- As the hiring process goes remote, job-candidate fraud is on the rise.
- This is a frustrating and expensive problem for companies — especially amid a labor shortage.
- Some employers are fighting back with AI-powered tools designed to identify and catch cheaters.
Employers are turning to artificial intelligence to identify fraudulent job candidates as remote hiring and a labor shortage fuel a rise in opportunities for dishonesty on the part of applicants.
Deception takes new forms in the era of remote recruitment: Some prospective hires have been known to receive interview answers from someone off camera in the Zoom room and mouth along a la Cyrano de Bergerac. Others exploit remote assessments by getting another person to take their cognitive or coding tests for them. And others do a bait and switch, where the person who interviews and is hired is not the same one who shows up for the job.
This fraud creates a frustrating — not to mention expensive — problem for companies. They not only spend money recruiting new candidates but also face costs related to the lost productivity associated with onboarding workers who don’t have the qualifications they claim to, and that strains team morale. There are also security concerns. The FBI recently issued a public service announcement warning companies of the increased risk of people with criminal records applying for work-from-home tech jobs that allow them to gain access to confidential company and customer data.
