Trying to hire people with technical skills is tough sledding in this era of extremely low unemployment. But what if your new hire turns out to have faked his or her capabilities and ends up being woefully miscast into a crucial project? Underqualified candidates can take advantage of tech tools to fake their way through interviews and testing, so hiring companies need to better equip themselves to detect deception.
The growing risk of hiring unqualified candidates is compounded by the growing use of online interviewing to fill remote work and work-from-home position. It prompted a warning from the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3): “Complaints report the use of voice spoofing, or potentially voice deepfakes, during online interviews of the potential applicants. In these interviews, the actions and lip movement of the person seen interviewed on-camera do not completely coordinate with the audio of the person speaking.”
There are many tactics that bogus candidates can utilize, including lip-synching, looking up answers from a mobile device, relying on prompts from an off-screen helper, even having somebody else stand in for the interview or online testing.
This is a big problem given the current scramble to find scarce talent during a period of historically low unemployment and companies feeling pressured to keep up with competitors.
“Remote hiring processes have given some job seekers the impression that they can get away with extreme forms of dishonesty,” according to a New York Times report on this phenomenon. “Virtual interviews leave open the possibility that candidates can ask a friend to feed them answers.” Furthermore, the article notes, “Right now, with job openings high and unemployment low, many companies are scrambling to find talent.”
As a recent Venture Beat report notes “over the past year, hiring managers had openings for over 300,000 US-based devops roles. And organizations are struggling to recruit skilled professionals to fill these positions.”
As a provider of expert tech talent solutions, we realize the need to go beyond traditional techniques to ensure our interviewers can weed out deceptive jobseekers. Supplementing our processes with emerging AI tools, we are able to ensure the right person shows up for the virtual interview, detect deep fakes, capture eye movements that can reveal a candidate opening up a web browser or looking to somebody off-screen for prompts.
Let’s be clear, AI is a tool, not a solution. In a Harvard Business Review article, British researchers write that automated video interviews processed through AI platforms can suffer from biases of the platform developers and the process can seem depersonalizing to candidates. An MIT Technology Review test of two other AI tools also reveals some of the technical limitations.
AI itself can’t be solely relied on to assess a candidate, but rather should be used as an assistant by highly skilled talent evaluators. That, today, is the best way to ensure you’re hiring the best and truly qualified talent.
