Technology and remote work have changed the opportunities for cheating in the hiring funnel—we’ve all heard horror stories of the wrong person showing up on day 1 after the person’s camera stayed off for the interview process. But these are exceptions to the rule. Most often, candidates are acting in good faith, trying to secure a job.
Technology gives employers back valuable time to focus on top candidates by cutting out menial tasks. Like any type of fraud, the cheaters continue to invent new techniques, and the victims of fraud must always keep up.
Cheating of all kinds existed long before the rise of fully remote hiring, but companies need to be aware of new methods as they adopt innovative solutions.
HireVue’s Global Trends Report found that more companies are making the shift to hiring technology to improve efficiencies in the hiring process and find qualified candidates quicker in this competitive market. We found that in just the last year:
- 57% introduced job-matching technologies to recruit both externally and internally.
- 37% moved to a combination of both in-person and virtual interviews.
- 24% implemented technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), chatbots, and skills assessments.
And of the leaders who made those changes:
- 54% report experiencing greater flexibility.
- 54% report timesaving benefits.
- 43% say it’s easier to identify the best candidates than it was before.
- 42% say they’ve experienced cost savings.
Hiring technologies give companies one more tool in the toolbox to check for fraud. For instance, using Measure of Software Similarity Scoring (MOSS) in coding challenges can capture a digestible timeline of a candidate’s performance. This helps determine time spent in another browser and when code is pasted.
A Typical Plagiarism Pattern Looks Like This:
- The candidate does nothing at the start (inactive—reading the challenge details).
- Browser focus goes away for a period of time (searching for an answer).
- The candidate pastes a large amount of code.
- The candidate quickly passes tests without editing the code.
Best Practices for Preventing:
Eliminate unnecessary requirements. When companies rely strictly on résumé data points, candidates are more likely to embellish their accomplishments to make it to the next step. This is why we recommend removing unnecessary policy requirements like inflated years of experience and degrees when they’re not needed and instead focusing on skills-based assessments. Our Global Trends Report found that companies that have adopted a skills-first approach to talent acquisition (54%) and/or replaced résumés with skills-based assessments (40%) also reported experiencing lower employee turnover.
Take a blended approach. We recommend combining skills-based assessments with a follow-up interview to discuss the test results and dig deeper. For instance, if you’ve used a coding challenge, ask candidates to explain their methodology. For nontechnical assessments, you can ask competency-focused follow-up questions that dig deeper into an area where someone demonstrated high performance.
Background checks and onboarding procedures. Information security is one of the primary concerns when it comes to detecting candidate fraud. If a bad actor does make it through an assessment and a follow-up interview undetected, having the right background check and onboarding procedures set up with your HR team can help prevent the person from infiltrating your organization and accessing customer data.
Streamline the process. Finding the best candidates requires gathering the necessary information for your hiring manager to make an informed decision without making the process unnecessarily taxing for your candidates. Most people just want a job that helps advance their position in life. Making the process fairer and easier to access, without unnecessary steps or unrelated requirements, will create a process whereby people don’t feel they need to embellish or lie about their qualifications.
Lindsey Zuloaga is Chief Data Scientist at HireVue, a leader in tech-based hiring tools, including video interviewing, prehire skills assessment tests, and text-enabled recruiting tools.