Saul Abreu

If you're job seeking right now, dealing with exhausting applications and high rejection rates, you may not be aware of the hellscape from the other side of the recruitment process. I've hired many people over the years and know a lot of folks in recruitment/HR, so what I'm hearing right now is that the sheer amount of fake candidates is, frankly, astounding. Anecdotally I've heard that around 80% of applicants for tech jobs are clearly fake and quickly get culled. Of the remaining 20% that get through the initial filter, around half of those are still high quality fakes, with fake Linkedin accounts, fake recommendations from other fake accounts, etc. I've heard multiple stories of interviews with fake candidates using AI prompted responses and deep faked visuals. Recruiters are having to ask people to rotate in their chairs and other weird things to prove they're real... it's wild. The latest fun one I've heard was people applying using other people's linkedin profiles... and they were specifically targeting linkedin accounts without photos... so when the fake candidate get interviewed it's much harder to confirm if the candidate is the same as the linkedin profile. So... if you don't have a photo, it might be worth putting one up just to avoid people stealing your identify for applications. Another interesting development is that Applicant Tracking Systems used by recruiters can tell the geo location of the person that applied. Often the location of the original application is a DIFFERENT COUNTRY to the location of the person on the later interview call. What this implies is that there is a distributed, multi-country operation to fraudulently get positions; someone in country A will submit the application, someone in country B will take the interview, the job is actually in country C. It's clear that AI is being used on an industrial scale to attempt to land tech jobs. Why? Even just one month's pay is worth it for scammers in a developing country given the scale of these operations. Vacancies are getting hundreds of applications within 24 hours. In the past I've had to switch applications off when we've hit 1000 applicants and it wasn't slowing down, and that was before all this AI stuff kicked off. Why am I bringing this up? If you're applying for jobs, make hiring managers and recruiters jobs easier! They're swamped by fake candidates and are pretty quick to reject anything that's even remotely suspicious. Make information easy to assess and verify; make yourself conspicuously human online. The likelihood is that the person looking at your application is overworked and overwhelmed with slop, you may not have long to make your point, so don't get overlooked! I thought I'd share this insight as it doesn't get a lot of visibility outside of the recruitment bubble and I'm sure there's a lot of great people struggling to get noticed for reasons that may not seem obvious. Good luck out there folks!

173

37 Comments

85% of game studios have dropped degree requirements. So why is it still so hard to find the right talent? 🧐 The truth is, removing a barrier is only half the battle. When you open the floodgates, you get more applicants, but not necessarily more *qualified* candidates. Without a degree as a filter, the burden falls on recruitment to identify "Maker DNA": the innate ability to solve problems and ship products. AI tools are flooding the market with generic resumes, making the search even harder. This is why "Surgical Recruitment" is no longer optional. You need a partner who knows how to spot a closer, with or without the diploma. Is your screening process overwhelmed? Let’s find the signal in the noise. #GameRecruiter #Hiring #GameDevelopment #RecruitmentLife #TechTalent

8

4 Comments