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We've seen a significant upswing in this over the last 18-24 months. It has gotten to the point where I can identify the fraudulent resumes as many of them seem
by spmurrayzzz 4y ago
We've seen a significant upswing in this over the last 18-24 months. It has gotten to the point where I can identify the fraudulent resumes as many of them seem to be cooked up from the same template. I wrote a quick script to identify these pretty quickly (assuming the PDF resume they submit has parseable text spans in them).
A lesser form of fraud, but still insidious at this point, are the templated resumes that misrepresent work experience. They will list a top line item in "work history" of something that sounds like tech startup, but in actuality isn't a company at all. It's just an open source project, that no one actually uses, with a website. Apart from the items listed, the candidates never have any legitimate work experience. It smells like a way to get resumes past any ATS keyword filtering and/or less-experienced recruiters.
And usually, the candidate hasn't really written much code at all in the repo. Just a smattering of readme updates, config changes, and maybe some bug fixes amounting to less than ~100-200 SLOC over the span of months.
In 100% of these cases we've seen so far, the resumes look exactly the same, including formatting/layout/etc. The projects all exist under the "OSLabs Beta" github orb [1] and the resume also lists a tech talk they did under the "SingleSprout Speaker Series" moniker. Most often, there is no actual evidence of them doing this talk, but in many cases you can find someone else doing the same talk topic on youtube if you search.
SingleSprout is a recruiting organization, so it seems at least somewhat likely that they are the ones shepherding this process, though I have no evidence of that. It could just be that they partner with this OS Labs entity as part of their candidate funnel. Whatever the case may be, this is at best (if I'm being charitable) a gross misrepresentation of candidate experience.
N.B. I am 100% OK with hiring folks based on (F)OSS experience. An active github is actually something I select for and, if its available, I will spend significant time reviewing such that I can have a meaningful discussion with the candidate about their work. These candidates are different entirely (for hopefully obvious reasons).
[1] https://github.com/oslabs-beta https://github.com/oslabs-beta
EDIT: Wanted to add some clarification here that this post is about the candidates involved, on the topic of hiring woes that OP brought up, but not about the specific entities I mentioned. It may just be incidental that all of the resumes we've seen have had the aforementioned patterns. It is not my intent to malign any of the orgs I referenced.
- dopamean 4y agoThanks for the interesting reply. I'm curious who "we" is that you reference several time. Do you work for an organization dealing with this problem?
- spmurrayzzz 4y agoI am director of engineering / cofounder at a company called Starry (wireless ISP). To be fair, I wouldn't call this a "problem" insofar as it doesn't cause any meaningful pain apart from extra noise in the funnel. Given how poor the signal-to-noise ratio is in most hiring funnels, the impact is more or less de minimis. I do still review every submission, at least in a cursory way, just in case the candidate has other legitimate experience and/or novel work on the github they link to.
- patch-n 4y agoUsed to live in a building with Starry internet, and just wanted to say thanks for the fantastic service while I was a customer.
- spmurrayzzz 4y agoI'm glad you had a good experience!
- bpodgursky 4y agoTbh I have more sympathy for this, as long as the actual candidate actually went through the in-person interviews. Resume screens can be brutal and high-loss.
- spmurrayzzz 4y agoI'm with you on that. I am empathetic to the take that a candidate may view this tactic as industrious & resourceful rather than deceptive. And as such, as I've stated elsewhere in this thread, I still review every one of these in earnest.