| be sued for.
|
| Not to say this would not work, but candidates would need to
| black out/ cover up information the employer cannot view.
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| Yea, before I got an offer to my current company you had to be
| vetted by hireright which was quite thorough. They contacted
| your previous employers and required a near absurd amount of
| documentation to prove who you are. It wasn't a pleasant
| process, but it would be really hard to pass through as a
| fraud.
| dento wrote:
| I've never had my ID checked by potential employer, except when
| the job requires security clearance. This is in europe, though.
| fundad wrote:
| I was told my state drivers license wasn't sufficient and had
| to bring my passport. I'm in the states.
| JJMcJ wrote:
| Are you a non-US citizen? Because otherwise it makes no
| sense. Only about 25% of US citizens have passports.
|
| The DL or State ID card is the de facto national ID card.
| jawns wrote:
| Last year, I was asked to interview a man who was procured
| through a remote-staffing firm.
|
| He was based in Southeast Asia, and on his resume it looked like
| he met all of the competencies we needed -- including English
| proficiency.
|
| But on the call, I noticed that whenever I asked him a question,
| he would turn off his camera, pause for 10-20 seconds, answer the
| question, then turn his video back on.
|
| It turned out that the man was using a translator and really
| didn't speak any English whatsoever.
|
| I have no idea how he expected to be able to do the job if he had
| been hired, but I guess he thought it was worth a shot.
|
| In talking with the remote staffing firm, they were extremely
| apologetic. He had apparently pulled the same trick with them,
| but they didn't do video interviews, so it was harder to pick up
| on.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > I asked him a question, he would turn off his camera, pause
| for 10-20 seconds, answer the question
|
| Even without the camera, I'm not sure how he expected this to
| fly? Someone who claims to be proficient in English should not
| always pause for 10-20 seconds before answering a question.
| nivertech wrote:
| GC?
| matai_kolila wrote:
| If you can get a job that's entirely async it might actually
| work out for a few weeks, and a few weeks of a western
| developer salary can last a year or more in some parts of the
| world.
| mmsnberbar66 wrote:
| Depends on the question. I wouldn't mind waiting 30s for a
| thoughtful answer.
| evan_ wrote:
| yeah but if it's "How are you doing today" that might be
| kind of weird
| anotheracctfo wrote:
| I mean, yeah? There are very few people who can go straight
| from my question to the answer. And pausing to collect your
| thoughts is much better than saying uuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhh
| ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm uhhh I ... uhhhhhhhhhhhhh
|
| Camera fuckery notwithstanding
| SkipperCat wrote:
| He may not have even cared if he got fired after 2 weeks. 2
| weeks of a US salary can go pretty far in some parts of SE
| Asia. If he can run this scam several times a year, it may
| provide a decent living.
| lucifargundam wrote:
| On the flipside, I've applied for plenty of jobs- only to be told
| I lack necessary skills for the positions.
|
| My resume has been edited to fit each job.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Rant: when companies outsource to dodgy subcontractors it's fine,
| but when the common man does it suddenly it's no good?
|
| This is just companies getting back the same treatment they've
| been subjecting their customers to for over a decade.
|
| In business this is called "business process outsourcing", aka
| send off sensitive data & permissions to sweatshops in third-
| world countries.
|
| While it's a shame that it happened to what I assume is a
| legitimate small/medium business that doesn't do the
| aforementioned practice, I have absolutely zero sympathy for any
| big company that does the above and suddenly ends up at the
| receiving end of it.
|
| The market has reacted, and as more and more things go remote it
| allows the "little guys" to take a stab at it with varying
| degrees of success.
|
| (to be clear, I do not condone this behavior despite being
| approached several times to be a "front" for foreign developers -
| however, I totally understand the market dynamics that push them
| to do this)
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| It doesn't make sense to suggest that the OP's company deserves
| this because some other companies did some things you didn't
| like. This idea that all businesses are bad and deserve to be
| cheated by their employees is extremely immature.
|
| > When companies outsource to dodgy subcontractors it's fine,
| but when the common man does it suddenly it's no good?
|
| Subcontractors are engaged on different terms and with specific
| contracts that require subcontractors to also engage in
| specific contracts.
|
| If an individual employee hands their logins to someone else
| and says "pretend its me" then it's clear fraud, not to mention
| a breach of the documents you agreed to when you signed.
|
| > In business this is called "business process outsourcing",
|
| No, it's not. Outsourcing specific operations is done with
| carefully limited access to only the data necessary.
|
| Hiring a programmer and giving them access to your company
| Slack and source code is entirely different.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > Outsourcing specific operations is done with _carefully
| limited access_ to only the data necessary.
|
| So carefully limited that insiders from said sweatshops end
| up taking (laughably low) bribes to perform things like
| fraudulent SIM swaps, access customer accounts, etc?
|
| In theory it must be all well and controlled and in a proper
| world nobody would be doing fraud, whether for themselves or
| a third-party. In reality there's very little oversight over
| it on the companies' side (and a slap on the wrist if by some
| miracle regulators actually get involved) so seeing them
| complain about being on the receiving end of this is some
| sweet schadenfreude.
| jdminhbg wrote:
| > I have absolutely zero sympathy for any big company that does
| the above and suddenly ends up at the receiving end of it.
|
| That seems like a sentiment better expressed in an instance
| where it actually happens then? I don't have much sympathy for
| burglars who fall through glass windows, but it doesn't have
| anything to do with OP's situation.
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| ironmagma wrote:
| It's a reaction to the sentiment - typically from rightists -
| that things like crime and fraud are good so long as it's the
| "correct" people (corporations) perpetrating it.
| malfist wrote:
| Why are you bringing politics into this? GP did not mention
| politics at all.
| hnfong wrote:
| I don't see how it's relevant.
|
| If you want a company to provide services without outsourcing
| to a third party, you can make it a requirement in the
| contract. But most likely you don't need this assurance, just
| that they maintain a certain level of quality. If a company
| misrepresents the quality of their goods/services it is
| essentially a breach of contract and it's not "fine". If they
| never made the promise in the first place and you're just
| bitter that some companies cut costs to achieve the bare
| minimum level of service, well that's capitalism for you. But
| irrelevant. Those companies could have hired dodgy people in-
| house and they'll still have shitty service.
|
| Finding somebody to interview then having another person show
| up at work is straight out fraud. That's also not OK.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| 1) two wrongs don't make a right
|
| 2) There are legal/tax ramifications to identity fraud.
|
| 3) There is nothing inherently illegal or amoral about
| businesses outsourcing.
| frellus wrote:
| Have some empathy, man. If you owned a company and hired
| someone, but the person who showed up isn't the same person,
| the word "fraud" is wholly appropriate and I feel bad for Op.
| When you are trying to hire the very best, and you do but
| someone else shows up in their place..? Not cool.
|
| There's no reason to have a comparison with companies
| outsourcing. Companies outsource to lower cost with, ideally, a
| balance between decreased customer service and standards. The
| alternative is to raise prices on consumers. Profit motivation
| is real and not immoral -- companies which outsource and lower
| their standard of service should get beaten up by the market
| and competition. That being said, when a company has a monopoly
| or some other anti-competitive practices there is no way to
| balance this.
| bobkazamakis wrote:
| >Have some empathy, man. If you owned a company and hired
| someone, but the person who showed up isn't the same person,
| the word "fraud" is wholly appropriate and I feel bad for Op.
|
| Fraud? Sure. But feeling bad for the person exploiting the
| value of one persons labor because they didn't get to exploit
| someone elses labor for more instead is fuckin nuts.
| breischl wrote:
| Interesting parallel. I think I'd disagree that it's considered
| "fine" when company's do it, though.
|
| What the OP describes is basically a version of a "bait and
| switch" fraud, which is pretty widely illegal and not
| considered OK by anyone. Although you can find examples where
| people ride that line pretty closely[1], but even then people
| think it's bad behavior.
|
| A subtly different thing that's maybe closer to what you're
| talking about is hiring contractors and then blaming them for
| problems. A current major example being many of the Amazon-
| branded delivery trucks that only deliver for Amazon, but when
| they do something wrong "oh they're a subcontractor, not
| Amazon's fault!"
|
| So, not sure I agree 100%, but I understand the anger.
|
| [1] For example, this guy that found name-brand USB-C hubs had
| the same "guts" as cut-rate crap.
| https://overengineer.dev/blog/2021/04/25/usb-c-hub-madness.h...
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| I remember seeing a couple of people post on here about
| basically becoming their own consulting company, by applying
| for the position (as their real selves) and then farming out
| the work to junior devs. They said they could juggle half a
| dozen "job" like this. Good for them, I guess, but that's real
| work, too; just very different work than programming.
|
| Then there was the guy who said he had enough rep to take jobs,
| do basically nothing until they figured out he wasn't
| producing, at which point they'd fire him, but meanwhile he'd
| collected 6 months of salary. Again, he had a half dozen of
| these "jobs" in the pipeline.
|
| In my own job, I've gotten roped into a years-long email chain
| where a legitimately hired programmer, working in our
| affiliated consultancy, in a foreign country, couldn't figure
| out how to install NodeJS to satisfy his ReactJS stack. LONG
| story, but who's at fault for hiring someone so clueless that
| they couldn't figure out one of the first steps of modern web
| development?
|
| I helped interview a replacement for a position I was leaving,
| and sat across the table from a guy who said he'd programmed
| several .NET and Rails applications. He was hired. When it came
| time for me to do the "knowledge transfer," I watched him
| literally open a browser, and type "Ruby on Rails." He'd never
| even heard of it. Again, LONG story, but they threw away
| everything I had written, and he used Java. It was the only
| thing he knew. He'd made up projects on his resume, and lied to
| our faces.
|
| All of these examples in this thread are just different data
| points along the sliding scale of trust. There are many
| different places to inject mistrust, and -- human nature being
| what it is -- someone will always find these holes, and try to
| take advantage of them.
|
| Don't trust. Verify.
| jrm4 wrote:
| 100%.
|
| If this wasn't on this end of the labor pipeline, it would be
| spun as "Marketing" or similar.
| blablabla123 wrote:
| Years ago I worked at a company where one of the first paragraphs
| in the contract was that you have to pay a 4 digit sum if you
| didn't show up on the first day. (The company was small with
| solid funding but had actually a massive churn)
|
| OTOH I experienced the reverse. Shady offers where red flags kept
| popping up after accepting the 1st interview round. E.g. the
| (ext.) recruiter lying about the funding or the company revealing
| shortly before signing the contract that the runway is just half
| a year. Not surprising that some applicants aren't 100% truthful
| either...
| v1l wrote:
| I wonder if companies would be willing to pay for a service that
| vets remote candidates in person in their city? Effectively the
| service would hire locals to meet/interview the candidate in
| person.
| noasaservice wrote:
| Thankfully, I work remote and with near-zero chance of fraud.
|
| I had to get my "badge" 1h away. Had to be sponsored, multiple
| forms of ID, and an active paperwork on file. Full handprints
| were taken for both hands. Pictures as well.
|
| Basically if I tried even KIND OF, I'd be going to federal
| prison. No ifs, ands, or buts.
| servercobra wrote:
| When I was freelancing (even before the pandemic and remote
| taking off), I used to get constant outreaches from people in
| Asia asking if I could secure contracts, do the meetings and face
| to face, and let them do the coding. They'd keep 80% and I'd keep
| 20% for a couple hours of work. I always flipped it on them and
| said since it's my reputation, I'll keep the 80%. None of them
| took me up on it. It seems like they've moved on to a new system
| of fraud.
| layman51 wrote:
| I have not experienced this personally, but someone I met told me
| they have encountered (or maybe also heard of) candidates who
| were lip-synching someone else's voice to answer questions during
| an interview. Basically, this person was warning that we should
| pay attention to a candidate's lips to make sure that they are
| the person who is actually speaking because there may be someone
| out of sight of the camera who may be providing competent
| answers. It doesn't surprise me because a lot of these remote or
| tech jobs are in high demand; but I don't understand what the
| cheater who actually gets hired would actually do. Part of me
| thinks they may actually be hackers or foreign agents.
| jmartin2683 wrote:
| We recently had to deal with a case of this at my company. The
| story is almost exactly the same, guy sounded great, passed all
| the interviews, had a killer resume etc. When he actually got to
| work, it was clear that he barely knew how to use a computer let
| alone program one. He had trouble searching for string of text in
| an open buffer, or explaining simple code in a language that his
| resume claimed he had expertise. It's very unfortunate and
| ultimately just wasted everyone's time.
| jlangenauer wrote:
| I've seen a lot of this, and I've started to pick up a few red
| flags you can watch out for.
|
| - The biggest and most obvious is that they don't have a
| functioning webcam that clearly shows who they are. If I
| encounter this, the interview ends immediately.
|
| - Another one is, if you do hire a person, they suddenly want to
| be paid through some unrelated company. ("Oh, it's my brothers
| company, I do this for tax reasons").
|
| There are other red flags which aren't as certain, but should
| definitely raise your suspicions:
|
| - The CV has been professionally designed or laid out.
|
| - The most recent job entry is a vague "Remote contractor" or
| similar which doesn't list specific companies they've worked for.
|
| - The name on the email doesn't match the name on the CV.
|
| - You get a series of emails following up after a few days, as
| though someone is running a drip email campaign.
|
| - The application email is sent directly to any of your
| employees, rather than to your standard recruiting email address,
| almost as though someone has used a sales tool to find internal
| contacts.
|
| These last 5 points can occur in legitimate applications, but
| when you see them, it's a sign that additional suspicion is
| warranted. These fake employees are generally not individuals,
| but professional operations.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| > - The biggest and most obvious is that they don't have a
| functioning webcam that clearly shows who they are. If I
| encounter this, the interview ends immediately.
|
| I get this. I also just did like 10 rounds of interviews and
| between google meets, zoom, teams, phone calls, I would say
| there was a 50% failure rate of somebody on the call having a
| non working webcam or another issue.
|
| I actually missed an opportunity at a job because the HR lady
| was bizarrely inflexible. I called, no answer, teams, couldn't
| let me in because of org permissions, yada yada. At some point
| I had rescheduled for the third time and just replied "look, I
| don't know what the issue is, but I will be happy to do an in-
| person interview". Never got a call back.
|
| So... tech problems do exist. I am on a phone call with a
| client right now who spent 10 minutes trying to get a screen
| share working. What can I do?
| Philip-J-Fry wrote:
| Tech problems exist on the employer's end, that's all on
| them. If their Teams permissions don't allow someone external
| to join, then they aren't fit to be even trying to do remote
| hiring.
|
| In 2022 there's virtually no excuse for a non-functional
| webcam on the candidate side though. If they don't have a
| dedicated camera, then most laptops come with one as standard
| nowadays. If they don't have a laptop, then they at least
| have a basic smartphone.
|
| You'd have to be incredibly unlucky to have no webcam, no
| laptop and no smartphone. Yes, people without smartphones
| exist. But they are an absolute minority.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| More than that, equipment is the cheap part of a developer.
| The company can easily provide any of this.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| I was, and I mean, three minutes late to the meeting after
| having issues with teams (the issue was actually microsoft
| thinking I was still apart of my former company though I
| was signed out), and the lady left the call!
|
| I think an incompetent HR person prevented me from getting
| the job. I almost emailed the CEO out of frustration with
| the process
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| I was offered a job at a major defense contractor in Binghamton
| NY without any interview. I had seen their job postings for this
| location for years and was mostly curious about the work they
| were doing. I finally got a response from some recruiters in NJ
| but they were evasive about any interview claiming the hiring
| manager was too busy, had some weird housing offer, and had an
| obnoxious superiority complex.
|
| This was immediately suspicious and I hate slimeball recruiters
| so I made them arrange an interview and ghosted them. One of the
| recruiters called to chew me out while I was returning home from
| a successful interview for a real job.
| silisili wrote:
| Curious - what did/will you guys do? Fire him day 1? Are there
| any repercussions to this...ie do you have to pay him for time
| worked on day 1? I read it's common, but how in the world do you
| handle something like this?
| plasma_beam wrote:
| When it happened to us, we paid the person for their couple
| days on the job before we fired them. I'm not sure if you're
| legally obligated to, but it was easier to pay to make it go
| away.
| dopamean wrote:
| In our case the issue was identified basically immediately. His
| access to our systems was revoked and we're in the process of
| trying to figure out how, if possible, we can get back the
| laptop we sent him. I'm not sure how pay will be handled for
| the few hours he was an employee.
| [deleted]
| avb wrote:
| We had pretty much the exact same thing happen earlier this year.
| Our team is remote. The guy I interviewed with on of our team
| members was an excellent hire. The guy that showed up online the
| first day was having all sorts of connectivity issues. And his
| communication was completely different.
|
| We got suspicious pretty quick and eventually forced the guy we
| hired into a call and confronted him about it. His excuse was
| that it was his roommate online because he had some unexpected
| errand or something that morning.
|
| The candidate didn't even come to us from one of the big faceless
| recruiters, but from one we've worked with in the past who's
| provided several of our current team members.
|
| It's the first instance of that happening since we've gone
| remote, so I foresee us doing some more verification day 1, etc.
| for future hires.
|
| And a few years ago, after we were acquired by a large enterprise
| company, we had several instances of the big contracting firms
| sending us different people than who we interviewed, or even
| catching the interviewee being a stand-in for someone else on
| their computer doing the work, etc. And this was prior to us
| being remote, so we'd get completely different people showing up
| in our office back then, etc. Our process at that time was to
| basically reinterview as soon as they stepped through the door,
| and then usually walk them right back out. Eventually, we were
| able work around having to hire from those firms.
| frozenlettuce wrote:
| I interviewed a candidate whose lip movements were not matching
| the sounds. His mouth just mumbled randomly, but a quite eloquent
| voice was produced, including sounds like "th". I assumed that it
| was some sort of sound delay and placed the doubts on myself
| ("it's probably my uncouncious bias"). When he got hired, he
| happened to be placed in the same team as me, and I was surprised
| to how thick his accent was. He just stayed for less than one
| week, because he lied about a lot of stuff to HR as well (he
| wasn't even living in the country that he said he was, so there
| was no way to ship the equipment).
| ChrisCinelli wrote:
| We had a guy that before COVID interview remotely as iOS
| engineering contract. When we came on the job was not good. Our
| boss heard him on the phone talking in his native language asking
| saying something like "you need to help me here, I do not know
| how to do it."
|
| He was on the job only one day.
| vdfs wrote:
| The company owner hired via upwork a dev for about 2x my salary
| and he produced little work but he billed 80 hours/week, turn out
| he recorded a work day session and used like a mouse
| recording/replaying app, each day he will just start the program
| and it will reproduce the same result, was really fun trying to
| figure out what's going on, and a strange way to get a raise
| smt88 wrote:
| This is a brilliant scam. If he can fool 100 companies per
| month with this and only gets caught (on average) after a
| couple of weeks, he's making an incredibly good income.
| westoncb wrote:
| Someone actually attempted to hire me to play a part in a scam
| like this over LinkedIn about a month ago. The guy who contacted
| me says their devs don't know web tech well and don't speak
| English very well, so he wanted me to do the interviews for them
| over phone calls and offered a modest rate for the service I'd
| provide.
|
| I ended the conversation as soon as the plan was revealed, and
| was struck by just how brazen the dude was just blatantly asking
| me to lie for them professionally after exchanging like 2
| messages.
| [deleted]
| flowersjeff wrote:
| Happened with my partner, and have heard of this from a lot of
| friends. This is a real issue. It hurts 'real' candidates and
| everyone that takes time to be apart of the hiring process.
|
| HR dept's are simply unable/ill-equipped to handle this new
| reality. Honestly, at larger org's this is really an upper
| management issue first and foremost, as HR dept's are sort of
| benefiting from these frauds. ( Before you go off on that last
| sentence, I did say 'sort of' - and I personally believe in 'you
| get what you incentivize'...so)
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I'm not actually sure it hurts real candidates?
|
| If garbage is flooding the market, it forces employers to pay
| higher wages for a chance to actually get something good.
|
| This pushes wages up for _real_ , skilled engineers.
| flowersjeff wrote:
| As I see it, the hurt is going to come from more hoops
| expected, as any burdens are always passed down to the
| individual. In in an ideal world, companies would actually
| read/think/analyze all the data/metadata they already have;
| however, we don't live in this world. And the individual's
| going to have to spell everything out in gross detail.
| [deleted]
| robinson-wall wrote:
| When a fake candidate accepts an offer, the first real runner
| up candidate gets a rejection and has fewer offers to choose
| from.
| [deleted]
| jallen_dot_dev wrote:
| How do higher wages discourage fraud?
| jxramos wrote:
| it's probably to avoid spinning the wheels down in the
| budget garbage being referenced here and wasting a bunch of
| time. Pay the upfront cost and leapfrog over the delay.
| Attrecomet wrote:
| That only works if the upfront cost actually does
| anything to make the fraud more difficult. Just paying
| higher salaries does fuck all, the fraudsters will adapt
| to the higher prices and reap more profits.
| jallen_dot_dev wrote:
| Yup that's what I'm thinking. Higher wages would
| encourage more elaborate fraud (faking identity, paying a
| strong interviewer to sit in for you, paying people to
| pretend to be your references, paying someone in the
| company to refer you) because the payday makes it all
| even more worth it.
| kazinator wrote:
| > _If garbage is flooding the market, it forces employers to
| pay higher wages for a chance to actually get something
| good._
|
| I don't think garbage in any market drives up the prices for
| anything.
|
| Those looking for something good just waste more time
| looking, and some of them give up and settle for garbage.
|
| Exclusivity drives up prices. If you're the sole supplier of
| something badly needed, you can charge a lot for it. If a
| second supplier shows up, but with garbage, you're likely not
| going to be able to charge _even_ more.
| nradov wrote:
| We had it happen once several years ago when hiring a consultant
| as a developer through a staffing agency. The candidate passed a
| webcam interview but then on his start date a different person
| showed up in our office. It took us a few hours for us to figure
| out what happened and send him away. Maybe in a larger company no
| one would have even noticed?
| enviclash wrote:
| Universities in the USA make proper use of third party checks,
| while me in poor EU had a postdoc that I suspected was faking
| something. The thing became big once he could not board a plane
| due to differences in company Identity (as in company-bought
| ticket) vs name in passport. I prefer to leave it here.
| schainks wrote:
| When candidates tell me they're in the US but our conversation
| has a 3 second lag, that's usually a red flag.
| [deleted]
| myhn wrote:
| It became an industry in its own. There are different layers of
| fraud from hiring to proxying day to day work. I know couple of
| guys who have been proxying for more than 5 people. This will
| become societal problem soon as this is going at a huge scale.
| ggnnhh wrote:
| I've been the dev that replaced the strong candidate.
|
| It was even worse, I was simply the guy in the meetings, the
| actual work was done by another dev that I translated for.
|
| The best way to prevent it on remote teams is having the actual
| team in the interviews.
|
| I managed up to 3 other devs while having a full time job on my
| end. Managing 3 daily meetings is no easy task.
|
| The missions where short and we got fired only once, but that's
| because the dev who was supposed to do the work was not up to the
| task.
| wildrhythms wrote:
| Can you explain how you were paid? Was the company U.S. based?
| victor9000 wrote:
| One of my favorite failed interviews was a candidate who wore
| glasses and took his interview in a dimly lit room. This allowed
| me to see the google search box from his monitor reflecting on
| his glasses lol. And sure enough, every question was followed by
| typing, screen flashing on his glasses, 20 seconds of silence,
| and a really poor response.
| justinzollars wrote:
| Scary. I can't believe someone would have the nerve to do this.
| Fire fast.
| 98codes wrote:
| The top story on HN right now would seem to indicate that it's
| not just you/your team:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32996953
| mekoka wrote:
| We're focusing mostly on new hires, but since work-from-home went
| mainstream, I've observed some existing and trusted employees
| suddenly always off camera during zoom meetings, with a different
| voice. Often along with a dip in the quality of their work.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| Just once, I interviewed this guy with a clearly european name.
| On the call he had no camera on, a very thick chinese accent and
| barely spoke English. In our email comms he was fluent.
|
| There was no way for me to verify this guy was real, he couldn't
| give me his address because of "tax reasons" and wanted me to use
| his "wife's address" for his W-2 and legal paperwork.
|
| Just all around fishy. After a bit he just stopped responding in
| the call, hung up and never responded to emails again.
|
| ---
|
| Unrelated, I've had many chinese nationals reach out to purchase
| my freelancing profile so I guess this is a common scam.
| [deleted]
| geggam wrote:
| I have had experiences where you do video interviews. When
| interviewing the audio is off and what is happening is the person
| answering is on speaker phone and the guy you are looking at is
| pretending to talk.
|
| The simplest way to discover is ask the color of your shirt.
| ericol wrote:
| I made a comment [1] in a similar thread a month ago. Even
| thought there were people not happy with some of my words, I'll
| copy it here verbatim (Mostly because the comments inferred
| opinions that I was not making):
|
| 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.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32669193
| rozap wrote:
| > but at the same time also weary as our experience with coders
| from India is far from stellar.
|
| it boggles the mind that you apparently don't understand
| selection bias, and would say something like this on a public
| forum, in the year 2022.
| ryandrake wrote:
| OP also probably means 'wary' (on guard, distrustful) instead
| of 'weary' (tired).
| [deleted]
| ericol wrote:
| Thanks for the correction.
| ericol wrote:
| That, in exchange, was proven right empirically.
|
| > and would say something like this on a public forum
|
| Why, is it a crime against humanity, or what? Based as well
| on my experience, there are things said constantly in public
| forums that are much worst than this.
|
| How high is the moral pedestal you are standing on?
| Cyberdog wrote:
| Wow, I don't think I've ever seen an HN post with text that
| light.
|
| Of course there are many talented developers from India, but
| unfortunately they are overshadowed by the massive number of
| frauds to the extent that even people in an industry
| overflowing with performative leftists can't help but be a
| little prejudiced despite ourselves.
|
| Good Indian devs, please run the frauds out of the industry
| one way or another. It'll be good for you as well as the
| industry as a whole.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| >..that even people in an industry overflowing with
| performative leftists..
|
| This got a good laugh out of me. This is a perfect
| description of the so called Left in America. I am totally
| stealing this.
| twawaaay wrote:
| Yes. People knocking on our doors thinking they were hired and
| come to start their first day of work.
|
| What happened was the fraudsters asked the candidates to buy some
| hardware on their own claiming we will reimburse them. Then they
| said they are sending them money to reimburse them but they made
| a mistake and sent too much and asked to send back the
| difference.
|
| Another variant was they asked them to buy computers and then
| send to fraudster's address ostensibly for software installation.
|
| We tweaked our website so that candidates browsing our website
| learn we never do such things, we explained the hiring process
| and especially the communication.
| deeptote wrote:
| I feel exactly zero sympathy for companies at this point. Y'all
| have spent years suppressing wages, making candidates jump
| through all kinds of hoops, and encourage a "fake it 'til you
| make it" culture among founders.
|
| Now someone pulls some dirty, saucy tricks on you and you're
| crying about? Cry me a fucking river. Boo hoo.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| 2 wrongs don't make it right.
| deeptote wrote:
| Okay, George Washington. You sure showed me the error of my
| ways.
| PointyFluff wrote:
| Constantly.
| benjaminwootton wrote:
| I think contractors taking on 2 or more full time roles at once
| is rife at the moment in the UK. In 2021 I put together a team of
| 7 contractors, and I'm as sure as I can be there 3 of them were
| double billing. Incredible!
| Nextgrid wrote:
| As a UK contractor myself, would you be able to share some tips
| as to how to give reassurance to the client that you're not
| doing that?
|
| With easy, well-defined tasks it's easy - just do the work and
| the regular commits prove that you've done the work on time and
| aren't taking the piss.
|
| But in my case I'm sometimes stuck on long-running tasks that
| involve dealing with lots of legacy technical debt where I have
| a local branch going for 2 weeks that's a complete mess and
| doesn't pass CI or where I have to spend lots of time thinking
| about the solution and trying different approaches before
| settling on something I'm actually happy to commit and build
| upon. During that time, from the client's perspective it might
| look like nothing is happening, so I try to make up for it by
| taking on smaller, auxiliary tasks which don't take much time
| but can be completed and pushed to at least show some activity.
|
| Before remote you show up in the office and everyone assumes
| you're working so this wasn't a concern at all.
| Beaver117 wrote:
| They're literally contractors for that reason, why are you
| surprised?
| benjaminwootton wrote:
| Because I was contracting these people for Monday-Friday 9-5
| approx (i.e typical working week rather than fixed
| deliverables) and the contract said likewise. It was
| therefore a breach of contract, and I was surprised because I
| thought people had higher professional standards.
| tinglymintyfrsh wrote:
| Yep. Some startup guy in the chat widget space basically used me
| as free consulting under the premise of hiring for a job. The
| joke's on him because I'm at one of the MAANG's now as an SRE
| equivalent.
| firstSpeaker wrote:
| There are significantly worst things happening in the industry by
| much much bigger consultancy names. We, an enterprise, hire
| complete teams from the consultancy that would pick some of the
| work in different projects with their own product owner and so on
| but under our contract.
|
| We seldom see all the people whom we interviewed for the teams,
| as devs, being present in the meetings that they are all expected
| to be present (of course it is most often the timezone difference
| that is the mentioned reason). Or people who join have their
| camera turned off, so no way to see them.
|
| Code quality that comes, is not on par with the skillset we
| evaluated during the interviews and I suspect the whole
| consultancy is doing something similar with presenting top
| engineers in the interview and then moving them between many
| teams. Leaving the less skilled engineer to do the work.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| Swapping the team that did initial meet&greet for B team to do
| actual work is classic contractor move especially if client
| makes the mistake of not including specific names on the
| written contract or doesn't care to. I've seen it in non-IT
| industries like construction too.
| [deleted]
| redleggedfrog wrote:
| Based on my experience with such firms this is the prevalent
| modus operandi. Hence I don't trust them. In our company we
| cannot commit code without review, and this turns up these
| "replacement" developers pretty quick. But it's pretty
| disheartening. You don't even make it 5 lines and there is
| .ToString() on a string, and it just gets worse from there.
|
| I used to take some effort in trying to be nice about it
| figuring the person probably who wrote the code doesn't know
| they're a replacement and is just doing the best they can, but
| I eventually stopped caring. Now I just butcher them, point my
| boss at it, and see how long it takes before they get fired.
| edw519 wrote:
| Former consultancy managing partner here. (My conscience would
| only allow me to be in that industry for 3 years.)
|
| Consultancies exist for one reason only: to maximize the delta
| between what we charge customers and what we pay
| employees/contractors. Charging $400/hr for someone we're
| paying $80/hr is non unusual. In fact, it's probably the norm.
|
| What could possibly go wrong?
| perfecthjrjth wrote:
| All consultancies (IBM global services, TCS, Wipro, Infosys,
| Tech Mahindra, Deloitte, Pwc, Accenture, etc) just want
| billable hours. Only way to make a fat profit: by underpaying.
| Who will take "less" pay? Of course, less qualified people.
| Since every consulting company is doing this, there is no
| incentive for big companies to switch from Infosys to TCS or
| from TCS to IBM.
|
| Hiring managers do get kickbacks from consulting companies.
| These kickbacks are sophisticated, and there is no way to
| prosecute them, esp if immigrants are the hiring managers.
| giaour wrote:
| This has _always_ been my experience hiring consultant teams.
| (Unless you 're hiring a team from a consultancy that only has
| enough staff to field a single team, that is.)
|
| I'm not sure if this is specific to government procurement, but
| when hiring teams for federal contracts, some personnel on the
| team described in the proposal would be "key" and others would
| not. Key personnel could only be replaced by mutual agreement,
| and non-key personnel could be replaced at will by the bidder.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Managing consultancies is a full-time job in itself.
|
| If you don't have someone in your company scrutinizing
| everything and spot-checking work that comes across, they will
| notice and they will take advantage of it. Starting with strong
| developers to impress a client and then swapping them out with
| newbies is standard practice.
|
| When we engage with agencies, we make it clear that the people
| working on our project are expected to be present for the one
| weekly meeting and that they will be the ones doing the work.
|
| We also reserve the right to "fire" specific agency team
| members and request a replacement if they're not working out.
| This is crucial as the agencies will often send teams of three:
| 1 strong developer, 1 strong communicator, and 1 straggler who
| needs a lot of supervision from the first two. You pay for all
| of the developers, so you might as well insist that you're
| getting what you pay for.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > scrutinizing everything and spot-checking work
|
| Which leads to another paradox (that I think I first saw Joel
| Spolsky point out, but I can't find the reference). Business
| software - and consulting services - always costs $20 either
| or $200,000. If it costs $20, you just buy it and use it.
| Once it gets over a certain price point - around $1000 or so
| - it requires approvals before it can be purchased. This
| leads to vendors having to develop full in-house departments
| dedicated to navigating those approval processes, so the
| price of the software has to be hiked to account for the
| additional headcount.
| hectormalot wrote:
| This one, great reading too:
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-
| rubber-...
|
| It's a long piece. The "credit card" vs "3 months of hard
| core PowerPoint by sales" pricing is about 75% into the
| post.
| opportune wrote:
| The only time I've seen working with bodyshops work out was
| when we had a senior spend most of his time checking their
| work and managing the project they were staffed on. He also
| happened to be from the same country/willing to talk with
| them outside of normal PST working hours.
|
| They still didn't produce great work but they did produce
| work that was usable and did what we wanted to do.
|
| Most of my team actually had started out in consultancies
| earlier in their career so they knew exactly how things
| worked. A few times we had to "send someone back" when we got
| someone who was claimed to be an expert on X but was barely
| able to do basic tasks on the computer.
|
| I've seen some consultancies with a much higher hit rate
| compared to WITCH and co though, on par with regular hiring.
| I am not privy to the financial details but I suspect they
| are a lot more expensive.
| xapata wrote:
| Wipro Infosys Tata C ... ? H ... ?
| subsubzero wrote:
| cognizant hcl
| scruple wrote:
| This happened to a former employer back in 2008. They sold us
| on their A-team and we got the guys they hid in the backroom
| closet. We cancelled the contract after their second code dump.
| They threatened to sue and my former CEO openly challenged them
| to. In the end they backed off.
| ghaff wrote:
| Unfortunately this happens in all sorts of consultancies and
| agency work. The partner makes the sale and (hopefully) at
| least reasonably supervises the associates or others doing
| most of the actual work.
| nicholasjarnold wrote:
| Yes, I have direct first-hand experience with the "presenting
| one thing in initial talks pre-signature, and getting something
| completely different later" with the "big consulting firms". We
| spoke with actual senior engineers with highly relevant
| experience up front, and the dev team they sent to us to
| actually do work (completely with entire suite of product, ux,
| qa, etc etc etc...packing as many as possible) were people of
| a...lesser experience level. I'm being polite here.
|
| I have a friend working in the business side of one of the
| large consulting firms, and the insight I got there is that
| sales is ahead of engineering staffing by _a lot_. In other
| words, the supply is being outstripped by the demand. Not
| wanting to leave money on the table these firms (or at least
| the very large "name brand" one my friend works for) will sign
| for projects which they do not have bench staff to fill. They
| then hit the streets and hire whoever can walk and chew gum at
| the same time.
|
| Now we have to work alongside these people, who themselves are
| not so much to blame in many cases. They are pawns in the
| often-fraudulent game called Software Consulting, Inc. It's
| great fun. I feel for you.
| htrp wrote:
| Name and shame the firm at least?
| j0hnyl wrote:
| All of them.
| badpun wrote:
| Did anyone ever had a genuinely positive experience with
| one of the software consulting giants - IBM, Accenture,
| Tata etc?
| ACow_Adonis wrote:
| isn't that like, the entire big consulting business model?
| rippercushions wrote:
| They all do, but here's an actual example from Tata (TCS).
| The company I used to work for hired them to support a
| complicated product requiring an unusual skillset, and the
| usual story ensued: they wooed the decision makers with the
| A team and then actually gave them the B team. They got
| even greedier, though: I stumbled on their hiring ads in
| the market in question (with the rare skillset
| requirements), and it was obvious they _actively lowered
| the salary_ they were offering as the engagement went on,
| in order to boost their own margins. One year in even the B
| team was all gone and we were left with D to F- players.
| genmud wrote:
| All of them do this, having been on both sides of the
| equation.
|
| I can't tell you how much it hurts your soul to work at a
| consulting firm or implementation shop. I took a job once
| where they said I could hire a team of great engineers for
| a very complicated/technical contract, we talked before
| about how much salary/benefits/timeframe it would be to get
| the right folks onboard to meet some project deliverables.
|
| Once I was onboard, it was like "oh, well you said you
| needed $X, but we only have budget for $Y, so you will need
| to make due with these jr resources". They suggested I work
| with the sales team to get more business for the things we
| wanted to do. I suggested they find a replacement and
| bounced from that clusterfuck.
| [deleted]
| bacan wrote:
| It is a very common practice for these companies to rotate
| competent people between multiple projects. Friend used to work
| as a senior exec for CG in India
| FerociousTimes wrote:
| I think that hiring organizations by now should have been
| immune to this kind of "switcheroo" or "bait and switch"
| tactics on the supply side of labor.
|
| It always amazes me that some businesses still fall for this
| kind of deception, it's like the oldest trick in the book.
| ChrisCinelli wrote:
| Yes, more than 10 years ago when I was hired as engineer 2 in a
| startup, I had to work with a remote team working as
| contractors. The manager was in Alaska but the team was in
| India. The CEO used them to create the first prototype of the
| product and raise money. We worked with them for 3 months. I
| tried to train them but there was a big ethical problem. It was
| clear they were not honest. We supposedly had 3 engineers. One
| was good, the other 2 were not good at all. It was clear that
| they were not working full time on our project and the good
| engineer was working even less with us (pretty much when the
| CTO was having discussion with the guy in Alaska). There were
| times when he asked: "Did you do task X?" Answer: "Yes!" CTO:
| "Can you show me the code?" contractor: "I did not do it."
| There was also a language gap and the good guy ended up leaving
| to work with Microsoft. We let them go and we started put that
| codebase in maintenance mode. At that time we also got a new
| talented designer and we started building the new features in a
| different codebase.
| FerociousTimes wrote:
| Whose fault is in all of this?
|
| Again not to look like flogging a dead horse here, but it's
| the hiring manager's and the organization's not the
| contractors' for this turn of events.
|
| They should have done their own due diligence and cross-
| checked the references and the whole nine yards.
| noodlesUK wrote:
| I'm a contractor and I don't get this attitude. It's my
| responsibility as a contractor to do the things I agree to
| do and if I can't do them due to whatever reason, be
| upfront about that as soon as possible. In fact as a
| contractor that's pretty much my only responsibility. I've
| definitely worked with people who weren't good managers and
| had projects not work out but what parent is describing is
| just flat out fraud.
| czbond wrote:
| A counter view - how long are your purchase decision cycles? I
| ask because that matters. The internals of a large consulting
| firms are:
|
| - Resumes are often used "as an example". Consulting teams who
| present are usually in between staffed roles, and are not the
| exact you'd see face to face. They do this because ... others
| are working on existing engagements and taking that client's
| calls.
|
| - Big companies decide very, very slowly. And they might not
| even sign on a deal. So consulting firms have to continually
| juggle team members + skills + their own staff's needs to fill
| slots. The members you spoke with may have been available when
| you talked to them 2 months ago - but were staffed on a
| different project while this one closed.
|
| etc.
| grogenaut wrote:
| I worked at a smaller 130 or so person consultancy. I have a
| masters in CS, so my resume was always included in the resume
| pack sent to people. It was listed as "representative". A woman
| with a PHD (Physics) and a guy with a PHD in Systems Science
| Math (ORR) were the other usual suspects. This was in around
| 2005. Benefit for me was that sales was always updating my
| resume every time they went out to sell so it was in great
| shape and I did no work on it.
|
| But who worked on the contract was just based on who was free
| at the time based on who was needed on other contracts. It was
| very likely I was tied up on another contract as a lead most of
| the time. Acutally one anti-pattern I pushed against was that
| we took the person on the bench and had them write the
| proposals... I pointed out this both landed us with bad
| implementations but also was likely less efficient than having
| the leads do the writing.
|
| Anyway, this is very common, you can't hire people to fill
| seats until you have a contract in hand or you're taking
| someone else's risk. It's also likely that less effective
| employees are more often free to go sit on a new project. At
| the start of the project those extra folks are super numerary
| anyway while the leads design with the customer. Same at the
| end of the project where you're just cleaning up core
| deliverables.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Right. I've been on both sides of this (person proposed for
| contract I did not end up on, as well as working with teams
| different than proposed).
|
| For the client, one way to ensure you get what you want, if
| it's important, is 'named resources' section of the contract.
| Use it wisely and with awareness.
|
| Other way is to be predictable and forthcoming during
| sales/negotiation/signing process. This is not meant to
| victim blame in the least, but there's lack of appreciation
| sometimes that people don't sit and twiddle their thumbs
| while internal processes grind the approval process to a
| halt: Frequently, who comes to oral presentation as part of
| sales cycle is _who was available at the time_ , and who
| comes to perform the work is _who is available at this other
| time_ , which may have been a predictable 2 weeks later, or
| (all too often) a completely unpredictable random 6 months
| and three weeks later. People you saw in February may not be
| waiting for you to finally sign and start come September.
|
| Oh, and all the other bait & switch practices as well,
| sometimes intentional -<
|
| In practical terms, it largely depends how actually
| "representative" people during orals were of the actual
| quality of workforce to deliver the project. Sometimes it's a
| close match, sometimes not. Ideally it's a fixed-price
| contract and it doesn't matter - it's vendor's responsibility
| to deliver, whether with many junior members supervised by
| senior members or however else, and hopefully contract and
| SLA and CAT/UAT are well designed.
| grogenaut wrote:
| It always amazed me how insistent clients were on specific
| people but also slow to sign contracts as if it was
| possible for us to hold heads for 6 months while they
| decided to greenlight a project. That's really on feasible
| if you pay them to be on the bench, or you deal with us not
| starting for 3-6 months after you greenlight."
|
| Other thing that amazed me was clients dictating when we
| had heads active versus not. Generally I'd go for a right
| shifted gradual increase and sharp tail off. But many of
| our contracts wanted "all heads down" on day one. They also
| refused to do a shorter term in parallel design contract
| while we were negotiating.
|
| Essentially their requirements were forcing us to burn
| money with idle hours.
| codegeek wrote:
| Sadly, a new risk with "100% remote anywhere" culture. Employers
| need to stop trusting blindly and do more due diligence. People
| like these are the reason why some employers will never trust
| remote employees.
|
| I suggest calling the candidate in person for 1 day at a co-
| working location and meet them in person once you are ready to
| make an offer. Pay for their time since you have anyway decided
| to hire them. Yes, this adds cost to you but it will be a huge
| deterrence for fraud. If a candidate doesn't like it, they can
| move on.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Why not just screenshot the interview call and check against
| when they show up on their first day?
| gtirloni wrote:
| How's that different than one person showing for an on-site
| interview and then another person on the first day at the job?
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Ease of doing so.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| As an interviewee I'd consider the 1 day of co-working an
| indication that the job isn't as "100% remote" as the posting
| says. It's a problem now as some employers start trying to claw
| workers back into the office and pretend the last few years of
| productivity never happened. But I also have a good quality
| camera I turn on for interviews and meetings, so you can be
| sure it's me the whole time.
| Ancalagon wrote:
| How is that a problem though if the employer is upfront and
| honest that its to make sure you are who you say you are, and
| everyone honestly wants to get to know one another?
|
| As an interviewee I'd take this as a very good sign that the
| company is serious about offering me a long term position. If
| I'm living on the west coast and my employer is on the east
| coast and my contract says 100% remote I'd seriously doubt
| the company is trying to fool me by wanting to meet me for
| one day, on their own dime, without further interviews.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| It absolutely shows commitment to me getting a job, sure,
| but it shows that the company fundamentally doesn't trust
| remote workers. I would assume that I'd be spending a lot
| of time being asked to fly out as time went on.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > it shows that the company fundamentally doesn't trust
| remote workers
|
| There's a difference between trusting remote _employees_
| and _aspiring_ employees.
|
| I wouldn't hold it against the company if they want to do
| proper due diligence on a prospective employee especially
| given real-world accounts of such frauds occurring.
| Goronmon wrote:
| _There 's a difference between trusting remote employees
| and aspiring employees._
|
| Why should an aspiring employee trust that a company is
| going to allow 100% remote if the first thing the company
| expects you to do is to travel into the office?
| ghaff wrote:
| Fully remote does not necessarily mean zero travel and
| very often doesn't.
| nottorp wrote:
| Then it's not fully remote.
| nottorp wrote:
| > How is that a problem though if the employer is upfront
| and honest that its to make sure you are who you say you
| are, and everyone honestly wants to get to know one
| another?
|
| Are they? I've been recently contacted for remote positions
| that turned out to be not remote twice.
| vsareto wrote:
| >People like these are the reason why some employers will never
| trust remote employees.
|
| So what? Those are irrational beliefs. Why should we care that
| someone never trusts remote workers?
|
| You can never be 100% secure against fraud just like you can
| never be 100% secure against hacking.
|
| We should certainly try to reduce the incidence of fraud, but
| only if you don't sacrifice the ability to hire who and when
| you need to.
| lazide wrote:
| Arguably not irrational, but even if it was, it matters
| because it causes a chilling effect for hiring.
|
| Which WILL result in folks not being able to get hired that
| otherwise would be. It also will result in positions not
| being filled that are important at companies we likely depend
| on, resulting in lower quality of service and/or failures of
| those services.
|
| It's poisoning the remote employment well, essentially.
| ilamont wrote:
| Not only that: Make it clear in the job listing that an in-
| person interview will be part of the hiring process even for
| remote positions. This will avoid wasting time later in the
| process as most fraudsters won't bother applying.
| ipaddr wrote:
| And most candidates.. win-win?
| fundad wrote:
| Yes or at least check a copy of their ID and run a background
| check.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Sue them for fraud? If employers are being bamboozled by this
| why aren't they suing? If there are no consequences it'll keep
| happening.
| nradov wrote:
| It would be difficult for an employer to show actual damages
| in a lawsuit. The cost of litigating outweighs any possible
| benefit.
| apohn wrote:
| >Sadly, a new risk with "100% remote anywhere" culture.
|
| I think this is a new risk when it comes to hiring engineers.
| This kind of fraud has been present outside of Engineering orgs
| for a long time.
|
| I used to be a hiring manager in a well known company that was
| 100% onsite. This was on the business side, not IT/Engineering.
| We were looking for a BI person as a contract hire. Our HR org
| said they had a staffing agency they had worked with for years.
| The staffing agency sent us a bunch of resumes that were
| surprisingly similar, filled with every buzzword and feature
| (e.g. I made a bar chart) and obviously weren't written by the
| candidates. After throwing those out, there were a few that
| looked decent. We had some phone screens and then a single
| onsite interview, but concluded there was something fishy going
| on.
|
| I confronted rep from the staffing agency with with this and
| their response was that typically somebody in a managerial
| position (at our company) picked a few resumes, had a phone
| call (not video, just phone) with them, then hired somebody
| based on the phone call. My team was the first one that had
| actually done more than that.
|
| Who showed up on the first day, who actually did the work, I
| don't think anybody had any clue.
|
| The non-technical managers didn't have the skillset to properly
| evaluate these candidates. So they saw the keywords and picked
| the person that sounded the best.
|
| Engineers _hopefully_ have the skillset to evaluate and
| interview other Engineers, so the fraud is different and more
| sophisticated now.
|
| IMHO, if you're the type of manager who hires somebody like
| this and what you wanted done gets done, you've probably got
| bigger problems than a staffing agency scamming you. If you
| think it's rocket science to build a couple of charts in a BI
| tool and you're happy when the person you hired takes 6 months
| to build a couple of dashboards at $100/hr...good luck to you.
| masterof0 wrote:
| I think you would have a hard time getting a valid candidate
| from Louisville, MO, to take a ~5 hours flight to LA, for a job
| that was supposed to be remote. Maybe the reason the candidate
| is looking for a remote job, is they don't have to travel? But
| I get what you say, maybe this approach is better when hiring
| in the same city/area.
| Philip-J-Fry wrote:
| Why? They'd travel on company dime in company time. A cheap
| holiday if you ask me!
| codegeek wrote:
| I donno. There is a difference between "I want to work fully
| remote but don't mind coming in for a day or so every once in
| a while if its fully paid for" vs "I never want to meet you
| in person". I personally would never hire the 2nd type of
| candidate.
| rebeccaskinner wrote:
| I was the first type of person before covid, but now I'm
| entirely the second type of candidate. Remote work has gone
| from being a nice option to have access to a larger job
| market into an absolute necessity if you want to avoid
| covid.
| notsapiensatall wrote:
| Some of the best engineers that I've ever worked with have
| been quiet types who don't particularly want "work mates".
|
| They work fine with people, can parse small talk and bring
| a positive attitude, etc. But they were out like a shot
| when the workday was over, and they would never dream of
| attending a company-sponsored teambuilding event. If they
| were hired for a 100% remote job, they would expect to
| never see a coworker in person, and consider it a perk.
|
| Some people just don't want to mix their personal and
| professional lives. What's wrong with that?
| ghaff wrote:
| Nothing wrong with it but it probably excludes them from
| a lot of roles. I've been essentially fully remote for
| years but I still traveled a quarter to a third of the
| time pre-Covid.
|
| I wouldn't assume remote meant absolutely zero travel
| unless that was spelled out.
| notsapiensatall wrote:
| That's fair, I guess sometimes people have different
| definitions of "100%".
| dml2135 wrote:
| I would absolutely assume that "remote" means "absolutely
| zero travel" unless _that_ was spelled out.
|
| Remote means you don't need me physically present at a
| particular place (outside of knowing my location for tax
| purposes). It's pretty clear in the word "remote". If
| that's not always 100% the case, I would expect those
| expectations to me made clear during the hiring process,
| not after I've already come aboard.
|
| Do you really think it would be unreasonable for someone
| to balk if you hired them for a remote role but then
| asked them to fly somewhere quarterly after they were
| onboarded?
| ghaff wrote:
| Yes. I would think it unreasonable. I know a ton of
| remote people including myself and we all travel quite a
| bit. Now a job with 25% travel should certainly state
| that in the job description but if zero travel is non-
| negotiable you need to specify that up front--and don't
| be surprised if you run into issues if managers change.
| ipaddr wrote:
| You are not in a role position if you are required to
| travel. It isn't as common as you think.
| ghaff wrote:
| Remote means you are not assigned to an office period. It
| says nothing about whether you never/rarely travel or
| travel essentially 100% of the time eg many consultants.
|
| Obviously people should take positions that align with
| their preferences however. Just be sure to specify
| upfront and be prepared to move if circumstances change.
| LawTalkingGuy wrote:
| There's no problem with preferring not to hang out at
| work, there is a huge problem with being unwilling to
| help your employer solve a huge trust issue in the
| engineering team. Those engineers are 100% toxic to the
| business goals that pay their salaries and should be let
| go immediately if they truly would _never dream of_
| attending a physical meeting as you describe.
|
| Someone who won't help you avoid fraud might as well be
| pushing you into it.
| ipaddr wrote:
| You are not hiring remotely if you require coming in every
| so often. You have a hybrid workplace.
| codegeek wrote:
| Not really if you are expected to come in person once for
| the final interview and then max of 1 or 2 weeks within
| the whole year (fully paid by the company). Hybrid is
| when you have people required to come in at least 1-2
| times every week and expectation is that you cannot live
| far away from the office.
| theduder99 wrote:
| I still see some companies posting "remote" positions and
| yet have mandatory 1-2 week bonding exercises per year
| and the language used makes it sound like a a job perk.
| Immediate back button for me.
| dehrmann wrote:
| I've flown out-of-state twice for interviews for jobs that
| were local to me. It was just where they were better set up
| to interview.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| I don't think it's _that_ unreasonable if the employer is
| covering the cost of the flight and paying for the person 's
| time.
| ipaddr wrote:
| What if the employer came to meet you instead?
| Ancapistani wrote:
| > I think you would have a hard time getting a valid
| candidate from Louisville, MO, to take a ~5 hours flight to
| LA, for a job that was supposed to be remote.
|
| I've done it many times, pre-COVID. I live in a small town
| (<25k) in the South and have been working remotely for ~10
| years. In that time I've gone through four rounds of
| interviews. The first three were pre-COVID, and they all
| included at least a "half day" of on-site interviews, most of
| which were in LA or SF. The most recent round was about
| eighteen months ago and didn't include any travel.
|
| > Maybe the reason the candidate is looking for a remote job,
| is they don't have to travel?
|
| This is not my experience. In my personal network of remote
| workers we're pretty uniformly working remotely because we
| don't want to move to where the companies are, not because we
| are entirely opposed to traveling. Each person has their own
| expectations of course, but I see traveling for less than a
| week per quarter as entirely acceptable.
| rebeccaskinner wrote:
| > I've done it many times, pre-COVID.
|
| But we're not pre-covid. Before covid I worked remote
| because it allowed me access to a larger job market without
| having to relocate, but I didn't mind occasional travel.
| Now that we're dealing with covid, there's no way you'd get
| me on a plane or in an office for a job interview. My
| health is worth far more than any particular job.
| Ancapistani wrote:
| That's fair, but I'd argue those concerns are separate
| from the expectation of whether or not it's reasonable to
| conduct an interview for a remote position on-site.
| n8cpdx wrote:
| Put it on a Friday, let them stay the weekend, and pay all
| the expenses. My company does that for a less glamorous
| location than LA and I loved it. It is essentially a
| vacation, and if you are deciding to relocate, a good
| opportunity to explore potential homes/neighborhoods.
|
| But I like exploring new places. I'm not sure how popular all
| expenses paid weekend vacations are.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| The very reason I want remote is to stay around my family,
| this seems to be made to appeal to the young and/or
| unattached.
| fknorangesite wrote:
| I love my family, but that doesn't mean I would object to
| a weekend away.
| drc500free wrote:
| Having worked in business travel tech, and run a LOT of
| customer interviews, travelers have very different views on
| it. Some love it, some hate it, some are in it for the
| points or for the tourism.
|
| The only thing business travelers have in common is that
| they all think everyone views business travel just like
| they do.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| really? At my company, full time WFH still expects a couple
| trips a year to meet up with the team.
| ghaff wrote:
| Barring unusual circumstances, e.g. disabilities, I will
| _never_ travel at all is probably disqualifying for a lot
| of roles.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Yeah, refusing to fly even for a final interview/on
| boarding is a very hard line.
|
| Even with disabilities, inability to meet the job
| description is a legally valid reason to discriminate.
| ghaff wrote:
| If the job itself doesn't require travel such as to meet
| with customers I'm at least sympathetic to hopping on a
| plane being a higher bar for some than for others.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Many people are afraid to fly and/or have motion sickness
| on long road trips. If remote roles require travel and
| crossing borders working locally becomes more appealing.
| ghaff wrote:
| I would think if someone doesn't want to travel they
| could find some low to mid level coding position where no
| one travels outside a local office. That would make the
| most sense to me.
| ghaff wrote:
| If most of the team is in LA, yes, I'd expect the candidate
| to travel for an interview. Of course, if everyone is
| distributed anyway, then it doesn't really make sense to fly
| them to a specific location.
| bluetraveler wrote:
| For most remote jobs I've had there was still an expectation
| of _some_ travel, usually 1-2 on or off-site visits per year.
| Further, many Big Name companies will ask that you travel out
| as a part of the interview process in the first place, remote
| or not. So long as there is no undue burden out-of-the-gate,
| i.e. you pay and or we reimburse, it 's not particularly
| untoward.
|
| Still, that wouldn't solve for the "My laptop doesn't have a
| camera" problem for the early phases of the interview. You
| would need to save face / voice samples to cross-reference at
| various stages of the pipeline to watch for the changeling.
| abeppu wrote:
| Maybe I'm missing something basic, but why is this a remote
| issue? The person who interviewed is not the person who tried
| to start working, and the company immediately saw this. In the
| old days one could also try to fraudulently arrange to have the
| person who did in-person interviews be different than the
| person who shows up on day 1 ... and you'd likely still be
| caught, right? Is the only additional risk of remote work that
| fraudulent applicants have a broader pool of fake interviewees
| to hire?
|
| Generally in my experiences as a candidate, _someone_ on the
| interview loop is with the team one would end up working with,
| and should catch this kind of thing. Generally as an
| interviewer, whether remote or onsite, it hasn't been part of
| the process to check the ID of the person I'm speaking to (and
| I'm not confident I could spot a fake anyway). Thinking back to
| a time where I did a day of interviews at a BigCorp and I don't
| know that any of my interviewers were on the specific team I'd
| work with ... I don't recall any rigorous attempt to establish
| my identity on the day.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > Maybe I'm missing something basic, but why is this a remote
| issue?
|
| Far easier to blend in as a remote employee.
|
| Usually when this happens, the fake employee will come up
| with excuses to leave video off: They'll say their camera
| isn't working today or that their internet connection isn't
| good enough to turn the camera on right now. If they do turn
| it on, it will be massively backlit so you can't see their
| face.
|
| Many companies don't even expect people to have video at all.
| The identity-swapping fraudsters are hoping that their
| companies fall into this category.
| lumost wrote:
| I'm suspicious this is also affecting the hiring pipeline
| at top-tier firms. Student hiring programs rarely include
| an interviewer from your future team, It would be
| incredibly easy to pay someone a few thousand to crush the
| leet code rounds. The ROI of such a fraud would easily
| exceed 10-100x.
|
| I'm not entirely sure there is a good fix for this, the
| problem would have always existed with in-person work as
| well - however the perceived risk/reward ratio would be
| different.
| lazide wrote:
| Risk/reward is different, and also physically and
| psychologically more committing going in person to the
| companies location and interacting with other employees.
|
| It's plausibly a crime too (actual fraud), if pushed hard
| enough, though most courts will just laugh at companies
| and tell them they clearly didn't do enough due
| diligence, so most people trying it will be worried about
| being arrested in person.
|
| If doing fully remote, they could be dialing in from
| another country and immune from arrest. Makes it much
| easier to do.
| lumost wrote:
| > If doing fully remote, they could be dialing in from
| another country and immune from arrest. Makes it much
| easier to do.
|
| This also substantially increases the reward. Traveling
| to SF for a 2 month con as a mid-level software engineer
| isn't a good deal. Working remote from a low cost
| location for a 2 month con might be a fantastic deal.
| lazide wrote:
| For sure. It wouldn't surprise me if a successful con
| like this - even if it only went on a month or two -
| could net them the equivalent of a 1-2 years of normal
| income locally or more. If they got lucky and they ended
| up in a situation like a prior co-worker of mine did at
| IBM (he wasn't scamming them, just a Software Engineer
| caught in the middle of a raft of corporate acquisitions
| and overwhelmed leadership) where they set him adrift for
| YEARS without direction or line management, it could be
| their retirement.
|
| Bonus - chances are, little to no taxes compared to the
| other option too, depending on how they structured the
| scam. The cut-out/middle man would get left holding the
| bag, but what else is new.
|
| Other Bonus - they wouldn't be using their real name, so
| chances are, no longer term impacts to the patsy either,
| unless they happen to end up trying to work legitimately
| with someone involved at the target company years later.
| Pretty unlikely to bother folks involved in this type of
| scam, IMO.
| FerociousTimes wrote:
| > though most courts will just laugh at companies and
| tell them they clearly didn't do enough due diligence, so
| most people trying it will be worried about being
| arrested in person.
|
| There's a contradiction here, right?
| lazide wrote:
| Not really - it's a newness/information disparity thing.
|
| If someone has never committed a crime before (which most
| likely, these patsies would be in that camp - it's too
| high risk and expensive for someone experienced to want
| to do themselves if they could send someone else), fear
| of prosecution is going to be high. After all, THEY know
| they're doing something wrong, even if no one else does.
|
| Someone doing this is also very unlikely to have the
| direct experience managing a company, or dealing with
| these issues, to actually know the real risks of
| prosecution and likelihood of damaging consequences.
|
| So since it's new, uncertain, potential consequences seem
| personally very damaging, and it's 'bad' == high fear.
|
| They get a lot more dangerous once they've done it a few
| times, and the fear of the unknown wears off, and
| confidence starts to replace it. But since they're
| showing up in person, and would need (in this example) to
| physically be there for awhile, that's expensive, time
| consuming, and high risk.
| FerociousTimes wrote:
| What I was trying to say is that since courts would laugh
| at these organization, and rightly so, for not doing
| their due diligence, these would-be offenders might
| actually proceed to pull the stunt, and try their luck
| landing the job.
|
| Also, I fail to see how this can be prosecuted when
| there's no identity theft or forgery i.e. real crimes
| involved in this act. It can be all boiled down to being
| just another case of an under-qualified candidate holding
| a role without proper or adequate credentials due to
| flawed hiring procedures, or more frankly the
| incompetence of the decision makers inside the
| organization.
| lazide wrote:
| It's somewhat difficult to do without committing those
| crimes in some way. Most states have laws with similar
| types of clauses, as Fraud is generally illegal, and the
| core elements of fraud are generally recognized as lying
| about a material fact for financial gain.
|
| In this case, they were impersonating someone else. For
| them to get to the point of getting paid, they'd likely
| have to provide identity documents (including a SSN, some
| form of photo ID, etc.) if the company was doing their
| paperwork correctly. Even contractors have to cough up a
| SSN, and that is enough to trigger federal identity fraud
| charges.
|
| If they provided real credentials and their real name,
| but had someone else sit in who pretended to be them to
| do the interviews, it gets trickier - it would still
| likely to be some variant of conspiracy to commit.
| Conspiracy at the federal level generally only requires a
| concrete action by a conspirator in furtherance of a
| crime, which with only a little squinting would likely
| apply here to anyone involved (including the fake
| interviewee).
|
| I present to you 18 USC 1028, the federal identity fraud
| code. [https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1028],
| which provides penalties up to 5 years for a first and
| non-violent/non-drug related offense, or 20 years (for a
| second offense or other nastier qualifications). A
| felony, either way. It includes transferring said
| documents electronically.
|
| My 'favorite' section is 7, which explicitly states that
| SSN, DOB, etc. count, as well.
|
| Conspiracy would likely be under 18 USC 1346 & 1349
| [https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1346]
| [https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1349], which
| makes it a crime to 'deprive another of the intangible
| right of honest services', or conspire with another to do
| so.
|
| Either way, as I said elsewhere, I doubt anyone would be
| particularly interested in such prosecution unless it was
| very high profile for some reason. It's hard to get
| anyone sympathetic about a large company getting scammed
| by someone this way. Most companies also don't like
| having a reputation or PR as being scammable.
|
| So companies should be very interested in covering their
| asses here. That said, it IS also a federal (and likely
| state) level felony, so folks SHOULD also rightly be
| scared to attempt it.
|
| If the right parties were motivated, it could easily
| result in many years in federal prison. And it's hard to
| say when someone will want to make an example out of
| something like this.
| FerociousTimes wrote:
| Can you cite any cases where US authorities prosecuted
| such applicants for lying on their resumes?
|
| I doubt that it really happened since as you may have
| hinted, no prosecutors are interested in pursuing these
| cases for lack of sympathy as you put it, which I can't
| verify, or failure of winning the case which I suspect to
| be the chief motive here since misrepresenting facts or
| exaggerating events on your resume is not a crime.
| lazide wrote:
| And now the button appears. See reply right above you.
|
| And you're wrong - lying about MATERIAL facts, events, or
| qualifications to get a job is a crime.
|
| Lying that you had a dog when you were a kid (when it's
| not relevant), for instance? No problem. That's not
| likely to be a material fact.
|
| If you're interviewing to be a host of a kids show about
| dogs?
|
| A problem.
|
| Just not one most people are willing to make a case over.
| There also is the court precedent about 'mere fluffery'
| or 'puffery' not adding up to a lie, which would need to
| get worked out somehow. See
| [https://contractslawinaction.law.miami.edu/?page_id=171]
|
| There is a line, for instance, between exaggeration and
| lying, that not everyone would agree where it sits.
| lazide wrote:
| Since I can't reply to the sub-respondent, but can
| apparently reply to myself.
|
| I forgot the link to USC 1341 (Frauds and Swindles),
| which is just a great read on it's own.
|
| Regarding their request for an example -
|
| Here is an example of a successful prosecution of someone
| for fraud (and tax evasion) for material lies about
| qualifications and job histories.
|
| [https://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/2020/02/former-
| health-c...]
|
| 20 years for mail fraud, 5 years for tax evasion.
|
| She was clearly going above and beyond on this front.
| smallerfish wrote:
| This is why embedded is better than fully remote teams.
| Your engineering managers should start building
| relationships with candidates pre-hire, and then be doing
| 1:1s post hire. Even with camera off, you'd notice if
| somebody is not the same person, unless you have too many
| other responsibilities.
| rob_austin wrote:
| > that their internet connection isn't good enough
|
| a person who wants to work remotely but doesn't figure out
| how to have a good internet connection, then they are not a
| good fit for remote work. If a person decides to travel to
| a location where internet connection is not good on the day
| of the interview, you can imagine what he/she will do when
| it's a regular work day.
|
| Somebody shows up for a remote job and doesn't have a good
| internet connection is too big of a hiring risk to even
| both continuing the interview.
| sanderjd wrote:
| What about 1:1s with their manager, though? I guess I just
| don't get this at all. If an organization has a bunch of
| people and absolutely no individual supervisory
| relationships with those people, then that's a much more
| general problem and I don't think it has all that much to
| do with remote work.
| flowersjeff wrote:
| Totally confused why folks are not understanding/believing
| what you've stated. I can attest, this is happening and at
| 'top' tier places. I can't tell you how spot on you are
| regarding the camera off strategy.
| than3 wrote:
| Honestly, this has been happening for decades, long
| before remote work was a 100% thing. If they lie you fire
| them plain an simple. Company needs to do its due
| diligence, and the fact that complaints like this keep
| coming up trying to drive a corruptive narrative instead
| of performing due dilligence is just stupid, and that's
| on the company.
|
| Trying to characterize having the camera off as being a
| nefarious tactic because you can't see them working is
| beyond asinine. There are many good reasons to have the
| camera off while working.
|
| One being you are there to do work, you are being paid to
| do the work. One thing video has never gotten right
| inherently is the whole eye contact part of a video chat.
|
| When you don't look directly at someone (the angle is
| wrong) while you are communicating its a non-verbal sign
| of disrespect or in-congruence, and it causes non-verbal
| communication issues regardless of intent.
|
| The camera has never adjusted your eye angle, so you will
| always have that issue of people distrusting those
| communicating over video to a lesser or greater degree.
| With a flat picture and a phone call, you don't have
| that. You focus on the work and get things done.
|
| If the candidate misrepresented their expertise, fire
| them.
|
| If they aren't doing the work, fire them.
|
| If they plain just aren't working out for other reasons,
| fire them! (after due dilligence).
|
| I don't see why you have to bemoan your lack of due
| dilligence and instead blame it on something ludicrous
| like anyone with the camera off is doing this (when they
| aren't).
|
| Lets call this plug what it is, you want to surveil your
| employees like a micro manager instead of actually doing
| due diligence (i.e. the job of hiring).
|
| Seriously how hard is it to just fire someone that's a
| new-hire?
|
| Its a new position, if it doesn't work out, hire someone
| else, and terminate the temporary contract with the
| appropriate legal clause and time periods.
|
| Most work is an 'at will' position, so as an employer, if
| they lied, use that and 'fire at will'.
|
| Excessively surveilling your employees while they do work
| only does one thing, and that's drop productivity through
| the floor. Not only that, it shows serious deficits in
| Upper Management, and any skilled/experienced candidates
| will walk away from positions with redflags like that.
|
| You either want work to get done, or you just want to
| pretend that while doing something else.
|
| What's your actual priority, making money and doing the
| job (due dilligence is part of that), or watching your
| employees work in minutia and spinning a narrative. You
| can't have both.
| Philip-J-Fry wrote:
| Remote workers where I work have company provided business
| broadband, company laptop, webcam, etc. At any company
| serious about remote work these aren't things they should
| be stingy on. It's crazy that they are.
| jt2190 wrote:
| In fact, if we step back a bit, a new hire _always_ brings
| some risk with them, because interview processes just aren't
| perfect. What we're mainly worried about here is accidentally
| hiring someone who we shouldn't be able to hire, mainly for
| legal reasons like they're in another country and we're not
| remitting their income taxes properly.
|
| Secondarily there's the "can they actually do the job"
| problem that has always existed. The new issue here is that
| we will now waste time on too many new hires who can't make
| the grade, because we're assuming that our hiring process was
| really good at weeding out the poor fits, and these "games"
| exploit the weaknesses. Rather than get into an arms race
| with fraudsters, perhaps hire two or three people for every
| opening on a short term and then only keep the ones who
| deliver.
| noodle wrote:
| > I'm just curious to hear how many of you have experienced
| something similar. Is it common? Is there something obvious I'm
| not thinking of to help avoid these situations?
|
| Had the exact same thing happen, yeah. One person interviewed on
| camera and used their ID for employment verification
| (EVerify/I-9). Someone else was joining meetings instead,
| initially with their camera off, and then when confronted and
| turned camera on, was DEFINITELY not the same person.
| jjk166 wrote:
| You're getting the person's photo ID for their I-9, and it's
| simple enough to verify employment history before making an
| offer. Just ask for a photo ID during the interview process as
| well. I mean they could still have a fake ID but that would be a
| much more elaborate and much more serious fraud.
|
| Really though, for all prospective hires it's a leap of faith to
| assume performance in the interview will translate into
| performance in the actual job, and you need to be prepared for
| that not to be the case. Whatever safeguards you have in place to
| protect you from someone who isn't as good as they seemed to be
| should presumably also protect you from someone who isn't who
| they seemed to be.
| confidantlake wrote:
| From a candidate's perspective this would turn me off having to
| show a photo id during an interview. It would be one thing if
| it is in person and I flash it to them like getting into a bar.
| But I would not want to send it online to someone I don't know,
| seems like a good way of getting your identity stolen.
| ggnnhh wrote:
| The problem is that you hire someone legit that could pass any
| verification, but the person you talks to once hired is not
| longer the candidate.
|
| If you don't notice it on day one, it's almost impossible to
| detect it afterwards. The fake dev could be somewhat competent
| even and do a great job.
| Kharvok wrote:
| I have first hand experience interviewing developers via Zoom who
| are trying to mime the audio from a speakerphone on their end
| with someone answering questions.
| unity1001 wrote:
| This should address the worries about how remote work will
| offshore all job.
|
| Because, think about it a minute:
|
| Why should the top-talent overseas slaver away for your startup
| for low compensation?
|
| Taking India as an example: There are top companies in India
| which would give top talent a competitive salary for India, along
| with corresponding status and responsibility.
|
| So, why should top talent there take your similarly paid remote
| job which lacks the social standing and credibility that comes by
| working for a top-tier Indian company? Even if you pay higher
| than the local top-tier company, the difference in pay should be
| high enough to offset all other things that the candidate is
| losing by not taking a job in a respectable local company. This
| kind of social status is quite important because of social
| pressure from parents, family peers in many cultures. Not unlike
| how top-tier candidates still prefer to work for reputable
| companies in San Francisco instead of going for somewhat higher
| pay in no-name startups.
|
| To recruit and keep top tier talent overseas, you will have to
| treat them just like how you were treating your local candidates.
| If you try to weasel your way out of it through scammy business
| practices - underpay, overwork, sweatshops etc - you will reap
| what you sow - scammy candidates.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| There was a thread on this topic about a month ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32668694
| preommr wrote:
| lol, there's a story in there about some guy that got fired for
| being unqualified and then came back under a different name.
| That's some Costanza shit.
| awinder wrote:
| "was that wrong? should I not have done that?"
| tuckerpo wrote:
| with a fake mustache.
| smegsicle wrote:
| they say they want loyalty from their employees...
| mkl95 wrote:
| I have never experienced it and I don't think it's a thing in my
| corner of the world.
|
| However there was a post here or on Reddit (the line is blurry
| sometimes) where some developers from a specific Asian country
| described several cases. They made it sound like a frequent,
| organized thing, like a consultancy or some kind of racket. Most
| of them cited desperation and a "fake it until you make it"
| culture as the reasons for lying.
|
| In my opinion this is bound to happen at places where people are
| poor and unhappy. And it's not limited to the software industry.
| [deleted]
| yibg wrote:
| We've seen a form of this a lot recently too. Some patterns we've
| noticed, at least for those coming to us:
|
| - Name / ethnicity / accent don't add up. By itself these weren't
| necessarily direct red flags, but combined with others it's been
| a common pattern.
|
| - A lot of background noise of others talking. Can't really make
| out what the others are saying but sounds like a bunch of other
| people interviewing.
|
| - Long pauses before answering questions, and often times the
| "candidate" looking somewhere off camera.
|
| - Very short direct answers. When they do answer, it's very short
| and direct with no further elaboration. Any follow ups, even
| simple ones are follow but long pauses as well.
| gk1 wrote:
| There's also this, which is a slightly different kind of fraud
| made possible by remote work:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/overemployed
| nottorp wrote:
| On the other hand, we once hired a remote guy at a company I
| worked for. There was no identity fraud.
|
| He just didn't do any work. Got fired ofc.
|
| Is that better?
| perfecthjrjth wrote:
| Here is a tip: just inform the interviewee that because of
| "hiring fraud", the whole interview video will be recorded. Such
| frauds won't accept your job offer, even if they clear
| interviews.
| dqpb wrote:
| So what happened next? Did you fire him or is he still working
| for you?
| dopamean wrote:
| I'm not sure how HR has handled it but within a few hours of
| him starting all of his access was revoked (email, slack,
| github, etc). I imagine HR fired him but I don't actually know
| what the official status is.
| RegW wrote:
| I'm so dumb that this question didn't even occur to me :-)
| bs7280 wrote:
| Earlier this year I was part of technical screening interviews
| but in two interviews we noticed the interviewee being given the
| answers during the call. They would wear airpods but have their
| teams device set to the laptop speaker / mic. Someone on our side
| heard the second voice coming from the airpods and we killed the
| interview.
|
| We can try to detect / avoid it in the future but ultimately my
| takeaway is to avoid generic question lists for remote technical
| interviews, and instead try to hammer into one of their projects.
| ChrisCinelli wrote:
| Honesty is in shorter supply than you think in the consulting
| industry (with good exceptions). I have been around long enough
| to see fabricated resumes, bait-and-switch of candidates, and
| dedicated engineers that were not so dedicated.
|
| What surprises me the most is that you have managers that not
| only end up getting in business with them but they are not able
| to find what it is really going on. And in some big companies
| some managers know what is going on and are fine with it!
| danesparza wrote:
| If you're planning on sending them a multi-thousand dollar work
| computer, why not invest in a plane ticket and overnight hotel
| just to be able to have a conversation with them in person before
| giving them an offer?
|
| You would save so much hassle with a (relatively) small
| investment.
| dominotw wrote:
| Yes this happened in my company recently. We took video
| screenshots and compared faces and fired a few people. But a lot
| of people were hired before they knew this was going on.
| FerociousTimes wrote:
| How many fraudulent candidates did you guys hire exactly?
| dominotw wrote:
| 4 that i know of. It was my employer not me personally.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I've posted a bit of a rant below but I figured I'd make another
| comment with actual tips to prevent this.
|
| First off, a lot of comments indeed recommend insisting on a
| functioning webcam. This might be uncomfortable for some (and
| shouldn't be a mandatory, long-term "webcam mandatory" policy),
| but explaining the reasons behind it should make the vast
| majority of people be fine with it at the start. Long-term, a
| culture where people feel comfortable having their cameras on
| regularly is also good so people turn it on _voluntarily_ , even
| beyond deterring fraud (personally I prefer seeing someone's face
| rather than a profile picture).
|
| Second, this kind of behavior is only going to get more common;
| there's no way to deter it in advance. The best you can do is
| optimize your hiring pipeline for faster turnarounds so you can
| quickly react when you detect such behavior and it doesn't cost
| you as much. Maybe an initial, short "contract to hire" system is
| better, as it allows you to delay all the employment-related
| formalities (which are slow and costly) to _after_ you 've
| already confirmed the candidate isn't a fraudster.
|
| Finally, the reason people do this kind of fraud is because they
| won't get in if they stay honest. If you actually need
| development services, does it actually have to be an employee?
| Maybe you can just be open to contractors or outsourcing
| agencies, let them in "honestly" with appropriate contract terms
| that protect both sides, and then it reduces the incentive for
| the "fake" employees to lie to you if they can get in
| legitimately.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| > Finally, the reason people do this kind of fraud is because
| they won't get in if they stay honest. If you actually need
| development services, does it actually have to be an employee?
| Maybe you can just be open to contractors or outsourcing
| agencies, let them in "honestly" with appropriate contract
| terms that protect both sides, and then it reduces the
| incentive for the "fake" employees to lie to you if they can
| get in legitimately.
|
| What kind of argument is that? These people aren't trying to
| get on 1099 and sure as shit won't be good, honest contractors
| either.
| LawTalkingGuy wrote:
| > If you actually need development services, does it actually
| have to be an employee? Maybe you can just be open to
| contractors or outsourcing agencies, let them in "honestly" ...
|
| No, they're dishonest people so we don't ever want them.
| There's no amount of desperation that makes hiring a scammer a
| good idea, they're willing to steal from and cheat you.
| foolfoolz wrote:
| if you aren't using a webcam and working remotely i don't want
| you on my team. this is a line i will not back down for
| "inclusive" reasons. i've been on teams where people don't turn
| on video. it is horrible for team engagement. i understand
| things happen from time to time or you're eating, no issue. but
| never or very rarely showing? no
| throwaway743 wrote:
| Remote "butts in seats" policy/monitoring. If the work is
| getting done and is up to standards, then it shouldn't be an
| issue to work without being watched.
|
| Hopefully you're upfront about that. Personally, from a
| business perspective, wouldn't use this method. From an
| employee perspective, I wouldnt want to work for anyone who
| would require this. Comes off as voyeuristic, controlling,
| untrusting, and just weird.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| > Remote "butts in seats" policy/monitoring.
|
| I don't think your parent commenter meant that you have a
| camera on for the whole duration of the workday, I think
| they were talking about having a camera on in meetings.
| Victerius wrote:
| As an IC, I've even gone the extra step of buying a small
| light ring off Amazon, at my own expense, to light my face
| better because my room is always a little dark on camera.
| ishjoh wrote:
| Are you talking about using a webcam during meetings or are
| the people on your team required to have a webcam on for a
| large chunk of their working day?
| matwood wrote:
| Likely talking about meetings. I'm not quite as forceful,
| but I agree. Webcam off is fine for large meetings, but if
| you do speak it's nice to turn it on for that moment. In
| small meetings we strongly encourage having your camera on
| as the norm.
| nradov wrote:
| Contract-to-hire positions only appeal to the most desperate,
| least qualified candidates. Those who are already employed
| elsewhere or have other offers aren't likely to accept an offer
| that leaves them in a precarious state.
| Melatonic wrote:
| I have not but I have heard first hand of people interviewing
| remotely from India (from big staffing firms of course) that were
| great for the job and then on the first day (pre covid) they
| physically showup it is a completely different person. They
| assume that westerners will not be able to tell the two apart and
| apparently it is pretty damn obvious.
|
| TLDR: Giant staffing firms suck for everyone
| twinge wrote:
| Many years ago I worked at a startup where the CEO was a former
| CS professor. While at the university, he worked with a somewhat
| legendary guy who ran the CS school's IT infra. Somehow wires got
| crossed in recruiting while sourcing the candidate, and another
| guy with _the exact same name_ who _also worked at the university
| in IT_ but for a different school got hired after what must've
| been a perfunctory interview.
|
| The startup had a lot of other problems, that one was the most
| awkward. It folded not very long afterwards.
| germandiago wrote:
| Yes I did. They wanted my stuff to be sent. When I said "no", I
| just show it on-screen they lost all interest suddenly and
| finished the call after encouraging to do the exercise and "take
| the time I need" (bc I was working already in my day job).
|
| But this was more employer-fraud, not employee.
| drusepth wrote:
| I had the same thing happen ~9 years ago. Interviewed a candidate
| who was fantastic, knew his stuff, and had a solid resume. We
| made him an offer that day and he started the next week.
|
| The guy that showed up (in person!) for the job was definitely
| not him, and asked rudimentary questions ("how do I access the
| terminal", "what programming languages should I download", "how
| do I install git", etc). We gave him the day in case it was just
| a bad morning or something, but ended up firing him the next day
| for misrepresenting 'his' experience.
| dymk wrote:
| If a different person shows up, why even give them until end of
| day?
| biztos wrote:
| > The guy... was definitely not him
|
| But:
|
| > We gave him the day
|
| That was very nice of you, but my first thought in that
| situation would be security. Your _best case_ here is you have
| a fraudster "accessing the terminal" -- but maybe he's
| otherwise harmless?
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| If as part of the hiring process, something old school and simple
| as calling just a referenced ex-teammate (or two) of the
| candidate and tell you things about him/her wouldn't massively
| remove this risk?
| lnsru wrote:
| Probably illegal in EU. For elsewhere I would add individual
| phone number for every fake ex-teammate so that nothing goes
| wrong faking voices.
| rr808 wrote:
| If you can fake an actual interviewer, asking for references is
| easy.
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| But you'll see good or bad signals on the quality of the
| references and their stories, no?
| rr808 wrote:
| I really meant who is doing the references. Its hard to
| confirm who was their old boss or colleague. Is
| hacker6969@gmail.com really their old boss? You could ask a
| Linkedin account but that has no guarantees either.
| dylan604 wrote:
| If they are willing to game the system by using a different
| person during the interview, what suggests that they _would
| not_ have fake references listed to help corroborate. Seems
| like one of the first things I 'd set up if I was running this
| scam.
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| It will make you scam one order of magnitude harder to setup,
| complex to manage and easier to detect incongruences if the
| company asks the right questions.
| Eleison23 wrote:
| Is HR allowed to ask the "right questions", other than "Did
| N. work there, and when?" I'm not aware of HR departments
| willing to ask anything else.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| I have seen belligerent aging managers use a news item about this
| criminal action to bolster their own "these people" management
| theories, on the other hand.
|
| plenty of mob types are making mob money on this scam while we
| type, as excellent young engineers struggle to make $3k USD per
| month.. I will guess. Overall seems like collateral damage for
| the relentless wage-war with outsourcing.. from the engineer
| side, I tend towards "this is the (outsourced workforce) bed you
| made now you are getting it back"
| explorigin wrote:
| I have been on the other end of this. I received an email offer
| to attend these hiring interviews and meet with customers while
| not doing the actual dev work.
|
| Too sleazy for me. I'm basically selling my brand to another
| company. If companies get smart and create an employee blacklist,
| it becomes a lot harder for me to be employed down the line.
| (Hrm, maybe I should start a blacklist.)
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| I've been remote hiring for years. Remote positions are a magnet
| for fraud of all types.
|
| If you have the budget, I highly recommend moving your
| compensation points up and focusing on top engineers in remote
| locations. It's much easier to vet people who have an established
| online track record and you can tap references from well-known
| companies. Unfortunately this way you _will_ miss out on some
| great candidates that haven 't yet established themselves, so you
| still have to branch out.
|
| For remote work we require video interviews and cameras on during
| meetings. We'd make an exception if someone really needed
| accommodations to keep their camera off for some reason, but
| otherwise it's cameras on. I know some people don't like this,
| but it improves communication and team cohesion in a noticeable
| way. It also immediately highlights fraud like this.
|
| Get your security team involved. You should be tracking where
| remote employees access your VPN and company services. Don't be
| afraid to ask about discrepancies and changes. If someone has
| logged in from one IP or region for the first 4 weeks and then
| suddenly you're seeing new logins from a different city or
| country, _investigate_. I don 't care if people travel, but we
| need to firmly understand the security situation.
|
| Watch out for people with frequent excuses for missing meetings,
| having to turn their camera off, excuses like "my camera isn't
| working today", and so on. Send everyone known-good webcams and
| company laptops.
|
| And as always, performance management is key. Managing remote is
| harder than managing in person, and I say that as someone who
| manages remote and loves remote teams. You need strong
| performance management practices in place and clear ways to
| measure it. People who aren't getting their work done should show
| up quickly in your system and warrant additional manager
| investigation.
|
| But if someone shows up in Zoom who isn't the person you hired,
| lock it down ASAP. Don't let being "nice" get in the way of
| handling an urgent security situation. Someone you didn't hire
| who hasn't agreed to your contracts is in your system, and that's
| a red alert emergency.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| Aren't background checks that include verification of past
| employment and educational history the norm for North America-
| based businesses for candidates that have gotten to the on-
| boarding stage? I'd have thought it would be difficult for a
| fake candidate to get past those.
| Cyberdog wrote:
| Sure, but what we're talking about is working with consulting
| companies and agencies who are assumed to have done their own
| vetting of their employees, and are representing the skills
| of those employees accurately to the companies that contract
| with them.
| KolmogorovComp wrote:
| > If someone has logged in from one IP or region for the first
| 4 weeks and then suddenly you're seeing new logins from a
| different city or country, investigate. I don't care if people
| travel, but we need to firmly understand the security
| situation.
|
| Couldn't they just say they use a VPN?
| nradov wrote:
| Employees should only even use a company supplied computer
| with a corporate VPN to access internal company resources.
| That's just a basic security practice.
| ghaff wrote:
| There are plenty of ways of securing access from BYO
| devices. There are certainly circumstances where your
| statement is true but it's very far from universal.
| stevewatson301 wrote:
| A login from a data center IP would stick out like a sore
| thumb.
| maayank wrote:
| > You need strong performance management practices in place and
| clear ways to measure it. People who aren't getting their work
| done should show up quickly in your system
|
| What performance management practices or metrics worked well
| for you?
| ryandrake wrote:
| > Watch out for people with frequent excuses for missing
| meetings, having to turn their camera off, excuses like "my
| camera isn't working today", and so on. Send everyone known-
| good webcams and company laptops.
|
| Yes, "camera isn't working" should be the easiest problem for
| the company to solve! "OK, we're overnighting a laptop with a
| working webcam to your address in our HR system. Please use
| that known working camera tomorrow."
| Test0129 wrote:
| I keep my camera off all the time because I don't like having
| it on when I'm tabbed off doing my actual job. While the PM
| is bleeting on about whatever they feel is important I can do
| actual work.
|
| Cameras shouldn't be required. Learn to vet your employees.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| Personally I find it disrespectful when people don't pay
| attention in meetings and decide they're going to make
| their own call about what's important and what isn't. So
| I'd probably enforce the "camera on" policy, notice that
| you're not paying attention and this means the issue gets
| discussed.
|
| At this point I do more digging/reviews and I either agree
| with your point and work with the PM to get them to be more
| concise, or I disagree with you and you're released from
| the team for having values that don't align with ours.
|
| Either way my problem gets fixed because I had people put
| their cameras on and communicate like grown ups.
| WWLink wrote:
| You sound like a great boss to work for lol.
| amflare wrote:
| Personally I find it disrespectful to be pulled into
| random meetings I have no reason to be in. Or be held up
| in meetings that are 45 minutes longer than they need to
| be. "They are paying you" only goes so far. If I wanted
| to be paid to be in meetings, I would have gotten a
| business degree.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Right, so the solution here is not to have you in the
| meeting if you're not required (and perhaps give
| individuals some latitude to decide for themselves
| whether they're required), but if you are in the meeting
| you ought to be paying attention.
| veb wrote:
| For me personally I need people's cameras on as I find
| hearing a bit difficult (I wear a cochlear implant) so I
| utilise lip-reading to fill in the gaps.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| How do you manage it if there are latency issues / sudden
| quality drops?
| Test0129 wrote:
| That's a good counter-argument. Don't most major
| providers provide closed captions? Or is it only Google
| Meet?
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| Turn it on for the initial greetings, turn it off for the
| rest of the time, on a big enough call nobody is paying
| attention anyway. Turn it on if you need to speak. I don't
| think your crown would fall off your head if you did that,
| and it would be a compromise.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > we're overnighting a laptop with a working webcam
|
| "Sorry, boss, this latest laptop didn't work just like the
| last 10 you sent that I definitely didn't sell on ebay"
| Melatonic wrote:
| Good advice
| BeetleB wrote:
| > For remote work we require video interviews and cameras on
| during meetings.
|
| I can understand interviews, but once a person is part of the
| team and team members have met with him often enough (with the
| camera on) to recognize his voice, what is the point of having
| the camera on?
|
| > I know some people don't like this, but it improves
| communication and team cohesion in a noticeable way.
|
| This is one of those things for which there is no True Method.
| Yes, a lot of people have better team dynamics with the camera
| on. And yes, a lot of people have worse team dynamics with it
| on. Mandating one way or the other is suboptimal.
| stevage wrote:
| Have things changed that much? I have worked in quite a few
| teams where remote meetings were a thing and never come
| across anyone who regularly had video off.
|
| The only exception is one on one work meetings, like pairing,
| where both of you are going to be looking at code or
| something and the video serves no purpose.
| wyager wrote:
| > what is the point of having the camera on
|
| Human social interaction is deeply dependent on facial
| communication.
| klhutchins wrote:
| I think I've had my camera on once the entire time I've been
| remote in ~5 years at my organization, and the same for 90% of
| my colleagues. I understand the need to ensure the person on
| the meeting is the person hired, but is this really how it is
| elsewhere? Everyone wants to see everyone else?
| ghaff wrote:
| For a big meeting where someone is presenting anyway? No. For
| one and ones and small team meetings? Generally yes unless
| there's some one off reason not to.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Same. I like to walk around while I talk so you won't see me
| (and I won't see you) anyway. When I'm sitting down,
| unnecessary visual input (what's with your hair and are you
| really listening or browsing the web?) immediately distracts
| me.
| stevage wrote:
| Completely the opposite in the places I have worked. Never
| seen anyone who had camera off regularly.
| brightball wrote:
| I've seen it at 2 different companies so far.
| drsim wrote:
| The scale of this on the thread is astonishing. I hired in the
| past through marketplaces. One particular candidate started
| strong but then his productivity began to taper off. Camera off
| in more and more meetings. Less availability. And this was a full
| time position! I haven't been able to prove it, but a very
| similar profile photo showed on LinkedIn as working full time for
| a different company. Whether or not he was working 2 jobs, more,
| or even being a face of a dev shop, all are possibilities. All I
| know is this individual was not just working full time for us.
| mriet wrote:
| I was at a remote company last year and hiring (was lead,
| building the team) and right before one interview, I reviewed a
| resume and saw that there were.. 2 jobs for the same time
| period.
|
| The best way to get the truth is to make all answers
| acceptable.
|
| me: "So, job A was a 40 hour/week job, right?" him: "Yup" me:
| "But you were also doing work for job B then right." him:
| "Yeah, basically" me: "So you basically did job B whenever
| there was some slack for job A?" him: "exactly."
|
| I was dumbstruck internally and then just wrapped up the
| interview politely and let him know a couple days later that it
| wasn't a good fit. No use alerting him that he should change
| his resume (for other possibile employers..)
| peacemaker wrote:
| Absolutely! I made a comment in
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32668694 just recently about
| this. My company hired a guy who passed their tests, yet the guy
| who joined us for work was barely able to move a mouse around the
| screen, let alone get stuck in as a "Senior DevOps Engineer".
|
| After we finally fired him I did a little digging. His resume was
| very similar to 100's of others found across linkedin, a list of
| devops keywords basically. Almost all of the people he had
| "worked" with in a previous company had the same text and even
| looked very similar.
|
| I'm pretty sure that the company gets these people in the door
| and they try to last as long as possible earning western senior
| dev salaries. Rince and repeat a few times a year and it probably
| earns them a decent amount.
| lazide wrote:
| It wouldn't surprise me either if the candidate paid them for
| them to do it, with promises from them that he'll be making
| tons of money from a clueless company.
|
| Grifts like this usually take advantage of multiple parties.
| jxramos wrote:
| is it possible to include language in the contract that comes
| with a penalty for things that result in this? At the least a
| money back guarantee.
| schnevets wrote:
| I don't do a lot of interviewing at my company, but I encountered
| my first fraud candidate two weeks ago. He said he was having
| connectivity issues and asked about not joining video. I offered
| to work with HR to reschedule but he said he didn't want to
| inconvenience anyone. If it was purely my decision, I would say
| no video = no interview, but I guess fraudsters thrive when
| administrative coordination breaks down.
|
| He gave a technically sound answer to every question, but I was
| extremely skeptical. For one thing, he wholeheartedly agreed to
| the design outlined in my "honeypot" question where the solution
| would be something prone to triggering immense technical debt. He
| also dismissed the "soft" question about a time he encountered a
| challenge.
|
| His most recent work experience was at a competitor where a
| former colleague works (we're in a niche space). That friend told
| me he encountered the same thing, including a candidate who
| recently claimed to work at my company and was moving (I never
| heard of the name nor could find mention in Slack/AD).
| gigel82 wrote:
| One of our managers told a story about someone using Deepfake
| during video interviews; it looked weird and artifacty but the
| quality was shit anyway so they just attributed it to that.
|
| Honestly don't know if it's true or just a story but now we only
| hire remote in the US and after the initial screens we fly out
| candidates for in-person (pay for the flight and -if needed-
| hotel).
| Beaver117 wrote:
| Where can I purchase this service? I'm a very capable engineer
| but my time and stress are limited, I'd pay like $20k to avoid
| having to do interviews
| papandada wrote:
| I worked for a consulting (bodyshop) almost 10 years ago and they
| had this happen. Someone did phone interviews with flying
| colours. The candidate himself was barely functional with English
| and had a pocket translator in hand at all times. He was let go
| within a couple months.
| frellus wrote:
| "a couple of months" ... why not immediately?
| papandada wrote:
| Funnily enough, the interview fraud (I wasn't a part of that)
| only got brought up after he was gone. Between being at a
| very passive government client, plus company culture, it's
| almost more amazing that he was able to burn bridges at a
| place people spent years accomplishing nothing.
|
| edit: I briefly doubted myself, but I checked on his LinkedIn
| and he has it listed as a 6-month engagement in 2013, with a
| significant gap until the next role. Even mentioned him to my
| wife in chats during that time span.
| kodah wrote:
| I dealt with a number of people who weren't who they said they
| were in my last bout of hiring.
|
| There's typical ones where an engineer will stack their resume
| with buzzwords that they don't understand at a basic level. An
| example of this is putting Kubernetes on ones resume but not
| being able to explain the different workloads. People don't often
| call this fraud, but I do when it crosses some magical threshold.
| The reason I call it fraud is that fraud, to me, generally
| implies intent to deceive. About a year ago I discovered on
| Reddit there were people coaching others through lying on their
| resumes and in interviews with the reasoning that "everyone does
| it" and "you'll learn on the job".
|
| The second kind I've encountered is more analogous to what you
| experienced, though we never hired any of these folks.
| Retrospectively I think one of the things that helped us avoid
| hiring these folks is that we don't refer to an engineers
| provenance. Early on I took the stance that just because you say
| you're from Google, or any other large engineering firm, doesn't
| mean you're the right fit for the team. We had candidates invest
| in a 2-3 hour take home exercise that was pretty easy, it mostly
| tested your API design skills but because it involved code we got
| some good peeks into what that would look like in a contrived
| scenario. Second, we ask that candidates bring an example of
| projects they've worked on, starting with ones they led. This one
| is a little harder to fake the funk on, especially if the
| candidate is Senior+.
| danaris wrote:
| The problem is the flip side: companies that demand 10+ years
| of experience in technologies that have been around for 5, and
| similar absurdities.
|
| More simply and commonly, the amount of experience required for
| supposedly "junior" positions has gone up without commensurate
| increases in pay.
|
| And far, far, _far_ too many companies demand that a candidate
| be able to hit the ground running _instantly_ --that they have
| _exactly_ the experience and skills required for this position,
| rather than being someone who may not know every possible way
| to configure Kubernetes, but who 's flexible and both willing
| and able to learn quickly.
|
| I would never do it personally (both out of a sense of honesty,
| and a deep-seated fear that I'd be found out), but I can
| certainly see why lots of people lie on their resumes.
| kodah wrote:
| I agree with you, allowing managers and recruiters to use
| contrived requirements creates perverse incentives. That
| said, while it may contribute to an uptick people have been
| doing this for a long time. I think they're both problems,
| and I don't think one is causal of the other. If a person
| lies on a resume to match a search engine that's one thing.
| If a person is coaching others on how to lie, conceal, and
| deceive then that's another.
| splitstud wrote:
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| > we don't refer to an engineers progeny.
|
| "progeny" dictionary definition is "a descendant or the
| descendants of a person, animal, or plant; offspring." I'm not
| sure if you used the wrong word, or what you mean? I don't
| think you are talking about literal children?
| kodah wrote:
| Sorry about that, it's early for me. I meant provenance.
| Thanks for the correction.
| [deleted]
| wildrhythms wrote:
| I agree and it drives me insane. Imagine in any other industry,
| like civil engineering, someone claims to have experience
| constructing a pedestrian bridge, despite never being near a
| construction site. Or having credentials that actually belong
| to someone else. It is fraud. If it was the medical industry
| they would be sent to prison.
| breischl wrote:
| >Second, we ask that candidates bring an example of projects
| they've worked on, starting with ones they led.
|
| Just curious what kind of "example" you'd expect someone to
| bring? Surely not code samples, since most people will not be
| legally allowed to show you code from their previous employer.
|
| The way I've done this before is to have them talk you through
| what they did and why, with some questions probing at an
| appropriate level of detail. But that's not exactly "bring[ing]
| an example".
| kodah wrote:
| Generally speaking to what they did, they're generally
| encouraged to produce diagrams that could help explain the
| problem and solution, and that's all usually part of a slide
| deck (but doesn't have to be). Having an enumerated list of
| outcomes is also nice. None of what they need to bring needs
| to be original. We're obviously not encouraging developers to
| steal from their former employers.
| extragood wrote:
| Late last year we had a candidate who seemed really promising:
| she had a CS degree from an Ivy League school and had a few years
| of work experience using relevant technologies.
|
| She absolutely killed the Byteboard technical assessment, and
| seemed like a good cultural fit during my initial screen. I
| advised the technical interviewer that he didn't need to go too
| deep; I was satisfied with her answers on the technical
| assessment. Then something odd happened - she completely bombed
| the interview. The interviewer told me that she couldn't even
| answer the most basic questions e.g. "what tech stack does your
| employer use?" I was thoroughly confused about that, but still
| passed her on to the VPE to help us get to the bottom of the
| discrepancy. Our VPE confirmed the previous technical
| interviewer's assessment.
|
| We came to the conclusion that she could not have completed the
| technical assessment on her own and obviously didn't move forward
| from there.
| mihaitodor wrote:
| Consider avoiding 3rd party screening solutions and put in the
| effort up front to talk to candidates in detail. Asking people
| to go through such hoops before they can even talk to a tech
| person from the company will put many good people off.
| extragood wrote:
| I kinda glossed over the interview structure for the sake of
| brevity, but they do speak to one technical person (me)
| before the tech assessment. I'm the hiring manager, and I see
| my primary role as getting the candidate excited for the
| position and to answer any initial questions. I've already
| narrowed down the applicant pool through resume review at
| that stage, so most people make it to the technical
| assessment from there. I feel like technical assessment
| shouldn't come too much later in the process: we're trying to
| be respectful of time on both sides, and while the assessment
| is 2 hours long, it's only completed once by the candidate,
| whereas if we have the technical interviewer come earlier on
| in the process, it will add many more hours across candidates
| who would have otherwise been filtered out.
|
| As far as using 3rd party solutions: I see your point, and
| actually used to administer homespun "code challenges". The
| downside with that approach is that it adds a ton of
| overhead. As terrible as it may seem, we may not be able to
| invest that kind of time unless we're willing to be more
| heavy-handed in candidate selection early on. In at least one
| case, there was a candidate who had a fairly unremarkable
| resume but really impressed us in the interview process, and
| they may have been eliminated earlier on if we were more
| selective from the beginning.
| mihaitodor wrote:
| My take on it is that instead of spending most of the
| initial interview getting the candidate excited only to
| disappoint them afterwards, it would be far more helpful to
| give them some offline material beforehand that they can
| read / watch and then use the interview to get a strong
| feel of their experience, abilities and interest in the
| role. In practice, hiring managers are biased to present an
| overly-positive / exciting view of the work that the new
| hire will actually end up doing and it's so demoralising to
| start a job with high expectations only to be disappointed
| soon after.
|
| Personally, I completely refuse to do any form of live /
| timed coding test but might accept a homework assignment
| with a very generous deadline if I feel it's well aligned
| with something I'm willing to spend personal time on,
| assuming that they're not satisfied with what I already
| have up on GitHub (although I'd expect a good explanation
| for why that's the case). Otherwise, I'm more than happy to
| discuss past projects, system architecture, API design,
| development practices and so on.
| [deleted]
| than3 wrote:
| This has been happening for decades. Long before covid, saddle up
| and due your due dilligence.
|
| Any decently sized company has employment contractual provisions
| for misrepesentation of facts, expertise, and experience during
| the hiring process. Use that, hire one of the other candidates
| you interviewed, and fire them.
|
| The only unfortunate thing here is having to read about this
| because your team failed in their due dilligence. That's a
| team/company failure, and this looks more like fluff spin for a
| narrative than anything else.
|
| Your people didn't do their jobs, and lost costs vetting a
| potential hire who wasn't a good hire because of it. That's the
| business you are in. You knew the risks.
|
| Prior to the first interview you should have covered an
| introduction and some of the expected vetting processes (i.e.
| Should we choose to extend an offer... there are requirements for
| an in-person report for HR to check I9 and other forms (i.e.
| potentially a certification of the facts they submitted as part
| of the process ...), and the required process of reporting
| instances of fraud to IC3/FBI). [It is often across state lines].
|
| That's just some examples, I'm sure you can figure it out with
| your legal team if this is really an issue, because its seriously
| not that hard. You set up a process that gives bad actors enough
| rope so that if they cost you money in bad faith, there will be
| consequences.
| NonNefarious wrote:
| That seems to be overstating their "failure" here. It seems
| that the person they actually interviewed may have been
| qualified, personable, and so forth. The problem is that a
| TOTALLY DIFFERENT PERSON showed up to work. How is that a
| failure in "vetting?"
|
| I haven't been through a cold hire in a while (where I wasn't
| already known to the company), but I suppose the only solution
| is to demand photo ID and check online records as well. But I
| doubt many companies actually do this.
| michaelt wrote:
| In the UK, it's required by law to confirm the applicant has
| the right to work in the country [1] - which means checking
| photo ID, and confirming photos are the same across all
| documents and look like the applicant.
|
| If that hadn't been done, it's a failing of the hiring
| process.
|
| However, the ID check would usually be done by someone in HR
| after the hiring decision had been made, and exchanging
| photos of applicants is not the norm. So I suppose you could
| send someone competent to the tech interviews, and swap in
| the incompetent person at the ID check.
|
| [1] https://www.gov.uk/check-job-applicant-right-to-work
| softveda wrote:
| Same in Australia, atleast for professional jobs you will
| need to give your Passport or Citizenship Certificate for
| verification.
|
| https://immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/visas/employing-and-
| sponsori...
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| > This has been happening for decades. Long before covid,
| saddle up and due your due dilligence.
|
| Some ancedotal evidence to support what you're saying.
|
| My first real development gig was for a startup in 2005. It was
| a small salesforce team, and I was a front-end guy. We had a
| small cluster of cubes in a two story, tiny office in a
| warehouse district. Indian guy sitting to my left kept getting
| up and going over and asking the team lead questions and then
| he'd go back to his desk. Repeat about every 20 minutes.
|
| I come in one morning and he's at his desk, furiously paging
| through the ".Net Nuke for Dummies" book. Another day of him
| getting up and continually asking the team lead how to do
| stuff. Since this was constantly taking place out of my
| peripheral vision, it was really distracting. I finally asked
| the team lead to go to lunch. After we sit down, I ask him WTF
| is going on with the guy sitting next to me.
|
| He rolls his eyes and tells me, "Dude, this is the second time
| this has happened. We interview a guy over Skype, he does well,
| passes the code challenge, and we hire him. He gets into our
| office and doesn't know how to do shit. I'm talking like basic
| shit man. Like, you're a front-end dev. It would be like hiring
| you and you come in and start asking how to write HTML. We're
| still trying to figure out how this scam works and we thought
| adding a code challenge would weed some folks out, but I guess
| not. Anyways, he'll be gone by the time we get back from
| lunch."
|
| This all happened in 2005, almost 20 years ago. I've been at
| larger companies and have seen the same thing happen over the
| years. It seems like a cat and mouse game. As soon as you add
| something to try and weed these folks out, they figure out how
| to game whatever due diligence you've put in place and then it
| starts all over again.
| wildrhythms wrote:
| My employer is gigantic and well-known and this still
| happens. I refrain from looking at a resume before an
| interview, the recruiter just tells me what to interview for
| (front end developer). I start basic, like "Write a 1-5 star
| rating widget in HTML", I even show them a picture of what it
| should look like, only to be met with hmm and uhhs, some
| broken, invalid HTML, and not a single line of working code
| written. In one instance, the candidate attempted to
| surreptitiously call their friend for help (it's very obvious
| because I heard the ringing tone). Later, when I actually
| look at their resume, I find the expected flowering claims of
| 10+ years experience in front-end and whatnot listed on their
| resume. What a waste of time
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| Regarding in-person I9 checks, I had a very interesting
| experience recently with a friend who was hired at a big 4
| accounting firm. They deputize a friend of the employee (me) to
| verify that they have checked the I9 in person. They use a
| service for this: https://www.lawlogix.com/
|
| It was a very strange experience. Here I am a totally unrelated
| party becoming an "authorized representative" of the firm to
| look at a document and verify it's real. There was no real
| verification of _me_ , mind you. I could have been anyone.
|
| I have no idea how normalized this sort of thing has become,
| but I was quite surprised that they appoint some random
| individual rather than have an actual employee do the document
| verification.
| Test0129 wrote:
| I found this process strange at the last company I worked.
| While the service required photo evidence of the documents
| they allowed you to elect a "representative" who can verify
| the documents physically. Typically at other jobs I had that
| were remote a company official would verify photo copies of
| the documents and use either a video chat or other means to
| corroborate them.
| saagarjha wrote:
| This is pretty normal, I've done it at several FAANGs too.
| I'm not sure what it's supposed to verify but I guess the
| penalty is if your representative lies they can put them in
| jail.
| softcactus wrote:
| Yep. I am a junior engineer. I got a message on Linkedin, someone
| was offering me like $2k/week to take interviews/technical
| assessments for clients overseas. I asked if it was legal and he
| stopped messaging me.
| pmarreck wrote:
| You thought that going 100% remote wouldn't have any drawbacks...
| You apparently thought wrong LOL
| jrmg wrote:
| This is almost 'mainstream' news at this point - it was discussed
| in a recent _This American Life_ episode:
| https://www.thisamericanlife.org/770/my-lying-eyes
| EamonnMR wrote:
| I knew this story sounded familiar.
| plasma_beam wrote:
| Yes, experienced the exact same situation in 2020. Person
| starting day 1 was different than person interviewed. They
| weren't too smart about it either - a little online sleuthing
| showed how the two people were related. We confronted him about
| it and fired him the first week. We also notified the feds about
| it (person had been submitted for clearance so we had to).
| xlii wrote:
| I've been on the hiring process for rather big company and all
| kind of frauds happened on daily basis.
|
| Faux identities, sub-hiring for work, outsourcing to low cost
| countries, even stuff like hiring actors for interviews and
| intimidation tactics (sic) plus a lot lot more.
|
| Hiring (especially remotely) is a game and at some level you need
| to incorporate some anti-fraud techniques.
| datalopers wrote:
| Our company had this happen, first day the new employee was
| clearly not who was interviewed and didn't have the skillset. We
| fired her her 2 hours into the job and thankfully before we did
| much onboarding.
|
| I'm unclear on what the desired outcome is. A shitty company that
| can't evaluate on-going employees and let them slide for 30-60
| days?
| bombcar wrote:
| I can certainly see large companies failing to identify and
| then when it finally comes clear it takes them months to fire.
| lumost wrote:
| If the person has some level of tech skill, then they might be
| able to coast for years. A junior engineer gets hired as a
| senior engineer, a D student gets the role that an A student
| would have gotten otherwise. etc. etc.
| RavingGoat wrote:
| I thought you were gonna talk about a company bringing you in for
| an interview but turned out they weren't hiring, just seeing who
| was out there in case they did need people. Meanwhile, I wasted
| my lunch hour doing what I thought was interviewing.
| itronitron wrote:
| Five years ago I would have been sympathetic to the OP, but not
| really anymore. Just running the numbers, if a person
| interviews at ten companies the odds are very high they will
| come across multiple companies with shady, broken, or
| manipulative hiring practices.
| ParksNet wrote:
| What was the national background of the candidate?
| balls187 wrote:
| I've had this occur in a number of ways, typically with
| candidates who are not US Based. One candidate was clearly the
| "face" of a group of more skilled programmers. Several others
| were not the person who was listed in a resume.
|
| Luckily enough, asking them to program while on camera makes it
| easy to suss out people who are not what they seem.
|
| And if they do not have their webcam on during the interview
| loop, it is an automatic no-hire.
| Havoc wrote:
| Nope. Pretty niche field that has small world vibes and such a
| person would get flushed out pretty fast
| robswc wrote:
| Wow... honestly I'm just amazed at the audacity considering the
| hoops I've had to jump though. Doesn't' seem at all worth it. I
| guess they're just banking on it being too much of a hassle to do
| anything about it but if that happened to me I would clear my day
| to get to the bottom of it and put an end to it, lol.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Nobody that made it to the offer stage, but we've had candidates
| make it through the recruiter screen using a stand-in, then fall
| on their face in a real interview.
| simonswords82 wrote:
| This would be impossible for us because despite hiring remote
| people from all over the UK we take photo ID and various other
| forms of identification as proof they can legally live and work
| in the UK.
|
| I get how this would be a thing when you're hiring from other
| territories. Got to step up the checks and balances in that
| scenario.
| rednerrus wrote:
| You're not taking IDs until after the offer has been accepted.
| How do you verify the person who was in the interview was the
| person you hired?
| maestroia wrote:
| While remote work has made it easier and more prevalent, "hiring
| fraud" has been around forever. Especially in larger
| corporations, where interviewing was done by loosely associated
| teams, and the faces of all the in-person candidates blended
| together or were rapidly forgotten. I personally witnessed this 3
| or 4 times back in the 90's, while an employee of a Fortune 5
| company.
|
| Contracting agencies were the worst with the bait-and-switch game
| though, even prior to H-1Bs.
| clusterhacks wrote:
| Yes! I have a long-ish tenure at my current org (10+ years). I
| have had at least two co-workers in that time window who were
| clearly having someone else do their work assignments off-
| hours.
|
| Honestly, it kind of worked for them. I was very naive about it
| and it took me a long time to realize that the reason both co-
| workers could not discuss technical issues at work (or "their"
| own code) was that they simply didn't know anything (and it
| wasn't "their" code). As far as I know, only a very small
| number of tech people suspected anything.
| xcskier56 wrote:
| We did one interview with a candidate who had a great looking
| resume and was from a town somewhat close to a city I used to
| live in. Started off with some general get to know you talk and
| asked him about where he was from... crickets. Then went into his
| experience and it 100% did not line up with what was on his
| resume. I started asking questions about the jobs on his resume
| and he hung up.
|
| My PM, who was also on the call, had looked up the name on the
| resume and found the linked in of guy whose resume had been
| stolen. We notified him that someone was using his resume and
| actually ended up interviewing him! We came close to hiring him
| but his salary ask was out of our price range.
| grahamplace wrote:
| I'm not sure the exact rules here (and you might not be in the
| US), but you might want to avoid asking candidates "about where
| they are from"
|
| > Any questions that reveal your age, race, national origin,
| gender, religion, marital status and sexual orientation are
| off-limits.
|
| > "State and federal laws make discrimination based on certain
| protected categories, such as national origin, citizenship,
| age, marital status, disabilities, arrest and conviction
| record, military discharge status, race, gender, or pregnancy
| status, illegal.
|
| > Any question that asks a candidate to reveal information
| about such topics without the question having a job related
| basis will violate the various state and federal discrimination
| laws," Lori Adelson, a labor and employment attorney and
| partner with law firm Arnstein & Lehr, tells Business Insider.
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/11-illegal-interview-questio...
| happyopossum wrote:
| Err, not relevant here. GP specifically said the interviewee
| "was from a town somewhat close to a city I used to live in",
| so this is information that was already disclosed.
|
| If you're interviewing for a US position, making small talk
| about where the interviewee lives is absolutely not out of
| bounds.
| flowersjeff wrote:
| Reading through all the responses...My personal take on what I've
| been reading.
|
| The amount of cheating that I ( and my fellow professors ) have
| seen during these past few years has absolutely exploded (in a
| way that is beyond belief, and I've been doing this for a while).
|
| The techniques others have outlined/alluded to ( camera off, a
| big life event just happened, looking off camera, noise, etc )
| are all things that I've been seeing. And whilst this is nothing
| to be lauded, after all how many vectors are there, I do think
| that perhaps a solution is looking towards academics. (just
| saying...)
| spmurrayzzz wrote:
| We've seen a significant upswing in this over the last 18-24
| months. It has gotten to the point where I can identify the
| fraudulent resumes as many of them seem to be cooked up from the
| same template. I wrote a quick script to identify these pretty
| quickly (assuming the PDF resume they submit has parseable text
| spans in them).
|
| A lesser form of fraud, but still insidious at this point, are
| the templated resumes that misrepresent work experience. They
| will list a top line item in "work history" of something that
| _sounds_ like tech startup, but in actuality isn 't a company at
| all. It's just an open source project, that no one actually uses,
| with a website. Apart from the items listed, the candidates never
| have any legitimate work experience. It smells like a way to get
| resumes past any ATS keyword filtering and/or less-experienced
| recruiters.
|
| And usually, the candidate hasn't really written much code at all
| in the repo. Just a smattering of readme updates, config changes,
| and maybe some bug fixes amounting to less than ~100-200 SLOC
| over the span of months.
|
| In 100% of these cases we've seen so far, the resumes look
| exactly the same, including formatting/layout/etc. The projects
| all exist under the "OSLabs Beta" github orb [1] and the resume
| also lists a tech talk they did under the "SingleSprout Speaker
| Series" moniker. Most often, there is no actual evidence of them
| doing this talk, but in many cases you can find someone else
| doing the same talk topic on youtube if you search.
|
| SingleSprout is a recruiting organization, so it seems at least
| somewhat likely that they are the ones shepherding this process,
| though I have no evidence of that. It could just be that they
| partner with this OS Labs entity as part of their candidate
| funnel. Whatever the case may be, this is at best (if I'm being
| charitable) a gross misrepresentation of candidate experience.
|
| N.B. I am 100% OK with hiring folks based on (F)OSS experience.
| An active github is actually something I select for and, if its
| available, I will spend significant time reviewing such that I
| can have a meaningful discussion with the candidate about their
| work. These candidates are different entirely (for hopefully
| obvious reasons).
|
| [1] https://github.com/oslabs-beta
|
| EDIT: Wanted to add some clarification here that this post is
| about the candidates involved, on the topic of hiring woes that
| OP brought up, but not about the specific entities I mentioned.
| It may just be incidental that all of the resumes we've seen have
| had the aforementioned patterns. It is not my intent to malign
| any of the orgs I referenced.
| dopamean wrote:
| Thanks for the interesting reply. I'm curious who "we" is that
| you reference several time. Do you work for an organization
| dealing with this problem?
| spmurrayzzz wrote:
| I am director of engineering / cofounder at a company called
| Starry (wireless ISP).
|
| To be fair, I wouldn't call this a "problem" insofar as it
| doesn't cause any meaningful pain apart from extra noise in
| the funnel. Given how poor the signal-to-noise ratio is in
| most hiring funnels, the impact is more or less de minimis.
|
| I do still review every submission, at least in a cursory
| way, just in case the candidate has other legitimate
| experience and/or novel work on the github they link to.
| patch-n wrote:
| Used to live in a building with Starry internet, and just
| wanted to say thanks for the fantastic service while I was
| a customer.
| spmurrayzzz wrote:
| I'm glad you had a good experience!
| asimpletune wrote:
| It reminds me of "Nathan for you" when he held his own award
| ceremony so he could claim to be an award-winning filmmaker, or
| he did parodies of songs at open mics so he could then claim to
| be a renowned parody artist, before opening his famous "dumb
| Starbuck"
| kuhzaam wrote:
| That is funny, this thread reminded me of a completely
| different "Nathan For You" episode. He hired a Web Dev to
| build an evite template that included a bunch of spammy foul
| language in "invisible" text in the footer, causing the
| invite to go to receiver's spam folder. The idea was that you
| could invite people to a party whom you didn't ACTUALLY want
| to show up, but also didn't want to hurt their feelings. If
| they asked why they weren't invited, you could incredulously
| claim that you DID invite them, and suggest that maybe it
| went to their spam folder.
| giantg2 wrote:
| To be fair, legitimate candidates might try to beat keyword
| screens. I feel like beating keyword screens is fair game as
| long as it's not an outright lie. It's just a way to get past a
| flawed step in the process so an actual human can make a
| decision. Those screens are really just the virtual equivalent
| of handing an interviewer a resume and them trashing it in
| front of you.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > To be fair, legitimate candidates might try to beat keyword
| screens.
|
| IMO, this technique has been exaggerated to the point of
| being counterproductive.
|
| As soon as the interviewer discovers that _some_ claimed
| experience on the resume was a lie, they can 't trust the
| rest of the resume. The interviews get harder and the
| interviewer starts looking deeper for other inconsistencies
| or outright lies.
|
| Often, discovering outright lies on someone's resume is
| sufficient to drop them out of the hiring pipeline
| completely.
|
| Spamming keywords _that you don 't actually know_ might get
| you into flawed companies that don't know how to screen or
| interview candidates, but those generally aren't good places
| to work.
| itronitron wrote:
| Yes, at this point I see technical keywords in a job
| posting as accumulating into a set of reasons that I
| wouldn't want to apply.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I agree, but it seems like every company does it.
| Apparently they're all great companies to work for with
| exciting opportunities to change the world using a
| cutting edge tech stack built by world class expert
| coworkers.
| bluGill wrote:
| Keywords are useful though because there are so many ways
| to say the same thing and half the time nobody cares about
| that keyword anyway. I've seen more than one place demand
| keywords they clearly don't use on the job - if I can talk
| about php even a little I can claim it even though it has
| been 15 years since I last saw php...
| giantg2 wrote:
| I'm not talking about lying.
|
| The main thing I was talking about is using something like
| tiny white color text to reiterate stuff from their post.
| Or literally say I don't have any experience with X, Y, and
| Z. It's not lying, a printout doesn't show it, but it can
| trick the system.
|
| One other example might be using the same inflated wording
| that job postings use (puffery?). Using fancy jazzed up
| language sometimes helps, especially if it includes
| keywords that are reasonably true or a matter of opinion
| (like the job posting saying it's a great opportunity or
| cutting edge tech).
| spmurrayzzz wrote:
| Very much agree on keyword scanning -- all of our resume
| review for us is done by the recruiting team and hiring
| managers. If candidates take the time to thoughtfully apply,
| I believe we should be making reciprocal efforts to review in
| kind.
|
| These resumes however are all identical to one another. It's
| a different situation, but that notwithstanding-- we still do
| review all these and your sentiment very much aligns with my
| own.
| monocasa wrote:
| Earlier in my career I would no joke add an invisible layer
| to my resume with the job description from the company I was
| applying to copy pasted in it in order to beat the auto
| keyword scanning.
| FerociousTimes wrote:
| Like an embedded passage of text within a PDF document?
|
| That's plain old keyword stuffing.
| Aromasin wrote:
| Glad I'm not the only one. I tracked the uptick in
| interview offers using this method, and it was nearly 4x
| more. Only one recruiter seemed to notice, and gave me a
| dressing for it. In my eyes, play stupid games, win stupid
| prizes (me).
| throwaway743 wrote:
| Noticed this increase in response with this method as
| well, while I was applying a couple years ago.
|
| Seemed to work really well specifically with city
| government jobs (New York), based on the
| response/application ratio. I'm guessing it may have to
| do with their antiquated systems.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| ha nice I've done that for website metadata and crawling
| scripts there
|
| never thought of for resume
| [deleted]
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Tbh I have more sympathy for this, as long as the actual
| candidate actually went through the in-person interviews.
| Resume screens can be brutal and high-loss.
| spmurrayzzz wrote:
| I'm with you on that. I am empathetic to the take that a
| candidate may view this tactic as industrious & resourceful
| rather than deceptive.
|
| And as such, as I've stated elsewhere in this thread, I still
| review every one of these in earnest.
| dimeskim wrote:
| OSLabs and SingleSprout Speaker Series are related to a
| bootcamp called CodeSmith, so they tell their grads to add
| those to their resume to seem more experienced. I wouldn't call
| it fraud but agreed that it misrepresents work experience, and
| it's very obvious when you see one of these resumes because
| they all look the same.
| spmurrayzzz wrote:
| I did notice that the youtube videos I was able to find on
| the speaker series was under the CodeSmith account, should
| have mentioned that. I was careful in my wording that they
| (SS) may just be partnering with other orgs.
|
| Interestingly though, very few of the resumes I describe
| actually list CodeSmith at all. So I didn't make the
| connection immediately.
| wongarsu wrote:
| > I wouldn't call it fraud
|
| Grossly misrepresenting work experience in a job application
| does sound a bit like misrepresenting a material fact in
| order to obtain action by another party, where the other
| party relies on the misrepresentation and suffers injury from
| it.
|
| Now I wouldn't want to have bootcamp graduates prosecuted for
| fraud, and it would be near impossible to put any concrete
| number on the damage anyways, but I do wonder if bootcamps
| that systematically abet graduates to commit fraud run afoul
| of any laws.
| spmurrayzzz wrote:
| I hoped this was obvious but I agree, I wouldn't for a
| second consider any of this even remotely criminal. Its
| only misleading and suggests not particularly great
| judgment from the candidates.
|
| Hyperbole on resumes is the sine qua non of the hiring
| experience. This is no different, just a more systematic
| form that I'm not used to seeing historically.
| dml2135 wrote:
| Oh wow this is fascinating, I have someone I'm doing a tech
| screen for this week that matches your exact description. They
| have both the Single Sprout Speaker Series talk along with the
| OSLabs Beta open source experience which takes up a good chunk
| of their resume.
|
| No mention of the CodeSmith bootcamp, although I had deduced
| they were probably a bootcamp grad due to their degree in a
| separate field.
|
| Also fishy is that one of their experiences just lists "stealth
| startup" as the company name, now I'm wondering if that role
| existed at all. Thanks for the heads up here.
| spmurrayzzz wrote:
| You are amongst a cohort of many that have shared with me
| that you've seen the same in your own funnel.
|
| That said, I'd encourage you to still review the candidate as
| you would any other. I try to give all folks the benefit of
| the doubt, even if I don't entirely agree with this
| particular practice. They may have some bright spots in the
| code you're actually able to check out. It's a great topic
| for conversation if you choose to have a call with them as
| well.
| dml2135 wrote:
| Yes this doesn't appear to be so egregious that I would
| cancel the interview, still worth giving them a shot for
| the phone screen.
|
| That said, as a bootcamp grad myself, it personally irks me
| when I see other bootcamp grads try and misrepresent their
| bootcamp projects as work experience. I know that some
| bootcamps direct their students to do exactly this, but
| that doesn't make it okay.
|
| I guess it works though. I feel like I'm always the one
| pointing out to our recruiting team that certain jobs on a
| resume are not actually jobs. If someone else is doing the
| tech screen, they may just make it through.
| spmurrayzzz wrote:
| Very interesting that you're also a bootcamp grad. Thanks
| for sharing all this.
|
| I love when candidates are up front about things like
| this, seeing a cover letter thats akin to "Hey, I'm just
| getting my started in this industry. I graduated
| <bootcamp-x>, I would love to get some feedback on the
| work I did on <project-x>."
|
| I have no degrees myself, very much identify with the
| self-learning journey.
| voberoi wrote:
| Just chiming in here on behalf of SingleSprout -- I know the
| two founders, David and Natan, and have recruited through them
| multiple times at Harry's when they and we were both fledgling
| companies in NYC. I have also been in touch with them on behalf
| of clients since.
|
| SingleSprout is much bigger today so maybe things could fall
| through. But it is unlikely that they would be willingly or
| knowingly shepherding this process. I'll point them to this
| thread so they're aware of what's going on and can chime in if
| they'd like.
| spmurrayzzz wrote:
| Thank you for clarifying - I tried to be careful in my
| wording here to be about candidates and not make any claims
| about entities involved apart from the pattern recognition
| I've noticed.
|
| I'm happy to edit my post to add any needed language to
| properly represent anyone mentioned.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I'm just flabbergasted at how this can happen, or how someone
| thinks they can get away with it.
|
| Our company is pretty much entirely remote, but the interview
| process includes an initial screen (on video, about 45 mins), and
| then about 4 hours of interviews, again all on video, with about
| 8 different people. Point being, _we know who you are_. Do people
| think humans can 't recognize faces or voices? Do some companies
| interview with _out_ a face-to-face conversation? I honestly just
| don 't understand how this works, or how someone could think this
| could work.
| joezydeco wrote:
| I think even this model can be gamed.
|
| I interviewed a contractor over video a few weeks ago. Both of
| us live on camera. The candidate wore glasses and I could see
| their eyes darting back and forth across their screen while
| answering questions. There were also a high number of really
| abnormal pauses before responding.
|
| I'm 99% convinced the candidate was being fed answers by
| someone else listening in.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Not to be too harsh, and judging by your response you _did_
| detect this bad interviewer, but IMO if someone can game your
| interviews in that manner, you need to re-evaluate how you do
| interviews.
|
| E.g. a big part of our interviews is to ask about previous
| projects, pitfalls they hit, reasons they made certain
| technology choices, etc. I'm 100% sure that if the
| interviewer had no idea what they were talking about and was
| being fed answers it would be extremely apparent.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| No idea if this was what was going on, but when I'm
| interviewing my eyes are moving between 3 things: The camera
| for eye contact, the interviewer's video so I can read body
| language, and my notes/resume so I don't forget to say
| anything.
| ghaff wrote:
| Ask anyone who is involved in certifications. During the
| height of COVID, a huge amount of effort had to go into
| preventing remote test proctoring from being gamed--of course
| often inconveniencing the honest test takers.
| diehunde wrote:
| You can get interview rounds with random people from the
| company, and maybe the hiring manager will be the only one that
| will keep working with you in the future. That's pretty common
| for big tech companies. In those cases, you would have to
| deceive only one person, I guess?
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Do you have legal right to claim their compensation?
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| Not this way, but a few years ago we got an entire team of 5
| people with a very specific skillset for a project and after the
| first week I discovered they have no such skills. Higher
| management in my company did not believe, but a month later they
| started to realize something is wrong, so they talked to the
| higher management from that other company with no good result. It
| took a bit over 1 year to terminate that contract.
|
| Also about hiring fraud, I saw many positions that were
| advertised, interviews were performed, the "right" person was
| hired - all the interviews were fake, the positions were arranged
| for certain people from the very beginning. It is quite common in
| some companies and positions in my country, including
| international companies with local branches.
| philip1209 wrote:
| More meta:
|
| I wonder if there's an opportunity in the future to tie work
| identity and work payments to a crypto wallet - i.e. "Your Github
| is tied to the wallet address, you apply to the job with the
| wallet address, you log into work accounts with the wallet
| address, and we pay you at the wallet address." Almost like the
| next evolution of Yubikeys.
| flowersjeff wrote:
| There are many projects that have experimented with something
| like this - and personally, I think this is the way to go.
| Staked ID...
| tmtvl wrote:
| Let's hope not, that sounds absolutely terrible. With my
| physical wallet, if I lose it I can call the bank to get my
| cards frozen, I can go to town hall to get my ID reissued,...
|
| Whereas with crypto if I lose my key/wallet, I'm SOL.
| myhn wrote:
| Today I spoke with one of ex-colleages. He said he was spending
| hours to weed out candidates that joined his company through
| fraudulent means. There are scams at multiple layers: during
| hiring, proxying in day to day work. It became a huge industry in
| its own.
| flowersjeff wrote:
| How fun (not) is that....
| sleton38234234 wrote:
| >> A few weeks later on his first day the guy in the Zoom was
| definitely not the guy I interviewed.
|
| What do you mean by this? Like the face is another person? can
| you go into more detail about "not the guy I interviewed"? maybe
| it's just that zooming/remote work inherently requires more
| trust.
| lormayna wrote:
| Not directly, but yes. We must hire someone in India, and we were
| making interviews through Xoom. HR strongly advises asking the
| candidate to switch the camera on and take a picture of him, just
| because it's very common that someone is replaced by someone else
| during technical interviews.
| jd_illa wrote:
| I've heard of this happening. A friend of mine recently hired a
| candidate, but the candidate that actually "showed up" (it was a
| remote company) was completely different. It took his company 3
| months to realize they had been duped by a scam out of India.
|
| How did you due diligence the candidate? Background check? Docs
| to confirm they are US based?
| cabirum wrote:
| The safest course of action is keeping 100% remote but
| interviewing in-person at least once.
| H8crilA wrote:
| Has anyone considered opening a criminal case against such
| people? Evidence of fraud shouldn't be too hard to collect.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Is fraud actually being prosecuted reliably?
|
| My observation given the vast amount of financial fraud
| occurring everywhere ( _with_ a paper trail), fraud is one of
| those things that 's only selectively prosecuted when you piss
| off someone powerful enough or with the right connections.
|
| Even if we assume fraud actually starts being prosecuted
| seriously, I'd assume the astronomical quantity of financial
| fraud out there would take priority over a relatively little
| amount of employment/candidate fraud.
| H8crilA wrote:
| I don't think there is a massive problem with financial
| fraud. What would be an example?
| criticas wrote:
| Wage Theft? A 2017 report claimed that US wage theft (by
| companies against employees) was 100 times the size of
| reported robberies ($50 B vs $438M).
| https://www.workingnowandthen.com/blog/wage-theft-
| the-50-bil...
| ergonaught wrote:
| Deja Vu? This exact question and set of circumstances was Asked
| previously.
|
| Ahh, yes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30150343
|
| Which referenced: https://www.askamanager.org/2022/01/the-new-
| hire-who-showed-...
| sputknick wrote:
| Been there. This happened about 3 years ago, it was also horribly
| blatant. We interviewed a candidate who blew us away, superior
| candidate, easy "yes" from everyone. then when he started, it
| became pretty clear within 2-ish weeks this was not the same
| person. He could not do basic BASIC tasks. The ironic part was,
| we did a video call, but none of us could remember what the
| original guy looked like, and we did not record the video.
| ericholscher wrote:
| Interestingly, we've had a bunch of fraud where people
| impersonate OSS devs. They then proxy their docs, and try to run
| fake traffic for ad revenue.
|
| More info in our blog post:
| https://www.ethicalads.io/blog/2022/09/watch-out-ad-scammers...
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