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Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?

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Re: Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?

#241

Post by Melting_Harps »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #235
bawolff wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do feel that if its possible to google interview questions in 20 seconds they are bad interview questions.

interview fail: googled answers to questions daily job: google answers to questions.

> interview fail: googled answers to questions > daily job: google answers to questions.

But you have to cram to make it seem otherwise... seriously one of the most interesting things I have ever seen was a HR person say that they had a stack of CVs but self-selected for those who were able to use 'know how to google when stuck' remarks on their applications.

I think we should just be honest and come clean and state that it is impossible to gatekeep like this while at the same time then expect people to be 'efficient and self-starters' and know how to use stack overflow at the same time. We have built these immense, entirely contradictory, ways of virtue signalling in this Industry that this is the outcome you get and can come to expect from optimizing for this vetting process--in-person interviews only partially elongated the farce of it being a good way to parse through applicants.

Because the truth is you know they are doing this for 2-5 other potential employers and have to do the same there and this is the most 'efficient use' of their time to solve a problem: googling it.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?

#242

Post by 2143 »

b800h wrote: post #112

Interesting that this has increased recently from the perspective of OP, but it has always been the case, and it's an annoying timesink. My favourite example of this was a interviewee for a post working on Oracle data warehouses. A colleague ran the guy's CV under my nose before the interview - it was strange - it kept on changing tense, and contained a bit too much random technical information about Oracle's tooling…

What was special about 2007?

Re: Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?

#243

Post by hackish »

iaaan wrote: post #128

Earlier this year, I interviewed this guy who gave me really strange vibes. He would stall for a good 15-20 seconds after each question I asked... and then spit out a perfectly worded answer. I google'd some specific, peculiar phrases I remembered him saying after the interview and found that the phrases came straight out of places like the Kubernetes documentation, word for word. He was googling my questions and the…

> His resume said he'd worked for a company called "Data Service Group" (https://dataservicegroup.com/) for the last 5 years or so. Their website contains this sentence: "Over the past decade, our customers succeeded by leveraging Intellectsoft's process of building, motivating."

> Turns out, if you Google the quoted sentence above, you get TONS of websites for other fake companies that all contain that sentence

It looks like that text is part of the default template for a commercial WordPress theme named Engitech[1]. If you check the live preview and browse to the "Main Home" template, you'll find it there.

I wonder how many of these "companies" paid the $59 licensing fee? :^)

[1] https://themeforest.net/item/engitech-it-solutions-services-...

Re: Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?

#245

Post by KennyBlanken »

iaaan wrote: post #128

Earlier this year, I interviewed this guy who gave me really strange vibes. He would stall for a good 15-20 seconds after each question I asked... and then spit out a perfectly worded answer. I google'd some specific, peculiar phrases I remembered him saying after the interview and found that the phrases came straight out of places like the Kubernetes documentation, word for word. He was googling my questions and the…

This is really bizarre - one of the hits under that google search is for a university's IoT research group:

https://ceid.utsa.edu/iotsecuritylab/home-5/

Re: Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?

#246

Post by okamiueru »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #235
bawolff wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do feel that if its possible to google interview questions in 20 seconds they are bad interview questions.

interview fail: googled answers to questions daily job: google answers to questions.

Although I think I get the intended humour, the daily job certainly shouldn't be to Google answer to questions.

Google to get to documentation... Sure. Reading documentation.. Sure. Ability to understanding it and how it is used, that's what would be missing, and what is suggested the interview question failed to pick up on.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?

#247

Post by lodovic »

__d wrote: post #198
shostack wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or getting questions to secure placement for future candidates.

Yeah, I did wonder about that, but they could've just recorded the interview. Although that did happen, but I think that was the recruitment agencies: they'd debrief their candidates after their interviews, and the next time they sent someone in, they'd be prepped for the whiteboard design exercises we'd used previously. I ended up with a dozen different questions that I rotated, which seemed to be enough. General in…

Why would you continue to use that contracting agency if they were clearly gaming the interviews?

Re: Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?

#248

Post by fortylove »

snapetom wrote: post #107

Yes. I just had an odd Interview a couple of weeks ago. We were looking for a contractor and interviewed someone. The location he gave was the middle of nowhere, British Columbia. Turns out though, I don’t live that far away from there. I can see his window was full of heavy, dark clouds. However, there was a heat wave going on and there wasn’t a cloud for hundreds of miles. “Huh. Odd that we’re so close, it’s almost…

Could he have been traveling during the interview? I very legitimately once took a virtual interview while on a trip.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?

#249

Post by newaccount74 »

faeriechangling wrote: post #212
iaaan wrote: post #128

Earlier this year, I interviewed this guy who gave me really strange vibes. He would stall for a good 15-20 seconds after each question I asked... and then spit out a perfectly worded answer. I google'd some specific, peculiar phrases I remembered him saying after the interview and found that the phrases came straight out of places like the Kubernetes documentation, word for word. He was googling my questions and the…

I don't know how much I judge this candidate you're talking about. Somebody who can give you the right answer after 20 seconds despite apparently not knowing what he was talking about before seems like a pretty useful employee to me.

Many interview questions aren't about the right answer -- they are just questions that are designed to show how much the applicant knows about whatever is on the CV.

If you have Python on your CV, and I ask you how the garbage collector works, I don't want you to read some stack overflow summary to me. I want to hear your own description, so I can make a judgement how deep your knowledge of Python internals goes.

Anybody can type specific questions into Google. But if it comes to producing performant code, you need to have that knowledge in the back of your mind, because nobody is going to tell you to google that.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?

#250

Post by starwatch »

paxys wrote: post #7

This is exactly why the technical interview process is what it is. No point wasting time asking about backgrounds and describing past projects (all of it can be easily faked). Make them write code in front of you live as part of the screening round.

The goal of an interview is to let great people through. It's not to see how well people code while you're watching their every keystroke.

I used to make people write code in front of me. I've missed out on some excellent candidates that don't perform at their best with that kind of pressure.

What I do now is ask people to share some code with me that they're proud of. Before the interview I look through it. Then on the call we'll have a quick talk through anything good or weird I've spotted. That helps me know if they've actually written it, and understand it.

Secondly I ask them to talk me through an interesting (to them) project they've worked. Then I dig into the how/why on project specifics to see how deep their understanding is. I tend to navigate to specifics that'll be important in the work I'm offering.

I also give candidates a heads up that that's what I'll be doing so they're not caught off guard. It's hard for them to know exactly the path of our conversation, but if they know what they've done and why they perform well.

With those tactics I've been able to hire some excellent engineers - several of which get quite anxious at the prospect of writing code in front of strangers.

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