This may come as surprise to you as a hiring manager or as an individual contributor – but this is not a news for folks in Human Resources. There are “fake candidates”! These are the candidates who take external help during their interviews or go all out and arrange for proxy representation during the video interview. It becomes very embarrassing for contracting company or staff augmentation company when fraud candidate is detected by hiring team. Cost of mis-hire is too high for the hiring company.
Types of Frauds
Looking for external help during the video interview is the simplest fraud candidates do. They search for the help for coding question on a different device (smart phones, typically) or browse topics on the Internet related to the questions asked during interview. This usually don’t go too far, as it’s not easy to search and prepare answer in real time. Our questions are usually scenario based and interactive – so, even if we give “open book” exam, our experts would be able to judge the real skills and abilities of candidates.
Other common fraud we observe is lip syncing. Candidates would be having a headphone attached to their ears and would try to cover their lips pretending to keep microphone near the mouth; but their headphone jack won’t be attached to the laptop. Someone else – behind the scene would be having their headphones attached and answering the questions asked by our experts.
Couple of candidates acted smart and covered the webcam entirely – stating that their webcams are not working. But, we have a strict “no video - no interview” policy; so that can’t go too far either.
Last scenario we have seen is complete proxy representation. The person appearing for video interview is a different person. We can’t ask to show their ID – given that majority of candidates are authentic and their overall interview experience matters a lot for hiring company and for us. Asking for photo ID at the beginning of the interview would be odd! Candidates committing a fraud by giving proxy representation at video interview stage get caught when they go for physical round of interview OR when they submit their identification cards to HR and the proxy representation in the video gets detected at a later point of time.
Cost of Mis-Hire is too high!
Hiring a wrong candidate is very costly for companies. In addition to the direct dollar cost, the time lost to build the team has larger impacts on project delivery and lost market opportunities. For services industry or staff augmentation firms, their reputation is at line when it comes to “fake candidates” and “proxy representations”.
That’s why we have developed technology and process based innovations to detect and prevent frauds when interviews are conducted through FloPlatform.
