Make talent quality your leading analytic with skills-based hiring solution.
That 100% test score might be your biggest red flag. Enterprise breaches don’t always start with phishing emails; sometimes, they start with a fake job interview.
In this episode of Talented, Joseph Cole sits down with COO Ben Walker to unpack one of the most underreported crises in enterprise hiring: the rise of professional-grade candidate fraud. This isn’t just about fibbing on a resume. It’s about state-sponsored operatives, deepfakes, remote proxies, and identity manipulation so sophisticated it fools Fortune 100s.
“It used to be resume puffery. Now it’s professional fraud. In some cases, it’s espionage.” – Ben Walker.
The hybrid work and remote recruiting has changed hiring forever. Talent can come from anywhere, but so can threats. Remote interviews, global hiring, and the widespread use of generative AI have created the perfect environment for fraud to thrive.
Walker and his team at Glider AI are now seeing threats ranging from fake LinkedIn profiles to state-sponsored actors using deepfakes and stolen identities to land jobs and compromise systems.
Absolutely—here’s an expanded and more compelling version of that section. It elevates the strategic risk, connects more departments, and adds urgency around organizational accountability:
This isn’t just a recruiting issue—it’s a full-blown enterprise risk that touches every corner of the organization.
“The entire C-suite should be losing sleep over this,” says Walker.
While talent acquisition may be the front door, they’re rarely the ones holding the keys to what happens next. A fake candidate doesn’t stop being a threat once they get the offer. That threat only escalates once they’re handed network credentials, access to customer data, or responsibility for systems and infrastructure.
Glider AI has seen firsthand how a seemingly isolated weakness in the screening process can spiral into a security crisis that brings in legal, finance, operations, and even the board.
Walker puts it plainly: “You can’t solve this with better interview questions. If your onboarding team, IT provisioning, InfoSec protocols, and compliance policies aren’t all working in sync, you’ve got a gap.”
Finance leaders should care because fraudulent hires can lead to financial loss, extortion demands, and insurance claims. CIOs and CISOs should care because these hires often gain access to sensitive systems before any red flags are detected. Even marketing and comms teams will feel the impact when a breach becomes public.
Hiring fraud isn’t just a glitch in TA’s process, it’s a business continuity issue. Companies that treat it like a siloed recruiting problem are the ones most likely to get blindsided.
Walker breaks down the different levels of candidate fraud:
In one case, a company ignored clear cheating signals because the candidate scored a perfect 100. That candidate later hacked into the company’s systems. The FBI got involved.
Glider has caught candidates using webcams, remote control tools, and even live coaching during interviews. One proctoring session caught someone whispering, “This is my fifteenth interview this week,” off-camera. Others are using software overlays to get real-time, contextual answers fed to them during interviews. Walker says this is more common than most leaders realize. “If you don’t verify who’s taking the assessment or showing up for the interview, you might be onboarding a threat.”
Some roles are more attractive to fraudsters—particularly those with access to sensitive data or infrastructure. And yes, some geographies are more active in these schemes.
Energy, finance, healthcare, and tech are high-value targets. But fraudsters are getting smarter. They’re entering through low-risk roles like contact centers and gradually working their way into more secure systems.
Walker outlines the common elements his team sees:
And then there are the copycats—people trying to replicate North Korean fraud operations for profit, access, or even sabotage.
What’s actually effective? According to Walker:
“This isn’t about slowing down hiring. It’s about stopping the kind of hire that could cost you everything.”
A bad hire might waste time and budget. A compromised hire can upend your entire business.
Organizations tend to calculate hiring mistakes in terms of productivity loss, recruiting costs, or backfill expenses. But when the hire in question is a fraud—someone who never should have made it past screening—the fallout is on a completely different scale.
Think ransomware attacks. Regulatory penalties. Breaches of sensitive customer data. And the worst part? It’s not just internal chaos. It’s public.
“Once your customers or the public lose trust in your ability to secure their data, it’s over,” says Ben Walker, COO of Glider AI. “You don’t just lose a hire—you lose credibility.”
And that credibility isn’t easily recovered. Customers churn. Partners question your controls. Investors get nervous. In regulated industries like healthcare, finance, and defense, the reputational hit often comes hand-in-hand with compliance violations and legal exposure.
“The trust you lose from one fraudulent hire can outweigh the gains from a hundred good ones,” adds Joseph Cole, VP of Marketing at Glider AI. “It’s not just a TA failure—it becomes a brand crisis.”
One company learned that the hard way. A candidate was flagged for multiple cheating indicators, including voice coaching and suspicious identity mismatch. Despite the flags, the candidate got the job. Weeks later, that same individual breached the company’s internal systems. The FBI got involved. The organization had to alert customers, launch a security audit, and conduct a full review of every hire that had bypassed fraud protocols.
That’s not an edge case. It’s becoming a pattern.
The cost of a compromised hire isn’t a line item—it’s a threat to your brand, your business, and your bottom line.
Here’s a more impactful and action-oriented conclusion to wrap up the blog, complete with key takeaways and a final piece of advice from Ben Walker:
Growing candidate fraud isn’t a blip; it’s a systemic vulnerability that’s quietly infiltrating even the most well-defended organizations. What used to be resume embellishment has evolved into professional-grade deception, supported by AI, global syndicates, and state-sponsored operatives.
Here’s what every enterprise leader needs to remember:
Final advice from Ben:
“Audit your process from end to end. If every handoff—from screening to onboarding—isn’t locked down, that’s your weakest link. Start there.”
The talent crisis isn’t just about finding the right people. It’s about making sure the person you hire is real, capable, and who they say they are. Anything less isn’t just a hiring mistake, it’s a business risk you can’t afford to take.
Transcript:
Joseph Cole (00:01.538)
Alright, looks like we are live right now. Ben Walker, why don’t you give an introduction about yourself, who you work for, what you do, a little bit about your background.
Ben (00:13.393)
Great, hi, I’m Ben Walker. I’m the COO of Glider. I’ve been with Glider for about four years, but have about 30 plus years in talent acquisition and talent management from a software perspective as well as a consulting perspective. And my role at Glider is to oversee all of our customer facing functions, which gives me a lot of exposure from an oversight perspective of what’s happening out there with candidates and candidate usage of our tools and.
ways that we’re detecting cheating and misrepresentation. So that’s why I’ve started talking about this quite a bit based on what we’re seeing as a company.
Joseph Cole (00:49.166)
Maybe just for some color, what are the industries or the types of customers that we work, no, we serve?
Ben (00:59.399)
The beauty of the Glider solution is that it’s industry agnostic. We have customers from a broad range of industries, from consumer products and manufacturing, automotive manufacturing, airlines, financial services, insurance, runs the gamut. So there’s no particular industry that isn’t a good fit for the solutions that we have.
Joseph Cole (01:20.494)
Okay, awesome. So today, truth or talent exposing the dark side of hiring, we’re going to be talking about a topic that’s coming up more and more, candidate fraud. And it’s going to be Q &A style fireside chat. So first question for you, Ben, let’s set the stage.
The idea of cheating on a job interview used to sound like a punchline. It’s now full blown security, a security issue. Why is candidate fraud becoming a front page issue for hiring leaders now?
Ben (01:52.529)
think the primary reason is the stakes are so much higher. The forms of cheating and identity misrepresentation have become much more sophisticated. mean, even before the interview process, you think back, it’s sort of quaint to think back to like, let me fill in a gap on my resume by saying I had a consulting gig for four months, know, embellishing a resume. Now there are very structured, sophisticated ways that through technologies that are available and organizations that are deliberately
trying to find ways to slip through this process through all forms of cheating and identity misrepresentation. So the worst case scenario is the real world examples of companies networks getting hacked, being extorted for ransom. That’s really the worst case. And that worst case is what’s opened up a lot of people’s eyes to what is happening in our ecosystem here with our talent screening and talent evaluation. And wow, I have way more risk than I ever thought I did.
Joseph Cole (02:51.532)
Yeah, makes sense. You answered some of this, but why does this topic matter right now? It feels like the floodgates have opened for obvious reason, right? There’s remote work, there’s generative AI, agentic AI, there’s global hiring now. You can find talent anywhere and people can work for you from anywhere. So what specific forces are making it easier for, I guess, candidates to fake their way into a job?
Ben (03:17.863)
Yeah, it’s those two key things that you just mentioned. The first is post-COVID remote evaluation of candidates, remote interviews, and then remote work where I may never set foot on a company facility. That’s the first dynamic. So now we have to adapt to ways to screen candidates remotely. That gives candidates an advantage of emerging technologies. You mentioned some of them. Tools built deliberately to…
cheat to the system, to get through an employee screening process if you don’t have the experience and if you don’t have the knowledge. one of the examples is something, if you just Google cheat on anything, that is one of the tools that’s being promoted here. It’s just the pervasiveness and maybe almost the ubiquity of tools that candidates have that are incredibly sophisticated to make it seem like they’re answering questions, whether verbally or on a skill assessment.
on their own when they’re really tapping into external resources.
Joseph Cole (04:16.686)
Right, so related to that, when you think about candidate fraud, you think about the hiring process and you think about the team involved as HR or talent acquisition. Is this really only an HR issue or a TA issue? Or is this a much bigger crisis for the enterprise? Should CFOs and CIOs be aware and concerned about what’s happening to the enterprise because of candidate fraud?
Ben (04:42.871)
Absolutely. mean, the entire C-suite needs to be aware of this and know that their functions are responsible for or connected. So I think of talent acquisition as sort of the first line of defense. They’re the ones who are talking to the candidates usually first and can detect things that are happening. But as an example, know, information security, network security needs to be involved in this process. As you have hiring processes from the start to the end, all of those touch points, including any onboarding activities,
Where am I shipping a laptop? All of those things, all of those functions need to be hyper aware of the warning signs and work together as they’re progressing through that process and handing off candidates from one function to another. It truly is an enterprise problem.
Joseph Cole (05:28.192)
So this one’s kind of…
Not on the list, but I think you can answer it. So when you think about like the history of technology and how fast it’s gone, you know, at one point in time, people might say like, Hey, using calculators, that’s cheating. You can’t use calculators. Right. And then like Google is like, well, no, you should know this. Why are you using Google? Isn’t the same to be said with AI? Is it just simply like candidates leveraging AI, being smarter with AI to have a better chance of getting a job?
I guess what’s the balance there between I guess candidates and organizations?
Ben (06:06.841)
Yeah, you’ve hit on the really sort of gray murky area as lots of companies are adopting AI technologies to enable their workforce. I need to use this agent to get my job done faster, easier to automate things. And then at the same time, like, but hey, candidate, you shouldn’t be using any at all. So there’s sort of acceptable forms of use of AI. So for example, in our skill assessments, we have AI agents that assist the candidate.
in the coding process. That reflects the reality of what’s available to developers today. Now, should you use it to answer the question and write the code in a screening process? No, probably not. So I think what’s happening though is people are using AI to say there’s someone other than they are, complete misrepresentation of who they are, to say they’ve done things they’ve never done and that they know things they don’t really know. So if I’m reading an answer from a script and it’s not really in my head,
And when I come on site into your organization, I can’t really do those things. I’m not going to be able to use AI agents and chat GPT and all that. I’m not going to fully be able to use AI to do my job and put my feet up on the desk. that’s where there’s sort of an increasingly broader line between what’s acceptable and what’s clearly not acceptable during the hiring process.
Joseph Cole (07:27.104)
Right. And I think you hit the nail on the head there is that it’s about setting the expectations and making sure that people are aware of what is acceptable, what isn’t and, at the same time, it isn’t necessarily only the use of AI to test someone’s, guess, aptitude. It’s also like, you know,
know, removing AI from the conversation. And it’s not just AI that people are using to cheat, right? To understand critical thinking, right? At the same time, there’s this, the idea of like this more nefarious thing is happening at the same time, right? Like people are getting jobs, landing jobs in companies with other agendas.
Ben (08:04.827)
Yeah, absolutely. mean, beyond yes. use of AI is a forum and it’s widespread of cheating through a number of hiring screening processes. But there’s others, like you said, there’s a, you know, I’m just going to have you take a test for me because you’re a great software developer. know, front end technology is much better than I do. Hey Joseph, will you just take this test for me? Then you you have professional test takers that are doing it for a large number of people and it’s much more sophisticated and they have more nuanced ways of
getting around cheating detection. Those are also things for us to be aware of beyond just, you know, is this person who I’m talking to using their brain to answer my questions? Is this person I’m looking at and talking to, are they the person that I think they are? And that’s where we get into some of the identity misrepresentation, identity fraud components of what companies need to be vigilant about.
Joseph Cole (08:57.934)
Awesome. And so I think this leads us into the next topical areas, talking about the spectrum of candidate fraud, right? So let’s think about the levels of severity. We spoke a little bit about people leveraging AI, more like augmentation, helping them do a better job at maybe interviewing. But what are the different types of fraud that…
you’re seeing or our customers are experiencing and Glider is catching. I guess where does it start and how far can it go?
Ben (09:31.035)
Yeah, so the first one is like least tech, lowest tech, least sophisticated is resume embellishment. And that’s everywhere, right? But now it’s not just filling in that gap of four months where I say I was a consultant because I was in between jobs. It’s let me fabricate a completely new resume based on a job description. Let me create a fake LinkedIn profile that corresponds to that. That’s the sort of table stakes of what people are doing to just make themselves look
more experienced and knowledgeable than they really are. There is then also this proxy component where the simple version is, Joseph, please, can you help me? Can you do this interview for me? You’re going to do a much better job than I am to an organized structure where there are professional interviewers who are taking it on behalf of. I’ve done 15 interviews this week and five of them for the same company. I know all the questions are going to ask me. I’m going to crush this interview.
So more structured way of organized cheating. And then the worst case is really that really state sponsored in North Korea, as everyone’s aware, I think these days the FBI’s promoted a lot of this. They’ve investigated it. They even have shut down some of these operations. But that’s where there’s a number of different technologies and a number of different ways in which they’re making someone who’s working in one place, in this case, North Korea, look like they’re working in another place, in this case, the US.
from a remote laptop and proxying in, and then once they’re in, hacking into the network and doing all kinds of damage. Like that’s the outer spectrum of what companies have to be aware of. that’s sort of key components of the spectrum from low tech and, you know, least sophisticated all the way up to the most structured and sophisticated.
Joseph Cole (11:17.012)
Right. And I mean, it could include leveraging AI tools to create fake profiles and deep fakes. And I guess is that happening? Have you seen it or at least heard about it?
Ben (11:29.605)
Yeah, we have heard about it. We haven’t seen DeepFake specifically. We have a live interview product where you conduct an interview with someone on our platform instead of say a web leading tool. We have ways of educating and informing our customers on how to detect it visually. We’re doing everything we can to automatically detect it. We have not seen it. We have not heard about it in our platform. In part, maybe because they know we have a number of different proctoring tools on our platform that you don’t have in a
a web meeting platform, we certainly have heard examples of that happening and people detecting it frankly, which is the good news, detecting it fairly early on. And there’s a number of things we recommend that they do if they can, if an interviewer suspects that’s what’s going on, ways to validate that that person is real, but that is certainly one that’s out there. And from what we can hear anyway, increasing in sophistication as these deep fakes get better and are harder to visually.
to the human eye and just being used more widely.
Joseph Cole (12:32.607)
Right, so people cheat, they’re getting better at cheating I guess, and then the technology to help people cheat is getting better and better.
Ben (12:43.047)
Absolutely, absolutely. And we refer to this as a cat and mouse game. It’s, know, what things can we shut down? What things can we automatically detect? What things can we enable our customers to look at manually if they need to? We’ve, over the years, added more and more functionality. But when we hear about new things, we work on new things that will help us shut that down, including our ID verification solution that we have. It’s a much more sophisticated way of making sure that I am who I say I am.
you can trust that as you go through a screening process with a candidate, you know who you’re working with, you know who you’re talking to.
Joseph Cole (13:19.158)
Excellent. Next area, professional cheaters and identity manipulation. You mentioned a little bit of this. So let’s talk about the role of the professional interviewer. There were syndicates of professional interviewers. You know, they’re making money from interviewing for people. So they take tests, they interview on someone else’s behalf. How common is this? And I guess how sophisticated is this operation now?
Ben (13:44.567)
It’s very common, unfortunately, and if you’re going straight from a phone call with someone to an interview, you’ve never seen them, you don’t have an image of them. It’s incredibly easy for them to have someone else show up to do an interview, second round interview, third round interview. So then the focus becomes who are we onboarding? Who shows up on day one? that person we interviewed? But, with our platform, if you take a skill assessment, we’re capturing information, including a facial image, so that when you show up to the interview,
we’re showing the interviewer, the person who took that assessment, their facial image is a match with who showed up to the interview. So that’s one way of detecting it, but it’s very common. We’ve learned about it sometimes because a candidate taking a skill assessment as a first part before a live interview, they have to share their microphone, their web browsing activity, turn on their camera, all these things to make sure that the end customer is really confident they worked independently.
We’ve had examples where they enable all those things. They haven’t started the test yet. They’re just about to start the test. And then we hear what they’re saying. They’re making phone calls to people. have someone off camera. They have someone remoted into the machine saying things like, are you ready to go? And we’ve heard examples of, this is my 15th interview this week. I’m getting so much traction and business from this week. hear it, interestingly, in the proctoring and recordings that we have.
And then on the interview side, have detected this within our platform as well that the person who shows up for the interview is not the person who the hiring manager or the interviewer expected them to be with some of the tools we have. So they can shut that interview down before it proceeds any further.
Joseph Cole (15:25.496)
Is this happening more in certain geographies, from certain places, you don’t have to name the place, and within certain roles?
Ben (15:37.017)
Yeah, great question because there’s like, we should be vigilant about everything, there’s, know, remote, we talked about that already, remote role. We are seeing certain geographies, we track this, we track treating indicators and we have a heat map. Certain geographies outside the US are hotspots. Within the US, we see certain states for whatever reason have more prevalence of cheating. So, you know, yeah, without.
Without naming names, there are certain areas that you should be more vigilant of. In terms of the roles, so there are roles that are more attractive to the people that are attempting to cheat for a number of reasons, whether it’s if I get this role, I’m going to have access to certain things that I can exploit. And we work with an energy company and they’re hyper focused on their nuclear facilities, obviously. So they’re applying additional controls for people in certain roles in certain locations.
Joseph Cole (16:17.742)
and
Ben (16:31.387)
and less so for other roles. know, call center, contact center, resource, a lot less risk there in terms of what systems they’re gonna have access to and what their function’s gonna be than someone working in a highly secure nuclear facility with access to really incredibly sensitive information, systems, hardware, facilities, et cetera.
Joseph Cole (16:53.486)
Yeah, it sounds like they’ll have moles in all kinds of areas and then expand and, you know, graduate to the next level of security. I guess, have you seen a pattern? Is there a playbook that these, I guess, bad actors, you could call them, are they used? You know, is there a playbook? Have you seen anything?
Ben (17:14.087)
Yeah, mean, the primary common elements are different email addresses, different names being used. Proxying into someone’s computer is very common for this scenario. So you might be looking at me during an interview, but if we’re doing technical exercises, it’s actually someone else controlling my machine. So that applies to skill assessments as well as live interviews. And then use of certain tools to help answer questions that may not be detectable to the interviewer.
There’s amazingly sophisticated, frightening, frankly, tools where you ask me a question verbally, the software that I’ve got overlaid into the interview, let’s say Zoom, Teams, WebEx, is immediately transcribing your question and immediately giving me a written answer that I can look at just below the camera line so I can answer those questions immediately. That’s not one of the things that you may look for is pauses between question and answer.
But from the technologies that I’ve seen out there, even that is harder to detect now because the answers are immediately available. And they can be personalized to me. I can upload my resume. I can upload a LinkedIn profile. It knows me. So when it’s answering the question, it’s contextual as well. So it’s not just this generic question about a skill or a technology. If you’re personal questions about me, about things local to me and where I live, it can contextualize that and give me really refined answers. So that’s the third piece, I think, that’s.
becoming more more common.
Joseph Cole (18:42.88)
Interesting. We spoke a little bit about this, but maybe we can unpack it some more. So fraud is really a global enterprise risk at this point. Foreign entities are getting involved. There are professional syndicates. So we’ve heard about those foreign entities. You mentioned North Korea, using fake identities to infiltrate US companies and get into highly secure
I guess roles to get data that they wouldn’t be able to get otherwise. So what can you tell us about that?
Ben (19:21.019)
Yeah, mean, it’s very structured, so there’ll be multiple things that you should be looking for. And so the other dynamic I’m concerned about is copycats. So now everyone’s aware of the North Korean fraud scheme. What I’m worried about is I’m seeing more sophisticated, organized proxies and cheating from some of the things that we look at at Glider, that maybe there’s copycats or people who say, well, I want to do that too.
either just to get more money from having many different jobs or temporary assignments and resources to deliver the solution, but worst case also maybe then, hey, let’s do what they were doing and hack into the network and extort and make even more money that way. So that’s one of the concerns that I have and I am seeing more of what seems to be professional actors, professional bad actors.
Joseph Cole (19:57.966)
Thanks, sir.
Ben (20:19.269)
not just individuals who are figuring out ways that they can cheat so they get the job. Professional bad actors working with collaborators to kind of spoof that system.
Joseph Cole (20:29.266)
Right. Related to all of this, is there specific industries or sectors that are at most or at highest risk?
Ben (20:39.943)
Generally, it’s very broad, what we’re hearing from more companies in financial services, I mean, think the commonality is the sensitivity of the data that a person will have access to. So all the information that financial services companies have within their networks is a key one. Others that have sensitive customer data in their systems will be more likely a target, but it’s not.
exclusive to those. mean, we’re hearing about it in a number of different industries.
Joseph Cole (21:13.294)
Right, I suppose like you mentioned some of the banking financial services, maybe even healthcare where people get sensitive information about people.
Ben (21:21.819)
Yes.
Exactly. The more sensitive information you have in your network, the more a target you are for someone to want to try and hack in and extort you. That’s the bottom line of it all.
Joseph Cole (21:36.288)
Right. So you shared some examples, but maybe an actual real world example, because I know you’ve got many working with lot of customers. What have you seen, know, firsthand? Can you share some real world stories that, you know, are real examples of when this has happened and how risky it is for the companies? And did they catch it or did our technology catch it or were they too late?
Ben (22:05.765)
Yeah, so good news, bad news. So in two cases, I’ll use two different industries, two different organizations that we work with that use our skill assessment solution, which includes a number of proctoring features that can include capturing someone’s ID and comparing the image on the ID to the image of the person who’s completing the process. Two examples, one was a manufacturing company.
They had a candidate take one of our tests. It had literally a red exclamation point on the test report indicating a number of forms of cheating. When we looked at that report, we can hear voices in the background. They were speaking a foreign language, which we now know was Korean. And they were able to detect a number of things through watching this. But the manager was so excited about the fact that that candidate got a hundred on the test. They said, well, let’s figure this out during the interview process.
Fast forward, got the engagement, started on the job, hacked into network, all these bells and whistles or alarms were going off, the information security group got involved, the FBI got involved. They went all the way back to, well, what’s all the inputs that we had for this? then in that example, they did request that their laptop be shipped somewhere else. They realized they used a fake identity, a stolen identity.
But if you go all the way back to the beginning, if they just said, look, we have this tool available to us, it’s indicating there’s concerns for us and say, we have a hard and fast rule to shut down any candidates that raise those alarm bells, they would have been fine. They’ve now built in a lot more assurances. They are requiring candidates to hold up their ID now on every test that they take. And so that’s one example. Another one is, I mentioned it earlier,
an energy company that similar situation they got through the process and then started doing nefarious things and only then did they realize there was an issue and their red flags were similar different laptop location hacked into the network Again going back to the test the indicators of that candidate not being who they said they were we’re all evident in the technology So what we’re working on is awareness through conversations like this and training and
Ben (24:24.551)
implementing business roles so that if you see something like this, be aware of it and don’t proceed with those candidates if these risk flags are going off. Those are two real-world examples.
Joseph Cole (24:36.386)
Awesome. Let’s talk about some blind spots, organizational blind spots. What are some of the most dangerous assumptions that companies can make when they think they’ve secured their hiring process?
Ben (24:49.991)
I’ll try and answer this from two perspectives. Like one assumption is, well, we can’t. And what I mean by that is there’s sensitivities, there’s data privacy considerations, there’s candidate experience considerations, and people feel like we don’t want our candidates to undertake a process that seems overly invasive or…
We don’t want to ask the hard questions if we have concerns about things where I’m concerned. Am I allowed to ask that question? Am I allowed to accuse a candidate of potentially cheating? Now, obviously there’s right and wrong ways of doing that, but that’s the first one is I can’t and just saying, you know, unfortunately due to a number of laws or policies, I can’t really poke too hard on those here issues that I wish I could. The other one is just a false sense of
we got this, you know, the number of people that touch candidates and even companies that are on the lookout for these sorts of things. If they’re not connecting every step in the process, I’ve talked a couple of times about the onboarding process. If you’re starting to get requests for odd banking account for direct deposit, you know, an odd banking account, can you ship my laptop somewhere else?
Not being familiar on day one onboarding with the people that you met and worked with during the screening process. There’s a number of things, but it’s all about connecting the different functions that are involved in the process. This is not an HR problem, as I said before. This is an enterprise problem. So people that feel like, well, we got all these controls in HR, we’re good. If you don’t have the cascading downstream impacts for your network and information security, physical security, you’re really in a false sense of security that everything’s okay when it might not be.
Joseph Cole (26:40.374)
Right, and I suppose another…
Concern or assumption would be that fraud is only happening with specific roles, right? It could really happen across any type of role. You know, obviously as you mentioned, there are certain roles with higher security and there might be an assumption that, let’s only enable this in depth proctoring or ID verification for those roles only. Do you consider something like that a risk that, you know, there should be some level of, I guess, security across the board
for all roles in hiring.
Ben (27:14.339)
Absolutely. mean, even on-site roles. We’re talking a lot about remote and that exacerbates a lot of these problems and it makes it more difficult to enforce things and detect things. even on-site roles where we’re screening them remotely maybe, but once they come on-site, we’ll know that’s really the person we talked about. So that’s one.
So, so while there are certain roles and certain work arrangements that are more likely to have people try to do this remote work for highly sensitive roles or where I’m going to have access to highly sensitive information. I talked about the cat and mouse game earlier. If I’m in this professionally and I’m acting as a bad actor here, I’m going say, hmm, they’re shutting down a lot of things for these sensitive roles.
Why don’t I try to get someone a gig in it like a contact center where I have access to far less things. If I’m sophisticated enough, I don’t care what role I have or where I land or what access I’m supposed to have to a company’s network. I’m going to find my way in. So in other words, if one door shuts, they’re to go find those other open doors. So it needs to be a holistic perspective here. While yes, there are higher risk scenarios. You can’t be.
put into a false sense of security by only focusing on those. You need to be focused on this for all the roles that you hire for.
Joseph Cole (28:55.994)
And throughout today’s conversation, discuss aspects of this, but what is the future of fraud prevention? So what are some of the solutions? What actually works to detect and prevent fraud today?
Ben (29:12.243)
So the FBI, as part of this North Korean thing, has put out recommendations for certain things. And it is when you’re having an interview, of course turn your camera on. And if someone says, even if you’re not using a tool like Glider that’s designed to detect a lot of things automatically in an interview, if they say, my camera’s broken or I’m not feeling well today, you have to, this gets back to, well, I’m not sure I can. Yes, you can shut down an interview if they’re not willing to come on camera.
The beauty of our technology is that we have all these automated ways of detecting it. It’s incredibly low tech in the most fundamental way that we’ve detected cheating. I’m recording what they’re doing. I’m recording what they’re saying throughout the interview process, throughout a skill assessment process. You have full transparency into seeing what they’re doing and we detect a lot of ways. That’s how we’ll detect a proxy being on. We can detect if they’re going to other websites or if they have another website open they’re using.
answer questions. So I think the future is just a really comprehensive way of looking at all the potential ways of cheating, incorporating those controls to detect it. Some organizations are saying, we’re going to do certain things on site now, which is great in theory, but doesn’t scale. the value to an enterprise of having a talent pool globally potentially and not being tethered to who do I have in this immediate metropolitan area,
That’s just too enticing and it’s not realistic to say we’re going to go back to the basics and we’re to do everything in person, on site. So it’s the technologies that are going to be the ways in which companies can protect themselves when they know that they’re going to be screening candidates remotely.
Joseph Cole (30:55.938)
So I guess this part having deterrence, right? You know, saying like, hey, this is a proctored interview and then having the safety protocols within. I mean, at the same time, it’s like, you you might see a house with an alarm that in itself is a deterrent, but it can also provide a false sense of security. You know that, I’ve got an alarm. You know, it doesn’t mean that someone can’t break into that house still, right? So the same thing, I guess, could be said with a candidate fraud.
Ben (30:59.975)
Yes.
Ben (31:21.307)
Yeah.
Ben (31:24.869)
Yeah, you hit the nail on the head. There’s a certain deterrence component to it. Well, if they’ve, if they’ve, you know, buttoned up this whole process, well, maybe I’m going to go somewhere else that hasn’t done that. So that’s a component to it. But still with the sophistication that we’re seeing, if they see that, you know, alarm sign, this house protected by the front yard, they see it as a challenge. They’re like, all right, I’m going to, know exactly what I’m going to do. I’ve got a playbook to do these five things.
Joseph Cole (31:43.79)
Yeah.
Ben (31:52.592)
I don’t care. yeah, the deterrence is one component to it, but certainly not sufficient as a standalone solution.
Joseph Cole (31:59.982)
Right, and I think as part of the before, during, and after approach to hiring and how do you layer in the security to ensure that you’re not at risk as much as possible,
Ben (32:13.223)
Yeah, absolutely. And I’m going to reiterate because it’s important. This is the challenge that a lot of companies have. Companies, large companies are siloed. There’s different people that have different functions and there’s handoffs and not enough overlap and coordination. So any company that does not have their whole hiring process mapped, not just from, made an offer and they accepted the offer. What happens next from onboarding? What happens in the first week of that person’s work?
Joseph Cole (32:21.805)
Yeah.
Ben (32:39.767)
All of those pieces need to be connected and everyone needs to have the awareness and the vigilance to look out for the warning signs and not allow those handoffs to become gaps where people are exposing weaknesses through the lack of communication and coordination across the functions of a large enterprise.
Joseph Cole (32:57.294)
Right. And we all know, I’ve seen the data about the cost of a bad hire, but what is the cost of a bad compromised hire? Right. I don’t know if we’ve got data at this point, but you know, there’s probably, you know, a huge amounts of risk in dollars involved there.
Ben (33:13.477)
Yeah, I mean, as soon as you start talking about there’s there have been 300 companies in the US who are known to have been affected by the North Korean scheme. And we know of examples where they have been extorted and have had to pay money to resolve that issue. That’s bad enough. the particularly if you’re in a particular line of business where the integrity of your information, whether it’s customer information or whatever is is is critical. The reputational risk can be
Joseph Cole (33:22.039)
Wow.
Joseph Cole (33:43.95)
Mmm.
Ben (33:44.039)
the deal breaker, like yes, okay, we had to pay this ransom and maybe we’ve got insurance for it and maybe that’s a one-time blip. But if work gets out there that a company that’s assumed to have all these controls in place and didn’t, that can be the most significant impact and long-term impact on the company.
Joseph Cole (34:00.94)
Right. So it goes beyond, like you said, beyond as simple as like, as an HR problem, you know, one dimensional, it’s not. It’s multi-dimensional. There is the impact that it has on the brand, the brand’s integrity and the trust that consumers, right. Or your end customer then has with your brand and maybe they choose to go with someone else if, you know, something else happens. So.
Ben (34:21.649)
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it’s like any any even if it’s not through a hiring process, any network hacking, I can remember a company that does just credit check reporting and like sensitive information got hacked and that business just evaporated very, very quickly after that happened because if your customers and the public in general can’t trust that their information is secure, they’re not going to use your company.
Joseph Cole (34:34.584)
Right.
Joseph Cole (34:50.798)
Very true. So let’s double click on one thing. This feels like, my gosh, there’s so much more that I have to add to my process. I don’t have as big of a team anymore. So what do you say to those people, the skeptics who will think that this level of rigor might be unnecessary and I can’t do it because it’s gonna slow down my hiring process and I need people now and I’m struggling to find people with the right skill.
Ben (35:15.111)
Yeah, I mean, if the first is just the awareness of the worst case scenario, if you expand someone’s perspective of what could happen, suddenly my time to submit and my time to fill are less important. Yes, it’s important. You want to focus on those things. But a lot of the tools we’re talking about, you we track this. We have faster time to fill rates with companies by using us because they’re going through processes in a more automated way, consistent way. It’s resulting in faster hiring times.
To those folks who are sort of doubting this, I would say we see two camps, the two biggest camps are those who embrace it. Just had a call earlier today with a customer of ours who is embracing the tools that we’ve given them. It required some training and some change management, but they now feel like I’ve got the tools I need to detect this and shut this down. There others who are saying, that’s just too much. Now I have to slow down my process. I have to become an expert in things I didn’t even have to care about before.
It’s the people who are embracing it who I think are going to have the more successful track record and realize this is just a cost of doing business. You hear that term a lot in a number of contextual conversations, but this is a cost of doing business today. It’s a cost of hiring today.
Joseph Cole (36:31.49)
Yeah, it goes back to one of those old things my grandmother, he’s always referenced, right? A stitch in time saves nine, but you know, it’s true here. All right, so let’s close. there you go. All right, so final, well, actually, let’s do a quick fire round. Truth or total BS? So.
Ben (36:39.397)
I love it. Absolutely.
Your grandmother knew my grandmother because she loved that one too.
Joseph Cole (36:58.016)
Let’s go through some of these. You can always spot a fake in the live interview. Truth or BS?
Ben (37:05.063)
BS. Unfortunate.
Joseph Cole (37:06.666)
Only technical, okay, only technical roles are at risk. AI is making it easier to cheat.
Ben (37:11.025)
BS.
Ben (37:15.663)
Sadly true.
Joseph Cole (37:17.29)
AI can also help us fight back if used right.
Ben (37:20.378)
Absolutely true.
Joseph Cole (37:22.658)
Most HR teams don’t know how bad the problem is.
Ben (37:27.963)
think that’s probably at least partially true. So I’m allowed to qualify my truer BS’s.
Joseph Cole (37:31.128)
us.
This almost feels like this is a yes or no answer, Ben. Truth or BS. Alright, final word. Ben, if you could rewrite the TA playbook tomorrow, what would the first chapter be called, knowing all of this?
Ben (37:52.455)
This is expression I use a lot in this scenario and that is trust but verify.
Joseph Cole (37:58.764)
Love that. What about one more? What’s the one thing every HR leader should audit right now if they want to stop fraud before it starts?
Ben (38:12.337)
I think candidate records in their ATS or their HRIS. Are those people where they say they are, you know, verify work history, which I think is far less common these days. But yeah, I would say do a look back, do an audit of some historical hires and just see if you have a risk that you weren’t aware of.
Joseph Cole (38:36.844)
Awesome. Well, thanks, Ben. How can people get in touch with you if they want to learn more about what you’re doing? Where can they find you?
Ben (38:43.527)
Yeah, my email is ben.walker at glider.ai. can find me on LinkedIn as well. Ben Walker, Glider will get you to me and I’d love to talk to people. I’d love to have them bounce ideas off me. I’d love to hear what they’re hearing and seeing and collaborate in any way that we can.
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