Simple - just auto-reject anyone who refuses to use a camera or answer specifics.
You'll be missing out. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32674503
Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?
311–320 of 419 posts
Re: Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?
#312Some time ago (~6 months) my company was looking to hire a programmer. We don't have a established process for this as it was some years since we hired a coder, but then we are in the industry (hiring) so published a couple of adverts here and there and we got the thing rolling. Most of the applicants were seriously under qualified, and my colleagues had to go through a lot of rubbish in the form of CVs in order to f…
Something you want to keep in mind is that stellar coders from India (I don't know if they're a huge majority or minority or whatever, but they do exist) already have stellar jobs and won't be up for hire. The random people who are up for hire from India — there's a good chance they're up for hire because they couldn't get anything else. You get what you pay for. And the best are probably not even in the market.
My UK employer in 2004 had the brilliant idea to save money by establishing a subsidiary in Bangalore. Find some awesome engineers and only have to pay Indian salaries & office rental! Took them a depressingly long time to understand that interviews are a two-way street and what most of the best candidates wanted was a multinational that would support them living and working in an exciting new environment for better money, i.e. moving to London and using the London salary to see the world and have fun. Some really good guys, but would have been cheaper and less disruptive just to recruit them straightforwardly. OTOH the director in charge of the project moved to Bangalore on a London salary with his housing costs and domestic staff paid for, living like a Maharajah and filing following progress reports. So the exercise wasn't entirely futile.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is money not a solution? A life-changing amount of money is peanuts to a government, and should convince the vast majority of people to take the job.
If money was what Shannon was primarily interested in, he wouldn't be in academia. This is true of almost all types of narrow domain experts. There are more parties than government that can offer them money, too. For most academics (and more, the better they are), not being allowed to talk about what you're working on to the vast majority your peers, would be too high a price for money to make up for. NSA circumvente…
There is no contradiction in being in academia because you want to spend your time doing research and accepting a nice bonus from the government now and then.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?
#314Ug... as someone that one day would like to work remote this is infuriating. Anyone who is doing this, you're destroying trust and making life hard for the rest of us.
I'm not sure if it's just "remote" or also aiming for cheap overseas contractors. As a senior remote US employee I don't see how any of the companies I interviewed with would even allow past screening not turning on camera or other tricks like this.
Sometimes, the problem is just getting to that first call.
If a job offer results in 20 genuine applicants, the company might set up 20 calls.
If the same job offer results in 20 genuine applications and 480 fraudsters, the seconds spent on a CV need to drop drastically for a HR person to make the decision to interview a candidate. And if the fraudsters do well faking a CV, and HR only has time for 20 calls, there are going to be a lot of false negatives (genuine candidates not getting a call back).
Re: Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand, next time I'm on a 30 minute screening and end up getting left with 10 minutes to show them I can write a functional program they will be too worn out to ding me for silly stuff like concatenating Strings instead of properly using StringBuilder. "You really should have used the enhanced for loop for that .." or "You really should have used a Lambda there" etc. After years of tech screens like this…
I get the feeling from this comment that tech interviewers would be very upset with how I write scripts in research. Part of the reason I will never shift to developer as a job is that the interview process is ridiculous. In universities, the uni hiring process is so imposing on the researcher's time that they just hire people they meet through informal processes outside the formal system. The informal system is usua…
> and the researcher checks your references to make sure you aren't lying scum.
That sounds way more professional than any interviewing process I've gone through in the industry /hj.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
That still costs you (the employer) money. It's like a DoS attack for your hiring system. E.g. a nefarious actor could harm a competitor by overwhelming them with fake applicants that it takes time to sift through.
This is the reason why employee recommendation have far higher success rate.
Now someone just needs to tell companies that the way to reward those is with significant cash in hand.
I've had companies offer $500 for a referral, if that person took the job and stayed with the company for at least 6 months (this was for a position with a salary of ~50$ per hour).
Re: Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?
#317what exactly is the endgame?
I imagine either: a) Get hired, collect a paycheck or two while doing the absolute bare minimum (filling out onboarding forms, etc - no real work) and then move on to the next victim company. or b) Get hired with the goal of getting access to improperly secured company or user data. I imagine a) is vastly more common than b).
I strongly believe there is also
a*) Get hired, collect paychecks until somebody notices, but then still stay employed because the KPI of a HR person in a fast-growing company is to fill seats, and firing people, no matter how terrible they are at their job, goes against that.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?
#318Earlier 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 do feel that if its possible to google interview questions in 20 seconds they are bad interview questions.
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Re: Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?
#319Early 2010's, Wall St software tech vendor: I had a candidate show up for an interview, in person, go through the preliminaries and then sit down in a meeting room for the detailed questions. As we got into it, the candidate often asked me to repeat the question. I was happy to do so, but after a few times, I was already taking care to speak slowly and clearly, and it was still happening a lot. Then I noticed a quiet…
Reminds me of an old Soviet comedy where a student taking exam in university with an ear piece. https://youtu.be/vADlGmX7-qU
In my country this isn't "common" but it's way more common than in other countries.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?
#320How many of these are candidates trying to game the interview into a remote dev position to sell the work to high experience cheap remote labor options in 3rd world countries?