Hiring in an era of fake candidates, real scams and AI slop

[Andrew Losowsky at The Markup]

Andrew Losowsky discusses the impact of AI on his hiring process:

“Within 12 hours of posting the role, we received more than 400 applications. At first, most of these candidates seemed to be genuine. However, as the person who had to read them all, I quickly saw some red flags, which were all clear indicators of inauthenticity.”

These jibe with what I’ve seen lately too. I’ve had the privilege of hiring for a few technical roles over the last year, and every single time, almost everything Andrew mentions has come up.

The good news, as he points out, is that right now there are some really strong tells. One of the most important parts of any application I run is the “why are you excited about this job?” question, which is really a question about mission fit. The AI-generated answers are extremely generic, heavily reference the job description itself, and start looking very samey in a sample size of hundreds.

Here’s the thing I don’t believe I’ve encountered before:

“Someone made a fake email address similar to ours, then sent generic technical “tests” containing our logo to jobseekers, while linking to our job ad. Completing these tests led to a fake contract signed by someone claiming to be our CEO – it was at this point that the scammers requested financial information, saying they needed it to issue payments.”

The thing is, without someone telling me about it, how would I know? This is where we need stronger tools – the anti-spam protections of yore don’t work very well against AI-powered scams. Centralized repositories of scammers and stronger anti-spam filters may work, but I suspect we’re going to need to find other approaches. Impersonating to make some quick money is one thing (and bad enough), but when you consider that for both Andrew and I we’re talking about impersonating newsrooms, this could get very bad very quickly.

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