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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?

#351

One of my clients (where screening CVs was one of my duties) had a different kind of fraud. On a particular week, we received a lot of CVs for a DevOps position. They shared a few common characteristics: were sent through Indeed, allegedly from Indians who emigrated to the USA, talked about skills and duties but not achievements, and were longer than one would normally write. Additionally, they used too-low-level phr…

I've seen this a lot this year.

Other red flags:

Resume says they live somewhere without large immigrant populations like some random town in the Midwest. Places that aren't really tech hubs so you wouldn't expect to find many immigrant tech workers there.

When you phone/video screen them. They are barely able to speak English to the point where you wonder how it's possible for them to survive in the area they claim to live in (again not areas known for large non-hispanic immigrant populations so you'd expect that a certain level of English competency is a required to function).

Sometimes they take the interview in what sounds like a noisy environment. Sounds a bit like a call center. You start to wonder if there are other "candidates" doing interviews for other companies in the same vicinity.

It's definitely been a time waster but I obviously will not filter resumes based on nationality which I think is morally reprehensible (not to mention the legalities that you mentioned).

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

#352
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of me suspects that this is a major reason for the push on RTO. If you hire people remote who used any one of dozens of mechanisms to cheat.. it can be hard to correct. You could have a candidate who does great on your interview then fails to produce a single PR in 3 months on the job.

If he fails to deliver on the job, put them on a PIP and get rid of them. If he actually delivers good work, who cares if he cheats?

The loss is three months of salary and the cost of hiring a replacement. Taken en masse, especially for smaller firms, quite a debilitating sum.

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

#353
post #348
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> was trying to do two jobs at the same time Happened at a company I worked at many years ago. Working from home was new, one dude who we all thought was suspect anyway got a call from his bosses boss and answered the phone with the wrong company name and it was over. To make an example of him they made him pay back some of his salary (his contract had him on call and available 24/7). Ran into him a while later and h…

This started to become much more common post-COVID. /r/overemployed is a sub full of people sharing strategies about how to maintain multiple jobs at once. Some of those folks have 3 or more jobs. Industries of focus seem to be tech and sales.

I can never tell how much on reddit is creative writing for a cause, sometimes those stories sound more like elaborate / sophomoric morality tales / fantasies ... but I don't doubt folks do it.

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

#354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> who wrote nested loops What is this supposed to be the connotation here?

This suggests runtime complexity will be O(n^2), which is rarely an optimal solution to a problem.

Some common cases (that wouldn't be considered algorithms) are:

- working with grids (rows and columns)

- iterating over nested data structures (eg. all people in a group).

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

#355

Just give them a simple screening coding challenge like copying a file to s3, then if their code looks OK ask them to justify their decisions, eg error handling, testing, etc. Tell them not to spend more than 1 hour on it. Google won't help much. I've had people use IDEs to auto create empty test cases, hard code file paths etc. No point wasting time on an interview and anyone competent will smash it.

I believe this is reasonable advice but I believe it can be simplified even further. Live-coding in an interview be it in a text editor (shitty or otherwise - those web based platforms can be really painful and slow to use when sharing a screen with zoom, e.g.) or on a whiteboard is a skill, and I’m not sure it is one that is worth optimizing for because I’m not sure that this particular skill really has much to do w…

Writing fizz buzz is practically a meme, but worse, what can you really talk about?

I agree about live coding which is why we send that test to them pre-interview - it's to screen potential candidates.

If they get to an interview, a reasonable amount of it is to ask what they've done and why, e.g.

* Did they write a CLI parser?

* If so, did they add sensible options (e.g. to force overwriting files that exist on the destination or not), or aren't they bothering to check whether files already exist on the destination

* Did they add/stub out tests? If so, to test what?

* What does error handling look like? Boto performs retries by default. Is this their justification or didn't they think about it?

* How else could they have done it (e.g. use a library vs shelling out to the aws cli binary).

It's complicated enough that it helps show their proactiveness. The instructions include 'making it good', and also say they can just stub out/write comments for what they would do if they were doing it for real.

It's saved loads of time in the past by filtering out people who don't even have the basics, and it's relevant to the work.

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

#356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My employer hired a guy from this company! I wasn't involved in the interview process but was tasked with mentoring him. His resume was covered with DevOps buzzwords and he obviously said the right things in the interview, but the guy could barely move a mouse around the screen... He took extremely long to do anything and then when he presented the work, it was very wrong and obviously copied from a bunch of stack ov…

This sort of experience frustrates me to hear. I'm out here trying my damnedest to be knowledgeable, well-spoken and engaging during interviews, and failing to get an offer. Someone with a buzzwordy resume and Google for interview answers gets hired instead... Why even try?

> This sort of experience frustrates me to hear. I'm out here trying my damnedest to be knowledgeable, well-spoken and engaging during interviews, and failing to get an offer. Someone with a buzzwordy resume and Google for interview answers gets hired instead...

Blame the automated candidate selection process that these very tech companies helped create and standardize in order to be 'ultra efficient in on-boarding qualified' candidates; this is the problem with just slapping AI to something as a branding exercise without considering the underlying mechanics and unintended consequences.

I guess be glad you got to even speak with a Human at this point because so many are just getting binned for not having the right buzzwords in their resume to pass the first screening.

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

#357
post #341
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…

The Google thing is very common now with remote interviews. I've interviewed several candidates that were clearly googling questions. Some I thought were scammers, others not so much. The funny thing is that they were all on camera. You can see the pause,you see the slight head turn and the eyes gaze away from the camera, you hear the click clack of typing and then the sudden recitation of a perfectly worded dictiona…

> The funny thing is that they were all on camera. You can see the pause,you see the slight head turn and the eyes gaze away from the camera, you hear the click clack of typing and then the sudden recitation of a perfectly worded dictionary answer.

What was your reaction? Would you prefer they be more subtle of the poorly kept secret that most of this job is simply trying to figure out why the code isn't running and looking for specific error codes from other people's projects?

I'm being sincere, because I'm studying AI and ML and I kind of doubt most CS majors could describe 85% of the concepts we cover at the undergrad level let alone describe the use of the sigmoid function and soft max when building a gradient descent algorithm in a NN if put on the spot; I know this because when I went searching for this they often say that even their professor sucked at describing it so much that they had just glossed over it entirely and admitted they would look it up when working with TF in the future.

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

#358

The FBI and other US federal agencies have attributed similar tactics to North Koreans looking to infiltrate particular industries [1-3]. [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/north-korean-crypto-job-cand... [2] https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/17/fbi_korea_freelancers... [3] https://www.wired.com/story/north-korean-it-scammer-alert/

If the FBI is accusing others of doing it, they're probably doing the same, or a more sophisticated variant of the same.

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

#359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there is. The reason is that they aren't superhuman, and aren't very popular anymore. This is something I've argued before: In the 40s, the US intelligence services could call up famous, brilliant people like Claude Shannon, ask him to fix some problem and never talk about the problem or his solution to it. If they tried that today, most would tell them to go fuck themselves. Now you may think things would be di…

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.

I have to work for a living. If I stop working, I'm homeless. Every agency in the entire US IC could ask me for help and offer me a billion dollars to do it, and I'd still tell those traitors, tyrants, and cowards to go rot in hell. Not that hell exists, but a person can dream, can't they?

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

#360

The FBI and other US federal agencies have attributed similar tactics to North Koreans looking to infiltrate particular industries [1-3]. [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/north-korean-crypto-job-cand... [2] https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/17/fbi_korea_freelancers... [3] https://www.wired.com/story/north-korean-it-scammer-alert/

The FBI seem to be able to infiltrate any group they like, so I'm sure they know the tricks.

Infiltrate? They're the ones starting the groups - the demand for terrorism outstrips supply these days. No terrorism = no reason to increase / not reduce budget allocated to FBI.
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