3 ms·
>Sadly, a new risk with "100% remote anywhere" culture. I think this is a new risk when it comes to hiring engineers. This kind of fraud has been present outs
by apohn 4y ago
>Sadly, a new risk with "100% remote anywhere" culture.
I think this is a new risk when it comes to hiring engineers. This kind of fraud has been present outside of Engineering orgs for a long time.
I used to be a hiring manager in a well known company that was 100% onsite. This was on the business side, not IT/Engineering. We were looking for a BI person as a contract hire. Our HR org said they had a staffing agency they had worked with for years. The staffing agency sent us a bunch of resumes that were surprisingly similar, filled with every buzzword and feature (e.g. I made a bar chart) and obviously weren't written by the candidates. After throwing those out, there were a few that looked decent. We had some phone screens and then a single onsite interview, but concluded there was something fishy going on.
I confronted rep from the staffing agency with with this and their response was that typically somebody in a managerial position (at our company) picked a few resumes, had a phone call (not video, just phone) with them, then hired somebody based on the phone call. My team was the first one that had actually done more than that.
Who showed up on the first day, who actually did the work, I don't think anybody had any clue.
The non-technical managers didn't have the skillset to properly evaluate these candidates. So they saw the keywords and picked the person that sounded the best.
Engineers hopefully have the skillset to evaluate and interview other Engineers, so the fraud is different and more sophisticated now.
IMHO, if you're the type of manager who hires somebody like this and what you wanted done gets done, you've probably got bigger problems than a staffing agency scamming you. If you think it's rocket science to build a couple of charts in a BI tool and you're happy when the person you hired takes 6 months to build a couple of dashboards at $100/hr...good luck to you.