3 ms·

This has been happening for decades. Long before covid, saddle up and due your due dilligence. Any decently sized company has employment contractual provisions

by than3 4y ago

This has been happening for decades. Long before covid, saddle up and due your due dilligence. Any decently sized company has employment contractual provisions for misrepesentation of facts, expertise, and experience during the hiring process. Use that, hire one of the other candidates you interviewed, and fire them. The only unfortunate thing here is having to read about this because your team failed in their due dilligence. That's a team/company failure, and this looks more like fluff spin for a narrative than anything else. Your people didn't do their jobs, and lost costs vetting a potential hire who wasn't a good hire because of it. That's the business you are in. You knew the risks. Prior to the first interview you should have covered an introduction and some of the expected vetting processes (i.e. Should we choose to extend an offer... there are requirements for an in-person report for HR to check I9 and other forms (i.e. potentially a certification of the facts they submitted as part of the process ...), and the required process of reporting instances of fraud to IC3/FBI). [It is often across state lines]. That's just some examples, I'm sure you can figure it out with your legal team if this is really an issue, because its seriously not that hard. You set up a process that gives bad actors enough rope so that if they cost you money in bad faith, there will be consequences.

throwaway09223 4y ago
Regarding in-person I9 checks, I had a very interesting experience recently with a friend who was hired at a big 4 accounting firm. They deputize a friend of the employee (me) to verify that they have checked the I9 in person. They use a service for this: https://www.lawlogix.com/ https://www.lawlogix.com/ It was a very strange experience. Here I am a totally unrelated party becoming an "authorized representative" of the firm to look at a document and verify it's real. There was no real verification of me, mind you. I could have been anyone. I have no idea how normalized this sort of thing has become, but I was quite surprised that they appoint some random individual rather than have an actual employee do the document verification.
- Test0129 4y ago
  I found this process strange at the last company I worked. While the service required photo evidence of the documents they allowed you to elect a "representative" who can verify the documents physically. Typically at other jobs I had that were remote a company official would verify photo copies of the documents and use either a video chat or other means to corroborate them.
- saagarjha 4y ago
  This is pretty normal, I’ve done it at several FAANGs too. I’m not sure what it’s supposed to verify but I guess the penalty is if your representative lies they can put them in jail.
NonNefarious 4y ago
That seems to be overstating their "failure" here. It seems that the person they actually interviewed may have been qualified, personable, and so forth. The problem is that a TOTALLY DIFFERENT PERSON showed up to work. How is that a failure in "vetting?" I haven't been through a cold hire in a while (where I wasn't already known to the company), but I suppose the only solution is to demand photo ID and check online records as well. But I doubt many companies actually do this.
- michaelt 4y ago
  In the UK, it's required by law to confirm the applicant has the right to work in the country [1] - which means checking photo ID, and confirming photos are the same across all documents and look like the applicant. If that hadn't been done, it's a failing of the hiring process. However, the ID check would usually be done by someone in HR after the hiring decision had been made, and exchanging photos of applicants is not the norm. So I suppose you could send someone competent to the tech interviews, and swap in the incompetent person at the ID check. [1] https://www.gov.uk/check-job-applicant-right-to-work https://www.gov.uk/check-job-applicant-right-to-work
  - softveda 4y ago
    Same in Australia, atleast for professional jobs you will need to give your Passport or Citizenship Certificate for verification. https://immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/visas/employing-and-sponsoring-someone/hire-someone-in-australia https://immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/visas/employing-and-sponsori...
  - NonNefarious 4y ago
    Yeah, all of that is too late. The ID verification has to take place at INTERVIEW time, not later.
at-fates-hands 4y ago
> This has been happening for decades. Long before covid, saddle up and due your due dilligence. Some ancedotal evidence to support what you're saying. My first real development gig was for a startup in 2005. It was a small salesforce team, and I was a front-end guy. We had a small cluster of cubes in a two story, tiny office in a warehouse district. Indian guy sitting to my left kept getting up and going over and asking the team lead questions and then he'd go back to his desk. Repeat about every 20 minutes. I come in one morning and he's at his desk, furiously paging through the ".Net Nuke for Dummies" book. Another day of him getting up and continually asking the team lead how to do stuff. Since this was constantly taking place out of my peripheral vision, it was really distracting. I finally asked the team lead to go to lunch. After we sit down, I ask him WTF is going on with the guy sitting next to me. He rolls his eyes and tells me, "Dude, this is the second time this has happened. We interview a guy over Skype, he does well, passes the code challenge, and we hire him. He gets into our office and doesn't know how to do shit. I'm talking like basic shit man. Like, you're a front-end dev. It would be like hiring you and you come in and start asking how to write HTML. We're still trying to figure out how this scam works and we thought adding a code challenge would weed some folks out, but I guess not. Anyways, he'll be gone by the time we get back from lunch." This all happened in 2005, almost 20 years ago. I've been at larger companies and have seen the same thing happen over the years. It seems like a cat and mouse game. As soon as you add something to try and weed these folks out, they figure out how to game whatever due diligence you've put in place and then it starts all over again.
- wildrhythms 4y ago
  My employer is gigantic and well-known and this still happens. I refrain from looking at a resume before an interview, the recruiter just tells me what to interview for (front end developer). I start basic, like "Write a 1-5 star rating widget in HTML", I even show them a picture of what it should look like, only to be met with hmm and uhhs, some broken, invalid HTML, and not a single line of working code written. In one instance, the candidate attempted to surreptitiously call their friend for help (it's very obvious because I heard the ringing tone). Later, when I actually look at their resume, I find the expected flowering claims of 10+ years experience in front-end and whatnot listed on their resume. What a waste of time

by than3 4y ago

throwaway09223 4y ago

Regarding in-person I9 checks, I had a very interesting experience recently with a friend who was hired at a big 4 accounting firm. They deputize a friend of the employee (me) to verify that they have checked the I9 in person. They use a service for this: https://www.lawlogix.com/ https://www.lawlogix.com/ It was a very strange experience. Here I am a totally unrelated party becoming an "authorized representative" of the firm to look at a document and verify it's real. There was no real verification of me, mind you. I could have been anyone. I have no idea how normalized this sort of thing has become, but I was quite surprised that they appoint some random individual rather than have an actual employee do the document verification.

Test0129 4y ago
I found this process strange at the last company I worked. While the service required photo evidence of the documents they allowed you to elect a "representative" who can verify the documents physically. Typically at other jobs I had that were remote a company official would verify photo copies of the documents and use either a video chat or other means to corroborate them.
saagarjha 4y ago
This is pretty normal, I’ve done it at several FAANGs too. I’m not sure what it’s supposed to verify but I guess the penalty is if your representative lies they can put them in jail.

NonNefarious 4y ago

That seems to be overstating their "failure" here. It seems that the person they actually interviewed may have been qualified, personable, and so forth. The problem is that a TOTALLY DIFFERENT PERSON showed up to work. How is that a failure in "vetting?" I haven't been through a cold hire in a while (where I wasn't already known to the company), but I suppose the only solution is to demand photo ID and check online records as well. But I doubt many companies actually do this.

michaelt 4y ago
In the UK, it's required by law to confirm the applicant has the right to work in the country [1] - which means checking photo ID, and confirming photos are the same across all documents and look like the applicant. If that hadn't been done, it's a failing of the hiring process. However, the ID check would usually be done by someone in HR after the hiring decision had been made, and exchanging photos of applicants is not the norm. So I suppose you could send someone competent to the tech interviews, and swap in the incompetent person at the ID check. [1] https://www.gov.uk/check-job-applicant-right-to-work https://www.gov.uk/check-job-applicant-right-to-work
- softveda 4y ago
  Same in Australia, atleast for professional jobs you will need to give your Passport or Citizenship Certificate for verification. https://immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/visas/employing-and-sponsoring-someone/hire-someone-in-australia https://immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/visas/employing-and-sponsori...
- NonNefarious 4y ago
  Yeah, all of that is too late. The ID verification has to take place at INTERVIEW time, not later.

at-fates-hands 4y ago

> This has been happening for decades. Long before covid, saddle up and due your due dilligence. Some ancedotal evidence to support what you're saying. My first real development gig was for a startup in 2005. It was a small salesforce team, and I was a front-end guy. We had a small cluster of cubes in a two story, tiny office in a warehouse district. Indian guy sitting to my left kept getting up and going over and asking the team lead questions and then he'd go back to his desk. Repeat about every 20 minutes. I come in one morning and he's at his desk, furiously paging through the ".Net Nuke for Dummies" book. Another day of him getting up and continually asking the team lead how to do stuff. Since this was constantly taking place out of my peripheral vision, it was really distracting. I finally asked the team lead to go to lunch. After we sit down, I ask him WTF is going on with the guy sitting next to me. He rolls his eyes and tells me, "Dude, this is the second time this has happened. We interview a guy over Skype, he does well, passes the code challenge, and we hire him. He gets into our office and doesn't know how to do shit. I'm talking like basic shit man. Like, you're a front-end dev. It would be like hiring you and you come in and start asking how to write HTML. We're still trying to figure out how this scam works and we thought adding a code challenge would weed some folks out, but I guess not. Anyways, he'll be gone by the time we get back from lunch." This all happened in 2005, almost 20 years ago. I've been at larger companies and have seen the same thing happen over the years. It seems like a cat and mouse game. As soon as you add something to try and weed these folks out, they figure out how to game whatever due diligence you've put in place and then it starts all over again.

wildrhythms 4y ago
My employer is gigantic and well-known and this still happens. I refrain from looking at a resume before an interview, the recruiter just tells me what to interview for (front end developer). I start basic, like "Write a 1-5 star rating widget in HTML", I even show them a picture of what it should look like, only to be met with hmm and uhhs, some broken, invalid HTML, and not a single line of working code written. In one instance, the candidate attempted to surreptitiously call their friend for help (it's very obvious because I heard the ringing tone). Later, when I actually look at their resume, I find the expected flowering claims of 10+ years experience in front-end and whatnot listed on their resume. What a waste of time