Ask HN: Fake Job Candidates?

I have been contacted multiple times on LinkedIn to be that guy. They disappear pretty quickly once I start asking a lot of questions and raise ethical concerns. So weird.

The root of this problem is that technically speaking, most people doing recruiting don't know their head from their ass when it comes to technology. I don't mean having actual programming experience, I just mean having enough basic high-level understanding to have a little intelligent conversation with somebody. This lack of knowledge means that the only method most recruiters have to try and rank people is asking the pointless "How many years of experience do you have with X technology?" questions that are easy to just totally bullshit your way through.

A good technical recruiter ought to be able to have a 5-10 minute conversation with a job-seeker about stuff they can't easily bullshit: going into depth on a past project or asking them a system design question in a particular domain and having enough sense to ask a good followup question or 2 and knowing if their answers are anywhere near reasonable.

> recently we dismissed developer after discovering he was working (also full time) at another company (we coordinated termination on both sides - I'm not even sure if it made him without work or just removed 2 out of N jobs)

Was the person doing their job or not? I can understand firing somebody if he was not performing, and I can almost understand firing somebody if they have more than one job and work with some sensitive/confidential information and might be a risk in some fashion with 2 jobs in a similar industry, but it seems pretty mean-spirited to go after both jobs.

Honestly, I'd be more inclined to fire a manager who couldn't tell their employee wasn't working 1 job than the employee who was industrious enough to perform at 2.

I have a suspicion an engineer/developer I worked with was secretly working two or more full time jobs. I didn't mention it to our boss as I had no evidence - only a gut feeling. He was eventually let go anyway after being given far too many second chances to produce any sort of output. He had graduated college and started work just a couple months before everyone went to work from home due to the pandemic, so it was always ambiguous whether he failed to adjust, had crippling social anxiety, or was actually just sandbagging us & doing other things with his time.

A couple reasons I thought this was: weird timing of IM replies and un/availability, repeatedly getting caught and warned against using his personal laptop instead of his issued laptop for work (when we were in the office), an impression everything was a game to him, and the aforementioned lack of any output. After he got fired he changed his FB profile to say he worked at a different company in the same general discipline as we do, which could have innocent explanation he was just quickly hired, but maybe that was his other job or one of them.

Also weirdly his social media story posts mostly consist(ed) of trading app screenshots showing "line go up" equity gains in 4x leveraged ETFs even during weeks I know the market was doing poorly. Again just a gut feeling but my spidey sense is these app screenshots might be recruitment bait for some kind of scam.

A lot of this typically stems from Indian recruiters who harvest peoples' resumes. Sorry to sound harsh, but all the WITCH companies do this and are based in India [1]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27571707

Yeah. I don't write those.