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It's 2026 and hiring has morphed from a land of opportunity to a world of distrust. Last week, a recruiter phoned a jobseeker only to be greeted with a question.
"Is this a real person?"
Employers have similar queries. They try to discern who wrote a resume (AI or a jobseeker), how a candidate is coming up with responses during video interviews (AI in secondary browser?), and at times even if the person who shows up on the first day is the same one they interviewed.
"Two-thirds of hiring managers say AI is complicating the hiring process," Jessica Johnson, vice president of the administrative and customer support practice at Robert Half, told Reworked.
"There are more risks in hiring now than even a year ago," Mike Hudy, Chief Science Officer at HireVue, told Reworked.
Hiring Fraud Is Getting Creative
The fraud isn't just fake resumes. It’s also fake voices, fake faces, deepfakes and synthetic identities. "It's getting harder for employers to evaluate candidates' true abilities, and in some cases, their identities. Employers are increasingly concerned about candidate fraud," wrote Jamie Kohn, senior research director in the Gartner HR practice.
The costs of mis-hiring aren't small. According to the US Department of Labor, a bad hire can cost up to 30% or more of that employee's salary. Gartner predicts that by 2028, one in four resumes will be fake.
Phony jobseekers are also getting harder to spot. "It's also fake faces, false LinkedIn profiles, suspicious email addresses and phone numbers," said Lorrie Lykins, vice president of research at i4cp. That kind of deception can be far more expensive.
It's crossed into national security territory. The US Department of Justice won eight sentences in five months tied to a North Korean IT hiring scheme that hit nearly 70 US companies. The playbook was simple: North Korean operatives posed as remote workers, got hired and had employer laptops shipped to American collaborators. They installed remote access software so the scammers could work from overseas while looking local. The scheme pulled in over $1.2 million for North Korea.
"These defendants helped North Korean 'IT workers' masquerade as legitimate employees, compromising US corporate networks," said Assistant Attorney General John A. Eisenberg.
That’s not a hiring problem anymore. That’s an intelligence failure.
AI Fakes, Meet Zero Trust Hiring
The industry has been pushed toward what some are calling a Zero Trust model for hiring. Because when you can't trust what you see on a screen, you have to change what you're looking for entirely.
HireVue's customers generally prevent jobseekers from leveraging AI tools by simply telling them they will be disqualified for using them. "That's usually all the warning needed," Hudy said. HireVue also claims that ChatGPT scores poorly on their Virtual Job Tryouts and only average on AI-scored assessments, "because they're built on science, not self-reporting," said Hudy.
However, psychological barriers and browser tracking only deter people who actually want an honest job. They do nothing to stop sophisticated threat actors using real-time deepfakes to infiltrate networks. This glaring blind spot is the driver behind the Zero Trust shift.
Because employers can no longer trust the person on the screen, they are bypassing basic assessment monitoring in favor of strict, multi-layered identity verification and biometric liveness detection before the hiring process even begins. HireVue has other tools to identify cheaters. They include countermeasures like multi-stage validation with live video interviews, similarity scoring on coding challenges, and behavioral signals that track what's happening during an assessment — tab switching and number of takes — not just what a candidate submits.
Technology can only close so many gaps. Some companies are betting on people instead.
Putting People Back in the Mix
Robert Half takes a different approach. "We've brought the human back in the loop throughout the hiring process," said Johnson. Before connecting jobseekers with a customer, they do a thorough resume review, a phone interview, an in-person interview, employment record confirmation and more. "This way we can dive deeper into their experience, create role plays during interviews, ask candidates how they would handle various situations and see how they think on the spot."
And because Robert Half has such a wide and deep employee and customer base, it's possible they've either employed or placed people who have interviewed a candidate before or know someone who has. With 404 locations (including Protiviti) and about 14,700 total employees, it's not hard to believe. "Interviewing each candidate in person is well worth our time," said Johnson. "We see a big impact through bringing people in."
Not only that, but many of the workers that Robert Half clients eventually hire start out as contractors. "It's like dating before marriage," said Johnson. "Everyone can see performance and if the chemistry is right."
While the Conference Board's most advanced clients have been successful with AI — to develop recruiting strategies, conduct 20-30 preliminary interviews simultaneously, and to help predict which candidates are likely to stay longest — “I’m not sure it can effectively coach the hiring manager,” Erka Amursi, principal researcher, human capital, told Reworked. “Bias can also be a problem, so you need to monitor data pushing (and pulling), otherwise you could replicate a problem.”
The Contract to Hire Pipeline
Watching someone actually do the job turns out to be a better filter than any algorithm.
Employers are getting the message. Fifty-five percent of employers plan to increase contract staffing, and temporary jobs rose by 9,100 in the latest labor report. In the UK, contractor vacancies jumped 52% between April 2025 and April 2026.
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That makes sense on multiple levels. It lets employers see real performance in real conditions before making a long-term commitment. It also cuts turnover. Contract-to-hire arrangements lead to less attrition than a straight contract or traditional hiring. And for a market where candidate fraud is becoming a full-time job to manage, watching someone actually do the work is about as fraud-proof as it gets.
Some companies have stopped treating it as a fallback. It’s now the whole strategy.
- PostHog's Engineering SuperDay is a paid full day of work ($1,000 for engineering candidates) where candidates complete real company tasks and get support via Slack throughout the day. The task is deliberately designed to be too much work to finish in one day. They want to see how the candidate handles it.
- At Automattic, best known for WordPress, there's a paid trial in the application process — a short project or set of tasks assessed by the hiring team. "You will have the chance to work on something that's closely aligned with the role you're interviewing for, and tackle a specific, real problem," says the company’s career section.
- Patagonia often requires a practical demonstration of skills. Repair technicians are required to perform complex garment repairs on-site. Design candidates may face a challenge where they must source materials and build a prototype that meets specific sustainability and durability benchmarks.
AI Imposters Are Part of the Landscape
Corporate hiring isn’t the only place getting creative.
Public safety has gone even further. Modern police and fire departments have largely abandoned the sit-down interview in favor of Assessment Centers, where candidates work through in-basket exercises, role-plays and group problem-solving tasks. The goal is measuring emotional intelligence and executive function in ways a standardized test never could.
Some recruiters interview typically but add additional questions when in doubt. Writing on LinkedIn, Giovanna Caponi, GTM & AI engineering hiring lead at Nava, recommended that if any suspicions arise during interviews, ask hyper-local, real-life questions. “If someone claims they lived in New York for 10 years, they're going to know the code of their preferred airport without hesitation. Same with local sports teams or college mascots. Real candidates answer instantly.” Fraudsters need time and stall while they Google answers.
Of course, knowing all of this doesn’t matter, unless everyone who touches the hiring process is well-trained. “I can’t emphasize that enough,” said Lykins.
There’s little doubt she’s right.
Perhaps the New York Bar Association put it best: "Being deceived into hiring an AI imposter is a now foreseeable risk in remote hiring; like other foreseeable high-impact threats, an organization may not be able to prevent every incident but is expected to plan for it."
Editor's Note: What other challenges does AI raise for hiring teams ?
- AI Is Making the Hiring Crisis Worse — Using AI as a cure-all creates a doom loop: candidates and hiring managers game each other with AI, and hiring stays broken.
- AI Interview Agents Redefine the Job Application — AI interview agents are reshaping hiring from top to bottom — faster decisions, less bias, but serious legal risks. Is your TA team ready?
- What Happens When Candidates Choose AI Over Recruiters? — A fact that should make every talent leader sit up: when over 70,000 applicants were offered a choice between a recruiter and an AI interviewer, 78% chose AI.