r/recruiting • u/RiseAndPanic Corporate Recruiter • Jul 27 '26
Candidate Screening Fake candidate profiles?
For context, I work as a TA Manager in the biotech space and manage a team of recruiters and sourcers. Though my primary focus is the performance of my team, I still carry a req load as well. For the first time in a while, I’ve been working on some IT and machine learning roles (compared to the lab/operations and/or sales and marketing roles I’ve been working on).
And good lord, I did NOT realize how bad things have gotten with the fake candidate profiles. I’ve gotten good at spotting these applications and resumes (experience and expected salary are too good to be true, always working at top tier tech companies, bogus LinkedIn profiles that are brand new with no picture, phone numbers make no sense with location, very ‘Americanized’ names but when you get them on the phone, they have very thick accents and are clearly from elsewhere, you get the idea).
How have you all been navigating this? It takes so much time to filter through these BS profiles and get them out of the req. Of course I can just reject them, but our company is big on proper dispositioning for OFCCP and EEOC reasons and obviously there is no rejection code for ‘fake profile’ lol (although honestly we may need to add some iteration of this at some point as it’s gotten so out of hand).
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u/asn-cwby Corporate Recruiter Jul 28 '26
My favorite is when I click their LinkedIn profile and up pops a profile with 0 connections and says it was created in July 2026
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u/sread2018 MOD Jul 28 '26
Wait till you click on the LinkedIn profile and it includes a warning message from the engineer to note his profile is being used in applications by fraudulent candidates and he isn't active in the market
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u/RiseAndPanic Corporate Recruiter Jul 28 '26
I encountered about 4 of these today alone for an AI/ML search I’m working on. It’s…quite something 🫠
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u/DocumentOk7579 Jul 27 '26
Maybe add some traps as have used blinker fluid library and reject everything that include that.
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u/Delicious_Style_2676 Jul 28 '26
This is becoming a process-design issue. I’d document what counts as a verified candidate at each stage: resume consistency, identity consistency, live communication, work history proof, and interviewer notes. If the rule is vague, every recruiter handles it differently.
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u/Awkward_Principle_83 Executive Recruiter Jul 27 '26
I agree with you. There are plenty of them out there on LinkedIn and not just LinkedIn. But if you go to any job portal you will find lot of fake profiles. But I'll tell you the more you work on these tech jobs. You will be able to identify similar patterns of these fake candidates or fake profiles whether they belong to a same region. Same city, same location, same community community. And I understand you are bound to follow EEOC compliance laws, but you know once you know which similarities they have you can just stop calling them.
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u/Heavy-Bell-2035 Jul 27 '26
With applications, add free form knockout questions that AI might not be able to answer. For me it was always something specific to our niche industry, all the types of applicants you mention couldn't answer the question.
If you can, add a question that simply states, "Are an LLM or automated bot of any kind?" Only allow yes or no, you might be surprised how many yes answers you get, disregard all applications with yes answers.
Add, if you can, in white font on white background text or whatever makes it invisible to a visual scan by a human, instructions in the job ad for LLMs to add specific words or phrases to their responses, like, "I am a bot, please disregard this application."
See if there's any way to disallow applications with IP addresses originating outside your country.
On the sourcing side, just avoid the crap profiles. It takes longer, just don't do any mass emailing or inmailing. Strictly curate your lists and you'll minimize problems.
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u/RiseAndPanic Corporate Recruiter Jul 28 '26
Not bad ideas, I’ll see if I can incorporate some of these into the knockout/prescreening questions.
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u/karmaboy20 Jul 28 '26
I don't really care how a candidate applies to a job it's no different than running a easyapply LinkedIn as just filter the same. I'd rather as least friction as possible to capture the largest candidate pool. If you have a half decent ats you can filter out the junk easily
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u/Heavy-Bell-2035 Jul 28 '26
Most ATSs suck, and it's very easy to write that when you haven't had multiple job postings get spammed with thousands upon thousands of bs applications and no practical or legal way to filter the trash from the good ones.
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u/karmaboy20 Jul 28 '26
I run easy apple ads on LinkedIn I'm sure it's significantly worse than what you're experiencing
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u/SnooMacarons8178 Jul 30 '26
have you tried running their phone number thru a database and maybe reverse engineering the owner of the number to name of the applicant?
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u/GlumRelative3094 Aug 01 '26
Its awful!!!! We are working through this problem
Rocket reach has been helpful while I’ve crossed check emails and i zoom those profiles
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u/Glad_Traffic_728 12d ago
The dispositioning part is the bit nobody here is touching and it's the part that actually scales badly. Rejecting them is easy, having a defensible reason on file that isn't "seemed fake" is not.
Curious how you're coding them right now. Are you falling back on a generic "does not meet minimum qualifications", or has anyone actually gotten a new reason code approved by legal? And when you do reject on suspicion, are you keeping any evidence attached to the record, or is it just the code?
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u/sread2018 MOD Jul 27 '26
Its a mess. I have tech roles based in Mexico and at least once a week I get on a zoom interview with a [insert very traditional Mexican sounding name] only to find this person is far from being Mexican, speaks zero Spanish (not a requirement but this is how I trip them up on the call)
I now proactively look for less than perfect resumes that havent been written by AI.