[HN Gopher] Fake job interviews are securities fraud
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Fake job interviews are securities fraud
Author : ioblomov
Score : 124 points
Date : 2024-07-30 18:55 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| ioblomov wrote:
| https://archive.ph/tkLtK
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| This is about Wells Fargo allegedly lying about pursuing
| diversity in its security filings.
|
| But I'm hearing more and more from friends on the tech interview
| circuit about processes requiring, in essence, free consulting to
| be done for a posting that remains listed and unfilled almost
| indefinitely after the interview (and subsequent ghosting). My
| hunch is these start-ups don't want to show an empty hiring
| pipeline to investors. But if that's being pursued wilfully, it
| seems to imply fraud.
| timomaxgalvin wrote:
| "My hunch is these start-ups don't want to show an empty hiring
| pipeline to investors. "
|
| Sounds very plausible, but why bother interviewing anyone?
| scrame wrote:
| because funding wants to go somewhere and headcount is an
| easy earmark.
| kevstev wrote:
| Intelligence on what other firms are doing, even if you are
| just getting a very high level view. Around 2009, I was
| working at an algo trading startup, and long story short,
| after having a previous company call me up after their non-
| compete in a business ended, and in the process one of them
| slipping in that they made like 4x what I was making at the
| time, I decided to look around.
|
| I got lots of bites on my resume! And I was called in for
| lots of interviews. But they didn't really go anywhere,
| despite me often feeling like I did well in them. It took me
| a few months to realize that they were actually just hearing
| some murmurs about what my company was doing and wanted to
| learn more about it- we were approaching the problem in a
| unique way for the time.
|
| Even seemingly innocuous details can give away a lot about a
| company's strategy. If you are working on say AR at Amazon,
| and you mention that your group is about 200 people, that
| says that they are not only going into this space, but doing
| a reasonably big push on it as well, which might be news to
| say FB. (This is completely contrived, I have no idea if
| Amazon is doing AR stuff at all).
| takinola wrote:
| I guess anything is possible but this seems unlikely. The
| type of questions (and followups) you would ask in a job
| interview are quite different than for an inquiry. Also,
| there are more straightforward ways of getting this
| information so why take a more convoluted and less
| efficient path.
| lallysingh wrote:
| I think you can get more intel than this just by scouring
| LinkedIn. You might have to use some statistics to eyeball
| some numbers, but you can get technologies used, group
| sizes, levels of team members, etc. Especially if you
| snapshot and compare over time.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| In fact, I would be shocked if this kind of competitor-
| employee data mining was not a service already sold by
| Linked In.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| The thing about "fake interviews", having gone to several
| myself, is that they are never completely fake, just very,
| very unlikely to produce a hire.
|
| I imagine the company internally can say something like
| "we'll hire if we find someone capable of solving all of
| department X,Y and Z's problems simultaneously and will do so
| for market rate. We probably won't find that but looking will
| make people happy." with the second part said with only
| winks.
| NickC25 wrote:
| Except if I'm an investor, and someone tells me that they
| are looking for a specific role that will help the company
| reach financial goals, they are spending time and money
| trying to find that person(s) and they aren't actually
| looking (rather, just posturing) that is fraud-y in a
| roundabout way. They are spending time and money on
| something that they know won't pan out. That's a waste of
| money.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| sadly, there can be a lot of inefficies and the number
| can still go up. That's ultimately all modern (western?)
| stakeholders care about these days. Not like they can't
| switch their stocks in days if they get worried.
| from-nibly wrote:
| Sometimes its double fraud. Sometimes they tell employees
| internally that they are hiring when though they arent.
| svnt wrote:
| >Sounds very plausible, but why bother interviewing anyone?
|
| Because then you don't have to ask anyone else to lie for
| you, or count on them to do it well.
|
| There are other options here though, beyond just lying and
| pickiness, which include:
|
| a) some internal party sabotaging hiring to prevent someone
| getting in who will be a better fit for the role they want
| during growth
|
| b) startups often don't actually know where they need to put
| bodies, especially in areas outside of the founders'
| technical training
| throwawayq3423 wrote:
| Every startup has a massive "Hiring" page for optics. Are
| they actually hiring for all those positions? Probably not.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| I could only read the first paragraph, but it seems like the
| article is about a specific type of fake job interview rather
| than "fake job interviews" in general.
| teamspirit wrote:
| https://archive.ph/KcjK6
| Aurornis wrote:
| > My hunch is these start-ups don't want to show an empty
| hiring pipeline to investors.
|
| This wouldn't make any sense. If a startup has headcount and
| budget, they're going to want to hire someone as quickly as
| possible.
|
| Investors don't care about the minutia of how many people are
| in your hiring pipeline. If portfolio company had board-
| approved budget and headcount and was failing to fill those
| roles in a timely manner, that would be a huge red flag that
| something is not right within the company.
|
| Investors care about result and efficiency. I don't think any
| startup is going to impress investors by wasting a bunch of
| time deliberately fake interviewing people and then failing to
| hire anyone.
|
| What's more like is the company wants to hire, has told the
| teams they can hire, but the board is reluctant to approve more
| headcount until the team starts showing results. Another
| possibility is that they're waiting for financials to improve
| enough to justify the hire.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Even large corps leave postings up forever as a way to
| manipulate their stock price. Take down the postings and
| analysts see it as weakness. This has been going on for
| decades.
| jedberg wrote:
| That's not always true. Sometimes they have up a "Senior
| Engineer" listing that just always stays up because they are
| always hiring for that role.
| giantg2 wrote:
| That's extremely rare, especially right now.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| "always hiring" in the same way anyone would hire, say,
| Steve Wozniak if he knocked on your door.
|
| I think one regulation to resolve this is to outline a term
| on when you expect to fill the role, in order to delineate
| between "we need this role right now" (AKA, "urgent hire"),
| "we want to fill it in 1-3 months", and "nice to have but
| no rush" postings. It'd give a better signals to workers
| and make it easier to call fraud if they are "urgently
| hiring" but repost the same thing 5 months in a row.
| Suppafly wrote:
| Fake Job Interviews Are Fraud Fraud -- ftfy
|
| we need to start prosecuting companies that do this shit, not
| just for financial fields.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Make it a criminal felony for everyone involved with fake job
| posts. It's wage theft of people who aren't even the company's
| employees. In almost all other contexts this would be criminal
| theft. Make it criminal theft in this context too. Once you
| include the hundreds or thousands of people they've stolen
| labor from, it easily passes any threshold required for it to
| be a felony.
|
| Guarantee the ghost job nonsense will instantly stop once the
| first person is shown being shipped off to prison for a year
| and one day.
| donor20 wrote:
| This might move hiring to friends / network type hiring. If
| you were in a good network awesome. If not could be tough
| teractiveodular wrote:
| As the friendly article explains, it is next to impossible to
| differentiate between "fake job interview" and "unsuccessful
| real interview".
| Flop7331 wrote:
| In the absence of proper documentation and genuine feedback,
| assume it was a fake.
|
| E.g. I had a CodeSignal assessment recently that resulted in
| the end of my "consideration". If it had been a genuine
| opening, they'd be able to tell me what the expected score
| was and how tenured peers at the company are scoring in
| recent assessments.
| say_it_as_it_is wrote:
| I heard that Discord is a notorious offender of fake job
| interviews.
| geoffpado wrote:
| I had a very strange interview experience with Discord myself.
| They sent me a rejection letter, saying that after much
| consideration, they'd decided to go with a different candidate.
|
| Thing is... I'd never even applied with them, and certainly
| hadn't done any interviews.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| There are people going around filching resumes and
| impersonating people when applying for jobs. It's worth
| reaching out to see how they got your name and resume to see
| if you're the victim of fraud.
| glasss wrote:
| > Wells Fargo did a bad thing. But the badness of the thing is
| uncertain, amorphous, hard to quantify: People were harmed, but
| not in ways that the legal system can easily reduce to money.
|
| > But the financial system can: The bad thing that Wells Fargo
| did caused its stock to drop, which is a good rough measure of
| how bad it was. The shareholders perform the socially useful
| service of measuring the badness [...]
|
| I think this is a really interesting point - assuming the actors
| in the market who are buying and selling stocks share the same
| general morals of the rest of the population, they can penalize
| companies that do bad things. But that would mean market forces
| would need to act on moral grounds and not on profit motives.
| blastro wrote:
| The idea that retail buying/selling pressure has any effect on
| market price is a very old fashioned idea.
| exolymph wrote:
| "actors in the market who are buying and selling stocks" does
| not necessarily mean retail, no?
| blastro wrote:
| > share the same general morals of the rest of the
| population
|
| funds don't share those morals
| benreesman wrote:
| People who have the stake or dry powder to move the share
| price of a bank (or megacap tech company while we're at it)
| are in no way interested in socially useful pricing around
| dickhead behavior.
| benreesman wrote:
| There is a financial accounting line item called "goodwill" and
| it's often non-trivial.
|
| In a functioning market customers (whether consumers or
| enterprise purchasing decision makers) tell you to take a walk
| if you act with bad will in any kind of consistent way.
|
| There isn't much money to be made in markets that are both of
| "mature" and functioning.
| takinola wrote:
| Goodwill has a very specific definition that has nothing to
| do with your behavior. It is simply the difference between
| the price an acquirer pays for something and the book value
| of that thing
| benreesman wrote:
| TFA accurately cites a decrease in cap on the day over a
| revelation of bad behavior, in no way affecting
| fundamentals. That comes out of goodwill.
|
| Why do people say things like this?
| takinola wrote:
| Goodwill only comes into play in the context of an
| acquisition. Unless they are being bought, the decrease
| in market cap is just that. It doesn't come out of
| anything in particular, accounting-wise.
| benreesman wrote:
| Price is definitionally attached to the likelihood of a
| transaction! The "price" of something is perfectly
| defined at the moment of a transaction, at any other time
| it is at best a rough estimate of the consensus of an
| amount at which a transaction would occur.
|
| I'm not nitpicking: this a la carte treatment of market
| capitalization neatly severed from what anyone would be
| willing to pay, warped by the prospect of intervention
| and other insidious capture is why we're discussing this
| embarrassing cavalcade of depressing behavior on the part
| of the executives in the first place.
|
| Goodwill isn't germane only to risk arbitrage
| discussions, it is (among other things) how the
| accountants keep track of the impact on value that
| accrues to piece of shit finance guys pulling stunts like
| this one.
| jordanb wrote:
| > which is a good rough measure of how bad it was
|
| This is a part that he takes on faith which is completely
| unsupported. What the market is really doing (assuming
| rationality) is judging how much any punishment Wells Fargo
| might receive from regulators, customers, counterparties will
| alter the net present value of the stock.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > The shareholders perform the socially useful service of
| measuring the badness
|
| That's a dangerous idea as it presumes that shareholders are
| investing not for profit but to improve "goodness" in the
| world. This is obviously not true.
|
| The shareholders are providing the economically useful service
| of measuring _risk_ to those future profits. These two factors
| may be linked through an abstraction but they are most
| definitely not equivalent.
|
| > they can penalize companies that do bad things
|
| Without journalists to expose the bad things in the first place
| the investors can do no such thing. There is no mechanism in
| place to discover these facts and there is no effort to build
| one independent of journalism.
| lmm wrote:
| > Without journalists to expose the bad things in the first
| place the investors can do no such thing. There is no
| mechanism in place to discover these facts and there is no
| effort to build one independent of journalism.
|
| Isn't that backwards? Investors are a major funder of
| journalism in the broad sense, and one of the few robust
| revenue sources left for it.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > Investors are a major funder of journalism in the broad
| sense
|
| I see it as an advertising driven industry. I'm not sure
| how investors could be funding it directly.
|
| > and one of the few robust revenue sources left for it.
|
| That there are publications meant for investors does not
| mean investors can be seen as the revenue source. The
| advertisers looking to get in front of investors are the
| source.
|
| If someone was investing in news for it's own sake then why
| is the quality of the information presented so poor? You'd
| almost have an easier time making the case they invest to
| _intentionally_ obscure the process of reporting facts.
| lmm wrote:
| > If someone was investing in news for it's own sake then
| why is the quality of the information presented so poor?
|
| Financial-oriented news tends to be noticeably better
| than other kinds. Often the best widely-published
| journalism in the UK will be in the Economist or the FT,
| for example, and some more specialised publications
| allegedly have even higher standards.
| panarky wrote:
| It doesn't presume that shareholders are altruistic.
|
| It presumes that shareholders' only objective is to maximize
| the share price.
|
| From Wells Fargo's reports to investors, it's clear that
| management believed that investors would interpret successful
| diversity efforts as important to maximize the share price.
|
| After the diversity rules were suspended, the share price
| dropped.
|
| It's nearly impossible to prove cause and effect, but the
| plaintiffs don't have to prove direct causation. They only
| have to show that management misrepresented the facts in
| reports to investors, that the false statements were
| material, and that investors suffered a loss at that time.
| golergka wrote:
| I think the point of this case is that they don't have to be
| moral at all. They penalise the company for doing bad things
| not because they think it's bad, but because they have
| financial incentive to do so.
| takinola wrote:
| Markets are not about morality. They are designed to allocate
| resources optimally. If you want moral outcomes, you would
| need to inject incentives that make those outcomes optimal
| for the market participants
| golergka wrote:
| Whatever the incentives, they already decided to include
| DEI commitments into their obligations to shareholders.
| masterkiller wrote:
| This happened to me at a very large publicly traded tech company.
| After being offered a position, they had to consider more diverse
| candidates. After a month of "searching" they hired me.
| ljsprague wrote:
| Did they hire you in the end because they were
| biased/racist/sexist or because you were the best candidate?
| 0898 wrote:
| It's interesting that Matt Levine capitalises "white", as well as
| capitalising "black".
|
| I haven't seen this style choice before.
| playingalong wrote:
| Is it his style or Bloomberg's?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| There's some debate over this.
|
| https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-cultures-race-and-e...
|
| > In some ways, the decision over "white" has been more
| ticklish. The National Association of Black Journalists and
| some Black scholars have said white should be capitalized, too.
|
| > CNN, Fox News and The San Diego Union-Tribune said they will
| give white the uppercase, noting it was consistent with Black,
| Asian, Latino and other ethnic groups. Fox cited NABJ's advice.
|
| > CBS News said it would capitalize white, although not when
| referring to white supremacists, white nationalists or white
| privilege.
| falcor84 wrote:
| > CBS News said it would capitalize white, although not when
| referring to white supremacists, white nationalists or white
| privilege.
|
| Oh, interesting - so would I be correct in saying that "white
| supremacists" are people thinking that White people are
| superior to others, whereas a "White supremacist" is a White
| person who is a supremacist of some group, e.g. "A White male
| supremacist"?
| OJFord wrote:
| Probably more likely to be a typo (as in off-style guide)
| than a deliberate distinction!
| klik99 wrote:
| Assuming this is about ethnic groups in the context of
| America, saying "White" doesn't have a "shared culture and
| history in the way Black does" is arguably true, but "Asian"
| and "Latino" also both don't have a shared culture and
| history in the way "Black" does. Also "White" is the only
| ethnic group name that doesn't refer to a place, even though
| it's clearly a stand-in for "European", which kind of implies
| everyone else came from somewhere else.
| OJFord wrote:
| What's the reason for capitalising either of them introducing
| any debate in the first place?
|
| I doubt this will pass the test of time, makes it seem like a
| noun ('a White'; it must be a noun to be a proper noun after
| all) rather than an adjective ('a black _person_ ') which
| (capitalisation aside) is way out of favour. (At least it
| is/would be in the UK, where 'PoC' isn't really used either,
| so ymmv.)
| akira2501 wrote:
| > It's interesting that Matt Levine capitalises "white", as
| well as capitalising "black".
|
| In this context, they're both proper nouns and this is the
| correct stylization, what's interesting about it?
|
| > I haven't seen this style choice before.
|
| Do people imagine that they're going to have an impact on any
| social outcome by merely changing capitalization of certain
| words? It's incomprehensible that this would be a "style
| choice" and not simply "moral navel gazing."
| booleandilemma wrote:
| I visited a website once that only capitalized "black" and
| not "white". It was a website geared towards black
| entrepreneurs iirc but I forget the name. It came across as
| creepy to me.
| mynameishere wrote:
| Umm, almost every media outlet does that.
|
| By the way, this whole thing is like the "He" in the bible:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverential_capitalization
| jmpman wrote:
| What if the hiring manager had a stack of 10 applicants, and of
| those 10 applicants, only 2 had a resume which appeared
| qualified. Let's assume those 2 candidates were not "diverse".
| But out of the remaining 8 non-qualified resumes, 1 was
| "diverse". Could they interview the 2 qualified candidates, and
| the 1 "diverse" candidate in order to meet the requirement of
| interviewing at least one diverse candidate? Would this be
| considered the scenario the lawsuit is talking about? Or do they
| need to wait until they have one diverse candidate with a
| competitive resume?
| takinola wrote:
| I think the issue was closer to one where the interviewer (all
| but) hires the "non-diverse" candidate and then as an
| afterthought interviews the "diverse" candidate. This clearly
| defeats the spirit of the plan.
|
| As for your specific hypothetical, it still seems to be
| contrary to the stated goals. My guess is you'd want to cast
| your net wide to get a cross-section of qualified candidates
| and maybe not just hire from the same sources that produce
| homogenous candidates
| conception wrote:
| There are various methodologies for increasing diversity in
| your hiring pool that don't require "token" efforts. Eg
| https://hbr.org/2023/06/when-blind-hiring-advances-dei-and-w...
| j-bos wrote:
| But the application forms always say that answers to the
| diversity questions don't count towwards the decision. How do
| they justify?
| matwood wrote:
| Matt Levine has an ongoing meme/thread that _everything_ ends up
| being securities fraud if you look hard enough :)
| magxnta wrote:
| The "everything is securities fraud"-theory honestly deserves a
| Wikipedia article by now.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| I find it interesting that investors don't really have to prove
| they were ever mislead, just that misleading statements were made
| about something bad that happened. For example if you didn't
| actually read Wells Fargo's diversity statement, you would have
| been incapable of making any financial decisions based on them,
| thus you were never actually lied to or defrauded. Can investors
| demonstrate that they changed their investing patterns based on
| diversity statements?
|
| If a lie is whispered in the forest and no one is around to hear
| it, is it securities fraud?
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