> ”The fake Connor Tumbleson immediately left the Zoom call.” I guess he felt the ultimate Impostor Syndrome.
Careful or he'll change his twitter handle to "thought leader" and write an self-help ebook about it.
Someone is pretending to be me
91–100 of 395 posts
Re: Someone is pretending to be me
#92This story gave me an idea for a different kind of scam in which the scammer acts as a man in the middle between a candidate and an employer. The idea is that the scammer could pretend to be the employer, tempting the candidate to go through the interview process. Whether the employers decides the reject or extend an offer, in both cases the scammer "rejects" the candidate, and takes on the offer to cash out pay checks until they're being fired.
The main technical challenge for a scammer would be to create a trustworthy looking email address so as to not raise the candidate's suspicion. It might not work with big companies but I've seen some companies using 3rd party services to send interviews invitation so it's not completely unlikely that this could work.
Re: Someone is pretending to be me
#93I think the root of the issue is LinkedIn. I know a number of scammers regularly monitor LinkedIn. When a new employee at our office updates LinkedIn they start getting email from the 'CEO', first asking for a personal cell number, and then asking to buy gift cards in a hurry. I'm seriously considering being LinkedOut.
This has happened to every new employee at my company within a month of them joining.
Re: Someone is pretending to be me
#94I got an offer for something similar from someone recently, wanting to rent my codementor account that I haven't used in half a decade. Strange times.
Re: Someone is pretending to be me
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you think you helped anyone in this scenario?
My friend, who is still earning a 200K salary 9 months later. He got terrible initial reviews, but they kept him.
Sounds like they’re stealing that salary, not earning it. Hope they work at a place that will never affect me personally.
Re: Someone is pretending to be me
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I hope Andrew [0] — the college junior with morals who blew the whistle on the attempt to get him to impersonate the author — gets an internship or job offer out of this; he apparently was having a hard time with that. Excellent point. I've been wondering about ways to test students on "trust/morals" and decided its one of the most valuable yet least well understood qualities. Employers generally rank skills, knowl…
I've simply asked candidates 'tell me about a time you had to make a moral judgement'. I'm kind of surprised that it's not a more common question, but of course that makes it work - truly immoral people would have a made-up anecdote if it came up regularly.
I like "Tell me about a time you failed miserably, absolutely and unequivocally, and how you recovered from it."
It's surprising how illuminating the responses are.
Re: Someone is pretending to be me
#97This story is much more fun when you come at it from the interviewer's position. You've been doing interviews every week. They're mostly rejections. They're the same questions over and over with minor variation. You're about to repeat the experience for the 18th time and you're 100% on autopilot. But suddenly you're in a spy thriller. This is the greatest thing that's ever happened. Is it a good legal/corporate decis…
> Is it a good legal/corporate decision to hide the person who claims to be the original and let him listen to the interview with the other candidate? Consider the situation from the perspective of the interviewer: They don't have all of the background we did while reading this blog. They haven't even had time to process what Connor #1 said by the time that Connor #2 arrives. The decision to hear them both out for a…
Which one do I shoot!?
Re: Someone is pretending to be me
#98My name is evidently hard to pronounce, even though the spelling, which is seldom right, is phonetic. It is specific to an obscure ethnicity. Except for also being my father's name, it is globally unique. I own the .com of my first name. Despite the occasional annoyances, I appreciate it as a security feature.
Re: Someone is pretending to be me
#99Someone messaged me on reddit once, and straight up asked me to do exactly this. Below is the message, but I haven't included their name because I think they were at least trying to seem sincere. --- Hi, hope you're doing well. We are looking for a professional interviewee. I'm not sure if you've heard similar thing somewhere. We are a talented developer group specialized in web and mobile software development. We ha…
If it were really true that this development group could deliver according to client expectations, they would do what many other groups do: form a consultancy and hire an English-language speaker not as a fake interview candidate but as a liason.
I worked with a firm that did this. Basically, they had one project manager who could speak decent English and about six developers who couldn't. The English-speaking PM was on calls with us, and then he'd farm out the work to the developers.
It was a win-win, because their group was getting work, and we were getting decent results at a discounted rate compared with on-shore resources.
But it's pretty clear that anyone looking for fake interview candidates is not actually planning to do that. They're essentially counting on the fact that it takes many companies a little while to get rid of a bad hire.
Re: Someone is pretending to be me
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I hope Andrew [0] — the college junior with morals who blew the whistle on the attempt to get him to impersonate the author — gets an internship or job offer out of this; he apparently was having a hard time with that. Excellent point. I've been wondering about ways to test students on "trust/morals" and decided its one of the most valuable yet least well understood qualities. Employers generally rank skills, knowl…
I've simply asked candidates 'tell me about a time you had to make a moral judgement'. I'm kind of surprised that it's not a more common question, but of course that makes it work - truly immoral people would have a made-up anecdote if it came up regularly.
I'd have thought a lot of completely regular candidates would be a bit stumped by that (especially since many non-trivial moral judgements are personal life stuff that's really off limits for interviews)
Although maybe that's the point: psychopathic candidates end up making up fairly unconvincing heroic stories whereas regular people look a bit confused and maybe mention something they didn't do because they couldn't trust it was legitimate or ask if their decision to volunteer their time for $cause counts.