7 ms·

AI generated recruits are a fiction. That's not to say there aren't fake or bait and switch recruits but this idea makes no sense. Some background. I'm a senio

AI generated recruits are a fiction. That's not to say there aren't fake or bait and switch recruits but this idea makes no sense. Some background. I'm a senior developer who has performed hundreds of interviews and seen dozens of questionable recruits long before AI. Typically the scam is that an offshore consultancy wants to place some roles to collect wages. Many of these agencies are from collectivist cultures, so in the mind of the agency, they all work in our project. This may not be true, but the agency sees the position as theirs, not the recruit's. So they typically don't the issue with putting recruit A in front of the interviewer and then slotting recruit B in after the position is secured. I've seen this done with A talking while B moves their lips on camera. Now with chatGPT (and earlier to some degree with just Google Search) we just see applicants eyes focused on something they're reading when we ask questions. All of this is just as easy as an AI generated applicant (if not easier) and quite likely to get the recruit hired. A lot of this narrative is pointing the finger at China, North Korea and Russia/Ukraine. The best candidates I've fielded have been Ukrainian, Russian and Chinese. These are countries well known for their tech sectors. North Korea has executed the largest crypto heists in history. These are not groups who need to fake it. So who does this narrative serve? It serves the RTO CEOs. This makes CEOs scared to hire remote workers and lets the ones who demand it have a reason. If anything the panic around AI should reinforce the need to think critically about these things.

codegladiator 2y ago
> putting recruit A in front of the interviewer and then slotting recruit B in after the position is secured reality is way more messy and worse. There are multiple actors involved in each part. Eg 2-3 "actors" for visual screen are ready for each call, 2-4 "audio" knowledge only experts on the call, 1 dedicated speaker, 1 person coordinating answers from audio folks to actor folks. they are even ready for once in a while visit to offices in us, so they have actors there on the field as well ready to attend calls (probably 1 to 1 mapping after first visit) and the work assigned is assigned to a completely different set of people, not involved in any of above. those folks and these folks dont interact. i have worked part time as one of the "audio" person in above interviews. also involved on work side. ama.
- transcriptase 2y ago
  … what’s the point?
  - ttoinou 2y ago
    Make money ?
    - ziddoap 2y ago
      I'm having trouble understanding how 1 company paying 1 salary for 1 position makes money for the 8-12 people described in the process above.
      - lazide 2y ago
        Those people are only for the initial interview. Also, the purchasing power disparity in different regions is humongous. For what a typical L5 might get paid in Silicon Valley, you can afford a team of 5-10 in India, and India isn’t even ‘low cost’ anymore.
      - gibbitz 2y ago
        You assume they care about the people and underestimate the desperation of those employees. This is slave labor and it's what US developers are up against. This is why under Trump we've seen 100k layoffs in Tech this year.
      - tmottabr 2y ago
        because the people above are just for the interview.. And they are shared across multiple jobs, so it is not just 1 position.. They apply to multiple jobs at multiple companies.. One team handle interview process to make sure they get the job, once they get the job another set of people handle the actual work.. And then the interview team also handle any instance the person need to be seen or talked to.. Each job pay a few of those guys and the company keep the rest.. If they land enough jobs they can easily pay for all that..
      - codegladiator 2y ago
everdrive 2y ago
We've had more than a few in my company. We work in Cybersecurity for the company, so we've definitely seen them and seen the details. I don't actually think they're that hard to avoid .. but to say they're not a problem at all is not fair. I agree with you that if taken the wrong way that this is just ammunition for "return to office" efforts. A LOT of people are far worse at interviewing than they think they are. And so, a bullshit artist can get hired. Technology now allows these bullshit artists to propagate more, and do more damage than would have previously be possible. AI in the workplace is a similar problem. Can you tell the different between someone who really just leans on ChatGPT all day but is actually incompetent? Probably so, but someone who was that incompetent just wouldn't have previously been able to hang on for quite as long, or deceive so many people. [edit] It's clear that my comment was not clearly written -- when I said "A LOT of people are far worse at interviewing than they think they are," I was referring to the people holding the interviews, and not referring to candidates. I'm shocked at just how bad a lot of folks are at holding interviews, and just how misplaced their confidence in their ability seems to be.
- mistrial9 2y ago
  > A LOT of people are far worse at interviewing than they think they are. A LOT of interviews are one-sided bully sessions, so people don't jump through the hoops they are expected to.. especially in hazing-friendly cultures like the security and finance sectors
  - everdrive 2y ago
    No disagreement there. The best way to get honest information from people is NOT to really leverage the power balance over them and try to "catch" them in an interview. People also commonly mistake "the stuff I know" for "general intelligence," and so they incorrectly think that their interview questions really tell them very much about a candidate.
- lq9AJ8yrfs 2y ago
  > A LOT of people are far worse at interviewing than they think they are. This works both ways right? Would it be fair to say that interview processes don't differentiate good hires from bullshit artists? Feels like framing the problem differently might make it tractable.
FirmwareBurner 2y ago
>The best candidates I've fielded have been Ukrainian, Russian and Chinese. These are countries well known for their tech sectors. Out of curiosity, what tech sector does Ukraine have? I don't remember ever hearing of any large successful Ukrainian SW compony or unicorn.
- mistrial9 2y ago
  parts of remote Eastern Europe have produced excellent techs for decades.. they seem to deny it now but JetBrainz is from there, which is hugely successful.
  - FirmwareBurner 2y ago
    >parts of remote Eastern Europe have produced excellent techs for decades.. Like wich exactly? Jetbrains is one, but it is from Czechia IIRC. I was asking what tech products has Ukrainian tech sector produced.
    - mistrial9 2y ago
      Leonid Radvinsky, Ruja Ignatova ?
      - FirmwareBurner 2y ago
        What part of "tech products of Ukraine" was unclear?
      - throwaway48476 2y ago
        An Israeli and a Bulgarian gypsy?
    - dkarl 2y ago
      I've worked with several excellent Ukrainian developers, but in each case they were working for consulting firms in other Eastern European countries.
    - 2y ago
mattbrewsbytes 2y ago
My experience was similar but with on/offshore companies in India. We just started requiring camera on (it was pre-pandemic) and it was obvious if candidates knew their stuff or were just prepped and/or reading responses. Most of those contracts were setup where the company was providing a "service" with fake cost recovery wordings if the service was not provided. Money only went one way, the contracts had wording about penalty payback but the reality after talking with people in finance was the financial process/systems weren't setup for that, lol. Ways to combat bait and switch is to alter interview questions, add new questions to every interview, ask deeper level questions, and observe the candidate in how they respond. It should be a more conversational tone the entire time, random discussion paths pursued, especially if the candidate's interests perk up about something. Every candidate has a different background so getting them to talk about that and problems they solved and diving into those in detail should be a good gauge of ability.
- pc86 2y ago
  A friend of mine - against my loud objections - hired some Pakistani offshore group to build an app for him around 2015 or so. $15k "estimate" but it was all time & materials not flat rate. They had an "office" with a "CEO" in NYC but no staff, just a PO Box. The whole thing was super fishy and I said as much but he didn't care because they were cheap. Fast forward nearly 18 months into the 6 month contract, and about $40k later, there is no working app and the "CEO" says "well I would love to give you some of your money back but the contract has expired so I am no longer able to do that, we could sign another one for $20k to finish if you'd like." I've worked with probably a dozen offshoring companies in my life in one way or another and every single one of them has been deceitful to the point of being fraudulent, and puts out some of the worst code you have ever seen. I tell everyone considering it that if you can afford it, you're getting scammed in one way or another. You're better off going with a US-based firm that guarantees you'll get American workers who are physically in the US working on your product. I'd rather hire Deloitte or Accenture for 10x the price - I know they offshore a ton but you'll at least have avenues to get your money back if they don't deliver.
  - erikerikson 2y ago
pc86 2y ago
The title alone reeks of pro-RTO-at-all-costs "there's nothing wrong with driving an hour each way to your office because work should be the most important thing in your life here's $70k for the year thanks so much" bullshit. I'm 100% sure there are some people there using AI to try to get through interviews, but what's the end game? The article mentions faking identification documents and work history. Well the first is a crime, and the second takes about 5 minutes to verify. "RTO to prevent crime" is so dumb even the RTO CEOs aren't pushing that one yet.
- zanderz 2y ago
  Ha, yes, agree. How many trips to the office should it take to prove you are real meat?
skeeter2020 2y ago
[flagged]
arkh 2y ago
> Many of these agencies are from collectivist cultures, so in the mind of the agency, they all work in our project. This may not be true, but the agency sees the position as theirs, not the recruit's. So they typically don't the issue with putting recruit A in front of the interviewer and then slotting recruit B in after the position is secured. Guess France is a collectivist culture. That's 101 of many consultancies: get the contract by presenting the A-Team then switch with junior employees a couple weeks in.
- thebruce87m 2y ago
  There is a difference between engaging with a consultancy and hiring for a position. They know that too, or the lip syncing mentioned wouldn’t be a thing.
jollyllama 2y ago
Yes, AI is used a pretext for many things. RTO, cost cutting, you name it. But since the fact remains though that there are fake recruits for remote positions, if you strip out the AI rhetoric, it remains a legitimate argument in favor of RTO.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  It’s a legitimate argument to fly the person in for interviews. I got my only remote BigTech job post Covid where the entire loop was remote. But it was customary before then to fly people into the office for the final interview. Yes I realize “remote first” companies may not have an office. But even then, you could fly the interviewees to the location of the interviewer and use a hotel conference room.
  - jollyllama 2y ago
    Agreed but I suppose the problem then is you could have an interviewer hand off his or her duties to a third party. In theory, regular presence in an office is a mitigation against this.
    - scarface_74 2y ago
      I’m not using this citation as a counterpoint to your comment and I realize this is a degenerate case. But it has happened in office… https://www.cnn.com/2013/01/17/business/us-outsource-job-china/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2013/01/17/business/us-outsource-job-chi... And as much as I hate to admit it, remote work has so many downsides for most companies, I see why many of them are in on RTO and hybrid. Luckily in 2020 I pivoted to cloud consulting + app dev where it doesn’t make sense to be in the office since you will either be working with clients remotely or flying into their offices. And even then AWS forced their ProServe consultants and SAs (full time employees) to be in an office when not on the client’s sites after I had already left. As does GCP.
devoutsalsa 2y ago
They are not a fiction. I’m dealing with LLM generated resumes right now. I just one that wasn’t too smart, and it claimed to have led a project for our company despite never having worked there.
827a 2y ago
We're hiring for a software engineer right now. The amount of time our single HR professional has had to invest in sorting through scam candidates is ungodly. We had someone apply to the job three times, using different names and resumes each time. We've had two candidates who we suspected were responding to questioning with an AI tool that was listening to the interviewer's voice (poorly, which might be the only reason why we caught them). We had one candidate who said they were on the east coast, but upon further investigation, the person didn't exist; and following a hunch, upon casually bringing up that it seemed pretty dark where they were at, they disconnected from the call and we never heard from them again. If you think these scams aren't real, you aren't looking. We're a remote company, but our policy is now to only hire candidates from internal referrals, or candidates who are in a location where someone on the team they're hiring into can grab coffee with them.
- polishdude20 2y ago
  Mind posting the position? I'm a real person! Would love to apply!
- antifa 2y ago
  Asking a candidate to do an outdoor interview at a public park so you can cross reference the sky with their time of day and weather and google maps photos sounds interesting.
koliber 2y ago
I had 4 instances where a sketchy Asian guy showed up to an interview. Something was always off. Twice it was the same guy under two different names. In the final case I called the candidate out that the they are from North Korea. They were frazzled and when they began talking the connection dropped mid-word. It’s as if someone else disconnected us. I am sure they are North Koreans. Next time I will have a picture of fat leader printed out and I am asking the candidate what they think of Kim.
vkou 2y ago
There's a simple solution to people cheating in interviews. In-person interviews. And if you don't want to pay for that, proctoring. And if you don't want to pay for that, I have next to zero sympathy for you.
jimbob45 2y ago
I refuse to believe a country as isolated as NK is pumping out genius hackers better than any other country. They speak one of the few languages isolates in the world. They don’t attract high-quality foreigners, if any at all. They don’t get access to the larger scientific community. Their universities don’t allow extended discourse for local students with the few foreigners they allow. Their internet infrastructure is pathetic and their citizens are poor. Call me a conspiracy theorist but it seems vastly more likely that China and Russia (far and away NK’s strongest, nearest, and largest allies) are executing these hacks and blaming them on the NKs to avoid retribution. You either believe that or that NKs are genetically superior specimens because they’re not doing anything else that would yield the superior results they attain.
- antifa 2y ago
  Just speculating. I would also guess maybe Russian and Chinese candidates have more domestic opportunities or the NK government sponsors more activity like this.
vosper 2y ago
> Typically the scam is that an offshore consultancy wants to place some roles to collect wages. Many of these agencies are from collectivist cultures, so in the mind of the agency, they all work in our project. This may not be true, but the agency sees the position as theirs, not the recruit's. So they typically don't the issue with putting recruit A in front of the interviewer and then slotting recruit B in after the position is secured. I've run into this with a Ukrainian consultancy. It wasn't even a scam. They told us up-front that they were prepared to pull their best engineers from some other clients and put them on our team in order to win our business. Our obvious reaction: and when you get another opportunity, you will pull those engineers from us and we'll get the B-team, just like you're about to do to someone else. Naturally we didn't move forward with them (this was before the war, so very lucky decision)
alfalfasprout 2y ago
While I agree that this narrative is fodder for RTO-hungry CEOs... it is something that happens albeit typically in a different way. You'll have someone do the interview on behalf of another candidate. A deepfaked recruit is a slight extension of that.
pllbnk 2y ago
I also see this as spreading FUD. I have led quite many remote interviews recently with European candidates and I can guarantee that not one of them was an AI generated pretender. Also, since LLMs is a popular topic nowadays, it was easy to have candid conversations about their use. I have also seen recorded videos of these AI-generated candidates and with two brain cells working it's easy to identify them. It's also easy to see and feel if a candidate is having a genuine conversation with you or is trying to use AI-assistant tools. Maybe in the future it will be a more significant problem but not this year, not next year and probably not even this decade.

codegladiator 2y ago

> putting recruit A in front of the interviewer and then slotting recruit B in after the position is secured reality is way more messy and worse. There are multiple actors involved in each part. Eg 2-3 "actors" for visual screen are ready for each call, 2-4 "audio" knowledge only experts on the call, 1 dedicated speaker, 1 person coordinating answers from audio folks to actor folks. they are even ready for once in a while visit to offices in us, so they have actors there on the field as well ready to attend calls (probably 1 to 1 mapping after first visit) and the work assigned is assigned to a completely different set of people, not involved in any of above. those folks and these folks dont interact. i have worked part time as one of the "audio" person in above interviews. also involved on work side. ama.

transcriptase 2y ago
… what’s the point?
- ttoinou 2y ago
  Make money ?
  - ziddoap 2y ago
    I'm having trouble understanding how 1 company paying 1 salary for 1 position makes money for the 8-12 people described in the process above.
    - lazide 2y ago
      Those people are only for the initial interview. Also, the purchasing power disparity in different regions is humongous. For what a typical L5 might get paid in Silicon Valley, you can afford a team of 5-10 in India, and India isn’t even ‘low cost’ anymore.
    - gibbitz 2y ago
      You assume they care about the people and underestimate the desperation of those employees. This is slave labor and it's what US developers are up against. This is why under Trump we've seen 100k layoffs in Tech this year.
    - tmottabr 2y ago
      because the people above are just for the interview.. And they are shared across multiple jobs, so it is not just 1 position.. They apply to multiple jobs at multiple companies.. One team handle interview process to make sure they get the job, once they get the job another set of people handle the actual work.. And then the interview team also handle any instance the person need to be seen or talked to.. Each job pay a few of those guys and the company keep the rest.. If they land enough jobs they can easily pay for all that..
    - codegladiator 2y ago

everdrive 2y ago

We've had more than a few in my company. We work in Cybersecurity for the company, so we've definitely seen them and seen the details. I don't actually think they're that hard to avoid .. but to say they're not a problem at all is not fair. I agree with you that if taken the wrong way that this is just ammunition for "return to office" efforts. A LOT of people are far worse at interviewing than they think they are. And so, a bullshit artist can get hired. Technology now allows these bullshit artists to propagate more, and do more damage than would have previously be possible. AI in the workplace is a similar problem. Can you tell the different between someone who really just leans on ChatGPT all day but is actually incompetent? Probably so, but someone who was that incompetent just wouldn't have previously been able to hang on for quite as long, or deceive so many people. [edit] It's clear that my comment was not clearly written -- when I said "A LOT of people are far worse at interviewing than they think they are," I was referring to the people holding the interviews, and not referring to candidates. I'm shocked at just how bad a lot of folks are at holding interviews, and just how misplaced their confidence in their ability seems to be.

mistrial9 2y ago
> A LOT of people are far worse at interviewing than they think they are. A LOT of interviews are one-sided bully sessions, so people don't jump through the hoops they are expected to.. especially in hazing-friendly cultures like the security and finance sectors
- everdrive 2y ago
  No disagreement there. The best way to get honest information from people is NOT to really leverage the power balance over them and try to "catch" them in an interview. People also commonly mistake "the stuff I know" for "general intelligence," and so they incorrectly think that their interview questions really tell them very much about a candidate.
lq9AJ8yrfs 2y ago
> A LOT of people are far worse at interviewing than they think they are. This works both ways right? Would it be fair to say that interview processes don't differentiate good hires from bullshit artists? Feels like framing the problem differently might make it tractable.

FirmwareBurner 2y ago

>The best candidates I've fielded have been Ukrainian, Russian and Chinese. These are countries well known for their tech sectors. Out of curiosity, what tech sector does Ukraine have? I don't remember ever hearing of any large successful Ukrainian SW compony or unicorn.

mistrial9 2y ago
parts of remote Eastern Europe have produced excellent techs for decades.. they seem to deny it now but JetBrainz is from there, which is hugely successful.
- FirmwareBurner 2y ago
  >parts of remote Eastern Europe have produced excellent techs for decades.. Like wich exactly? Jetbrains is one, but it is from Czechia IIRC. I was asking what tech products has Ukrainian tech sector produced.
  - mistrial9 2y ago
    Leonid Radvinsky, Ruja Ignatova ?
    - FirmwareBurner 2y ago
      What part of "tech products of Ukraine" was unclear?
    - throwaway48476 2y ago
      An Israeli and a Bulgarian gypsy?
  - dkarl 2y ago
    I've worked with several excellent Ukrainian developers, but in each case they were working for consulting firms in other Eastern European countries.
  - 2y ago

mattbrewsbytes 2y ago

My experience was similar but with on/offshore companies in India. We just started requiring camera on (it was pre-pandemic) and it was obvious if candidates knew their stuff or were just prepped and/or reading responses. Most of those contracts were setup where the company was providing a "service" with fake cost recovery wordings if the service was not provided. Money only went one way, the contracts had wording about penalty payback but the reality after talking with people in finance was the financial process/systems weren't setup for that, lol. Ways to combat bait and switch is to alter interview questions, add new questions to every interview, ask deeper level questions, and observe the candidate in how they respond. It should be a more conversational tone the entire time, random discussion paths pursued, especially if the candidate's interests perk up about something. Every candidate has a different background so getting them to talk about that and problems they solved and diving into those in detail should be a good gauge of ability.

pc86 2y ago
A friend of mine - against my loud objections - hired some Pakistani offshore group to build an app for him around 2015 or so. $15k "estimate" but it was all time & materials not flat rate. They had an "office" with a "CEO" in NYC but no staff, just a PO Box. The whole thing was super fishy and I said as much but he didn't care because they were cheap. Fast forward nearly 18 months into the 6 month contract, and about $40k later, there is no working app and the "CEO" says "well I would love to give you some of your money back but the contract has expired so I am no longer able to do that, we could sign another one for $20k to finish if you'd like." I've worked with probably a dozen offshoring companies in my life in one way or another and every single one of them has been deceitful to the point of being fraudulent, and puts out some of the worst code you have ever seen. I tell everyone considering it that if you can afford it, you're getting scammed in one way or another. You're better off going with a US-based firm that guarantees you'll get American workers who are physically in the US working on your product. I'd rather hire Deloitte or Accenture for 10x the price - I know they offshore a ton but you'll at least have avenues to get your money back if they don't deliver.
- erikerikson 2y ago

pc86 2y ago

The title alone reeks of pro-RTO-at-all-costs "there's nothing wrong with driving an hour each way to your office because work should be the most important thing in your life here's $70k for the year thanks so much" bullshit. I'm 100% sure there are some people there using AI to try to get through interviews, but what's the end game? The article mentions faking identification documents and work history. Well the first is a crime, and the second takes about 5 minutes to verify. "RTO to prevent crime" is so dumb even the RTO CEOs aren't pushing that one yet.

zanderz 2y ago
Ha, yes, agree. How many trips to the office should it take to prove you are real meat?

skeeter2020 2y ago

[flagged]

arkh 2y ago

> Many of these agencies are from collectivist cultures, so in the mind of the agency, they all work in our project. This may not be true, but the agency sees the position as theirs, not the recruit's. So they typically don't the issue with putting recruit A in front of the interviewer and then slotting recruit B in after the position is secured. Guess France is a collectivist culture. That's 101 of many consultancies: get the contract by presenting the A-Team then switch with junior employees a couple weeks in.

thebruce87m 2y ago
There is a difference between engaging with a consultancy and hiring for a position. They know that too, or the lip syncing mentioned wouldn’t be a thing.

jollyllama 2y ago

Yes, AI is used a pretext for many things. RTO, cost cutting, you name it. But since the fact remains though that there are fake recruits for remote positions, if you strip out the AI rhetoric, it remains a legitimate argument in favor of RTO.

scarface_74 2y ago
It’s a legitimate argument to fly the person in for interviews. I got my only remote BigTech job post Covid where the entire loop was remote. But it was customary before then to fly people into the office for the final interview. Yes I realize “remote first” companies may not have an office. But even then, you could fly the interviewees to the location of the interviewer and use a hotel conference room.
- jollyllama 2y ago
  Agreed but I suppose the problem then is you could have an interviewer hand off his or her duties to a third party. In theory, regular presence in an office is a mitigation against this.
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    I’m not using this citation as a counterpoint to your comment and I realize this is a degenerate case. But it has happened in office… https://www.cnn.com/2013/01/17/business/us-outsource-job-china/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2013/01/17/business/us-outsource-job-chi... And as much as I hate to admit it, remote work has so many downsides for most companies, I see why many of them are in on RTO and hybrid. Luckily in 2020 I pivoted to cloud consulting + app dev where it doesn’t make sense to be in the office since you will either be working with clients remotely or flying into their offices. And even then AWS forced their ProServe consultants and SAs (full time employees) to be in an office when not on the client’s sites after I had already left. As does GCP.

devoutsalsa 2y ago

They are not a fiction. I’m dealing with LLM generated resumes right now. I just one that wasn’t too smart, and it claimed to have led a project for our company despite never having worked there.

827a 2y ago

We're hiring for a software engineer right now. The amount of time our single HR professional has had to invest in sorting through scam candidates is ungodly. We had someone apply to the job three times, using different names and resumes each time. We've had two candidates who we suspected were responding to questioning with an AI tool that was listening to the interviewer's voice (poorly, which might be the only reason why we caught them). We had one candidate who said they were on the east coast, but upon further investigation, the person didn't exist; and following a hunch, upon casually bringing up that it seemed pretty dark where they were at, they disconnected from the call and we never heard from them again. If you think these scams aren't real, you aren't looking. We're a remote company, but our policy is now to only hire candidates from internal referrals, or candidates who are in a location where someone on the team they're hiring into can grab coffee with them.

polishdude20 2y ago
Mind posting the position? I'm a real person! Would love to apply!
antifa 2y ago
Asking a candidate to do an outdoor interview at a public park so you can cross reference the sky with their time of day and weather and google maps photos sounds interesting.

koliber 2y ago

I had 4 instances where a sketchy Asian guy showed up to an interview. Something was always off. Twice it was the same guy under two different names. In the final case I called the candidate out that the they are from North Korea. They were frazzled and when they began talking the connection dropped mid-word. It’s as if someone else disconnected us. I am sure they are North Koreans. Next time I will have a picture of fat leader printed out and I am asking the candidate what they think of Kim.

vkou 2y ago

There's a simple solution to people cheating in interviews. In-person interviews. And if you don't want to pay for that, proctoring. And if you don't want to pay for that, I have next to zero sympathy for you.

jimbob45 2y ago

I refuse to believe a country as isolated as NK is pumping out genius hackers better than any other country. They speak one of the few languages isolates in the world. They don’t attract high-quality foreigners, if any at all. They don’t get access to the larger scientific community. Their universities don’t allow extended discourse for local students with the few foreigners they allow. Their internet infrastructure is pathetic and their citizens are poor. Call me a conspiracy theorist but it seems vastly more likely that China and Russia (far and away NK’s strongest, nearest, and largest allies) are executing these hacks and blaming them on the NKs to avoid retribution. You either believe that or that NKs are genetically superior specimens because they’re not doing anything else that would yield the superior results they attain.

antifa 2y ago
Just speculating. I would also guess maybe Russian and Chinese candidates have more domestic opportunities or the NK government sponsors more activity like this.

vosper 2y ago

> Typically the scam is that an offshore consultancy wants to place some roles to collect wages. Many of these agencies are from collectivist cultures, so in the mind of the agency, they all work in our project. This may not be true, but the agency sees the position as theirs, not the recruit's. So they typically don't the issue with putting recruit A in front of the interviewer and then slotting recruit B in after the position is secured. I've run into this with a Ukrainian consultancy. It wasn't even a scam. They told us up-front that they were prepared to pull their best engineers from some other clients and put them on our team in order to win our business. Our obvious reaction: and when you get another opportunity, you will pull those engineers from us and we'll get the B-team, just like you're about to do to someone else. Naturally we didn't move forward with them (this was before the war, so very lucky decision)

alfalfasprout 2y ago

While I agree that this narrative is fodder for RTO-hungry CEOs... it is something that happens albeit typically in a different way. You'll have someone do the interview on behalf of another candidate. A deepfaked recruit is a slight extension of that.

pllbnk 2y ago

I also see this as spreading FUD. I have led quite many remote interviews recently with European candidates and I can guarantee that not one of them was an AI generated pretender. Also, since LLMs is a popular topic nowadays, it was easy to have candid conversations about their use. I have also seen recorded videos of these AI-generated candidates and with two brain cells working it's easy to identify them. It's also easy to see and feel if a candidate is having a genuine conversation with you or is trying to use AI-assistant tools. Maybe in the future it will be a more significant problem but not this year, not next year and probably not even this decade.