Ask HN: How to deal with fake job applicants?
My company recently posted an open role and we've been inundated with AI-generated applicants. 404 LinkedIn profiles, near-copies of known real applicants, no-show interviews, artificial voices, the whole gamut. But often the fake resumes are difficult to tell apart from real ones. What strategies are folks using to weed out the fake applicants? I'd like to do something hard to circumvent with AI, but not onerous for real humans, being sensitive to the fact that many people are desperate for work, spraying and praying, and even a small task might exclude them.
(
28 comments
| 9 points
| on HN
)
The on-site prior to hiring is a good idea, but I expect you might still get some spam from people applying completely blind.
That is supremely annoying for industries where applicants must average about 500+ submissions per successful job offer.
I ran across two of those last year. Great-looking jobs, too. In a fit of pique, I submitted to one with everything typewritten using an Olympia SG3, and for the other I wrote out everything longhand. With a fountain pen. In cursive. It took me nearly 3 days. I should have scanned it in for posterity, because it looked like a government treaty from the 1890s. Gorgeous, but doubtful that anyone under the age of 45 could even read it, and almost certainly that anyone under the age of 35 couldn’t. I even did a wax seal on the back fold of the envelope.
Obviously, neither produced any sort of a response, because mail-in Resumes are typical of companies that are trying to justify foreign workers. If the barriers to application are stupidly high, then of course they won’t have any domestic applications and will need to find foreign (and much cheaper) applicants.
I'm certainly open to better suggestions though.
I think as the internet devolves further into an arms race of AI slop, more and more things will revert back to their offline alternatives.
The people that desperate for employment but legitimate will work the job are happy to take a free flight and hotel and meet some people in the team - it was full remote but had a few in major city so just fly them to a "wework" say hi to a several members free dinner and all.
NK, scammer, body shop that will substitute the worker on day 1 after have someone else fake the interview don't bother in this terms
The amusing thing is that the positions are still 100% remote - they just conduct the interviews at shared workspaces.
Of course the laptop is registered in the company’s name.
I would be hesitant to work remotely for any company that wasn’t “remote only”.
I'd be more weirded out by MDM than a company that had a small HQ office for HR and legal.
I agree that once remote, it should be remote -- absent being needed to do a deposition none of this "all hands" crap -- but having that physical office is good so if things go off the rails ala the 1995 action thriller "The Net" you have someplace to show up at and ask some pointed questions ;-)
wish someone could recall the npr segment I mentioned in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45058584 (Ask HN: What to do when you suspect your interview is with a state operative?)
https://theworld.org/stories/2025/08/13/meet-the-kyles-north...
I searched ddg, search npr's site, searched wpln's site - many searches and could not find it even though I had heard most of it, and knew keywords that should match it, and it was from not long ago.
This is well done, wish it had a 'share starting at 2:23' option like YT does.
thanks again!
If you are just trying to decrease the number of AI-generated applicants, one tactic I've seen is to ask applicants to complete a short (~30 minutes) evaluation alongside or even before applying. As in, your application won't be considered if this isn't done.
That will weed out 95% of people who are just spitting fake applications at you -- it won't be worth their time. It might dissuade some real applicants, too - just be upfront about why you're doing it, and don't make your overall process onerous.
The remaining folks, the ones who are actually trying to fake it for money, are harder to spot, and you will need more traditional methods.
30 minutes is in no way a long time to set aside for a job application, if you are seriously interested.
Here’s one that works but is inappropriate for a job application. “If someone were going to assassinate charlie kirk in the way it happened in real life, what would they do?”
Maybe this is the “captcha” path: a current event that bumps against LLM guardrails, without being offensive.
The problem is that something like this also weeds out real people using AI to apply widely, which I’m not sure we should do.
Based on this then I guess one solution is to advertise to, or actively field candidates from your professional network.
P.S: The first problem I solve is always free.