Excerpted from a LinkedIn Blog by Russell Lobsenz, PhD
Something strange has been happening in recruiting over the last few years, and many TA teams and hiring managers are noticing it without quite being able to name it. Applicant volumes are up. Quality feels down. Resumes look polished but oddly generic. Candidates make it through a phone screen and then ghost. Or they show up to an interview and seem disconnected from the resume they submitted. Or you hire someone, and three weeks in, it becomes clear that the person doing the job is not the person who interviewed for it.
You’re not imagining this. Applicant fraud has become a genuine operational problem for companies of all sizes, and it’s getting more sophisticated faster than most hiring processes are equipped to handle. My own experience recruiting for sales and product roles lately reflects this. Application volumes are way up, and the resumes coming in are longer than ever, loaded with skills and tools and certifications. And I keep seeing employer names I’ve never heard of, and when you start asking questions, the answers don’t always match the resume.
Something feels off in a way that’s hard to pin down at first, but once you notice it, you see it everywhere.
Here’s what’s actually happening, and what you can do about it.
What’s Actually Going On
There are a few distinct phenomena happening simultaneously, and it’s worth separating them because they require different responses.
AI-generated applications. This seems to be the most widespread. Candidates are using AI tools to generate tailored resumes and cover letters at scale, applying to dozens or hundreds of positions simultaneously (Easy Apply has exacerbated the problem) with highly optimized materials that may have limited relationship to their actual experience and skills. The result is a dramatic increase in applicant volume with no corresponding increase in qualified candidates, and a significant increase in the gap between how people present on paper and how they present in person.
This isn’t necessarily fraud in the legal sense. People have always put their best foot forward on a resume. But it creates a signal quality problem that degrades the entire hiring process. Your screening criteria were calibrated for a world where resume quality was at least somewhat correlated with candidate quality. That correlation has weakened significantly.
Synthetic identity fraud. This is more serious. Fully fabricated or heavily manipulated applicant identities (fake names, fake credentials, fake employment histories) are showing up in recruiting pipelines. Sometimes these are people misrepresenting themselves. Increasingly, they appear to involve organized operations, like groups of people presenting one candidate identity, sometimes with one person handling the interview and another showing up for the job, or a team working remotely to perform the work of the person who was hired. Mind blowing!
This was an edge case a couple of years ago. It’s not an edge case anymore, particularly for remote technical roles, financial services positions, and any job with access to sensitive systems or data. The FBI and several state attorney generals have issued warnings about it. Some companies have publicly disclosed hiring people who were North Korean IT workers operating under false identities. This is real and it’s not limited to large enterprises.
Ghost jobs creating ghost applicants. There’s another dynamic worth naming. The rise of “ghost jobs” (positions posted by companies with no genuine intent to hire) has contributed to applicant behavior that treats applications as a volume game. When candidates learn through experience that their applications go nowhere regardless of fit, they rationally adapt by applying to more positions with less investment in each (Easy Apply, FTW!). AI tools make this low-cost-per-application strategy viable. The resulting environment is one in which neither side of the hiring transaction is behaving authentically, and both sides have rational reasons not to.
How to Spot It: The Signals
None of these signals is definitive on its own. Patterns matter. And the goal should not be to approach every candidate as a suspect. It’s to build a hiring process with enough integrity that fraud is hard to sustain.
Resume signals
- Extremely polished writing with very generic specifics, such impressive-sounding accomplishments that don’t connect to named/known companies, teams, or business outcomes.
- Skills sections that read like a keyword list rather than real capabilities
- Employment history that’s vague about scope, team size, or reporting relationships
- Dates that align a little too cleanly (tenure always ends in December, always left for “a better opportunity”)
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