Employers aren’t just screening resumes anymore. They’re verifying applicants’ identities throughout the hiring process by taking biometric scans of their faces, scrutinising email histories and even examining the outlets behind them in Zoom interviews.
Recruiters say it’s how they’re coping with a flood of embellished applications. More than a third of about 1,230 headhunters and hiring managers surveyed now spend half their workweek filtering for "spam and junk” submissions, many of them AI-generated, according to hiring software firm Greenhouse. Companies are concerned about applicants using stolen or fabricated identities to boost their chances of getting a job.
The worries aren't hypothetical. Hiten Sheth, an analyst at Gartner Inc, says his clients have uncovered candidates using deepfakes to impersonate someone else during video meetings. In one case, a recruiter interviewed one person only to have someone entirely different show up on the first day of work. Another hired a remote worker they thought was based in North America only to later learn that the person lived on a different continent. Such incidents are becoming common enough that Gartner estimates that one in four job applications companies receive will be phoney by 2028.
"Technologies are now being used that draw from well-tested, decades-old cybersecurity used in places like airports and voting and military and government applications to the ordinary business of applying to a job,” Greenhouse chief executive officer Daniel Chait said. "But in this world, it turns out that’s pretty easy to do because the technology is no harder than taking a selfie on your phone.”
The cost of letting deceptive prospects slip through can be steep. For decades, businesses have routinely shared information about their staff and workflows with job candidates before requesting identification or conducting background checks. About 23% of US companies surveyed by background-check provider Checkr said hiring fraud cost them more than US$50,000 (RM204,260) in the past year because of delayed projects, compliance issues and rehiring costs. For 10% of respondents, losses exceeded US$100,000 (RM408,520).
Susan Dietrich, owner of Pittsburgh-based staffing firm Tops Staffing, now uses a mix of artificial-intelligence (AI) tools and phone interviews to verify candidates’ identities and confirm their claims. Some job seekers, she said, have claimed to have accumulated years of work experience in the months since they last applied for a position through her firm. Others have listed skills on their resumes that they appeared to know nothing about during phone interviews.
After a careful evaluation, Dietrich’s team sends hiring managers summaries of what they were able to verify. The extra vetting is "really sucking up a lot of time,” Dietrich said.
The addition of new screening measures early in the recruiting process is driving business for identity verification firms like Clear, which authenticates applicants using their photo IDs and public records for headhunters. Clear, best known for its airport skip-the-line membership, expanded its digital platforms last year to help clients, both big and small companies, weed out potential tricksters.
"We didn’t set out to solve this problem,” said Brett Romanoff, executive vice president of Clear1, the company’s digital-identity business. But after some customers started using the service to vet already-hired remote workers, Clear started using its biometric facial scans to validate applicants too.
For Persona, another identity-verification company, confirming the identities of prospective hires is now one of the company’s fastest-growing services, said chief executive officer Rick Song.
Persona’s screening platform can detect if a candidate is writing from a newly created email address or if their computer’s clock is set to a different time zone than where they are supposed to be. It also flags whether someone is logging in through a virtual private network (VPN) to obscure their location or if their IP address is jumping around the globe faster than a person can travel.
In one recent example, a Persona client found that a prospect was impersonating a Coinbase employee using details copied from the employee’s verified LinkedIn profile, Song said.
These additional verification steps utilise the signals from the devices candidates log on from and the metadata they leave behind when they submit applications. It marks a change from traditional background checks, which often require applicants to submit basic personal information and sign consent forms.
"Background checks are fundamentally about the past,” Song said. "The real risk is that you aren’t even the person that you claim to be.”
At a conference for human resources professionals hosted last month by SHRM, recruiters described "stalking” candidates with biometric screening tools in virtual interviews and tracking IP addresses long before they would traditionally run background checks.
"It almost sounds like something out of a spy novel,” said Stephen Dwyer, president of the American Staffing Association, an industry trade group.
Dwyer is training recruiters at ASA member firms to take a range of precautions to ensure job candidates are who – and where – they say they are. One tactic is asking interviewees to turn their webcam toward a nearby electrical outlet to prove they are in the US.
Equifax Inc found that almost three-quarters of more than 350 human resources officials say they are encountering "challenges with fabricated or misleading candidate information.”
The rise in fake applications comes as hiring has slowed and job searches are taking longer. The median unemployed worker now spends 11 weeks looking for a job, up from 10 a year ago, US Labor Department data show. Some job seekers are responding by taking extreme measures, like impersonating others or using chatbots to cheat in interviews.
At the same time, employers are facing more serious threats, too. The Justice Department said last year that North Korean operatives had infiltrated more than 100 US companies by tricking the firms into hiring them for remote IT jobs. NBCUniversal, Nike Inc and Boeing Co all hired North Koreans who used fake IDs and resumes to pose as American workers, according to legal documents.
NBCUniversal, Nike and Boeing didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The rise in falsified information is "one of the greatest threats to us,” said Ernest Stephens, a talent-acquisition manager at Seattle Public Utilities. It’s forcing the company to make "a lot of changes” to the hiring process, he said. Stephens declined to elaborate, citing security concerns because the company is a public utility.
More than 40% of employers that hire temporary workers now use some form of identity-verification software to screen applicants, according to the first survey of its kind for Staffing Industry Analysts. The report included responses from more than 120 companies.
Private lender Kiavi Inc has job candidates complete "biometric and device validation to confirm identity and liveness,” according to an advertisement posted by the company. Data centre giant Equinix asks applicants to present government-issued photo identification at the start of video interviews and bans them from using virtual backgrounds.
Seven months ago, a real estate company called Place started requiring applicants to verify their identities through Clear using a government-issued ID and a selfie. The platform flags hundreds of potentially suspicious applications each day, according to Holly Priestner, Place’s chief people officer.
"We learned some things the hard way,” Priestner said. – Bloomberg
