Hiring In The Age Of AI: The Battle Against Cheaters

Forbes

3 days ago

Tokumasa Yamashita, Co-founder and COO/CTO of Qlay Technologies.
Remote work and hiring has become more common than ever since the Covid-19 pandemic. From resume screening to technical interviews and live coding tests, the majority of the screening process in modern recruitment happens online. Now, with the rapid development of generative AI tools over the past couple of years, a new problem has emerged: Job seekers are increasingly utilizing AI to hack the recruitment process.
From AI-enhanced and AI-generated resumes to code generation and answering technical questions in real time during online interviews—and in some cases, voice or video manipulation during interviews—candidates now possess powerful tools to misrepresent their true skills.
Cheating undermines the integrity of the hiring process and can lead to costly mis-hires, wasted engineering time, and long-term team performance degradation. What used to be a trusted set of filters is now being gamed by increasingly sophisticated means that traditional screening can no longer detect. As these trends accelerate, companies are forced to rethink the way they evaluate talent, and this leads to the creation of new business opportunities.
How Cheating With AI Happens In Tech Hiring
AI is no longer just a productivity tool; it is becoming a cheat code for job seekers looking to game the hiring process. As technical screening and interviews happen online, candidates are finding new ways to exploit weaknesses in traditional systems. Here are some of the common ways in which they do so:
Generative AI tools enable candidates to easily craft resumes that are tailored to the requirements of specific job postings. With just a few prompts, candidates can inflate their skills or fabricate work experiences that do not reflect their true capabilities. As interviewers now face more pressure to carefully assess the validity of what is represented in the candidates' resumes, the interview step in the recruiting process has become more critical than ever.
Candidates utilize tools like ChatGPT and Claude to answer technical questions and produce code in real time during interviews or for take-home assignments. These tools are able to rapidly generate intelligent answers and working solutions based on the question at hand, making the candidate seem much more competent than they truly are.
Some companies have discovered that the person who sat for a technical interview was not the actual applicant. Regardless of whether the person was a friend, a freelancer or a paid surrogate, this kind of falsity completely undermines the recruiting process. Furthermore, without strong authentication, it typically passes through.
On top of that, AI-powered visual manipulation tools enable candidates to do this without having to find someone with a similar appearance. In a recent widely shared LinkedIn post, an interviewer caught a candidate utilizing an AI tool to alter his on-camera look during a live interview—in effect, producing a digitally constructed face.
Another use case is when candidates use an AI-powered visual manipulation tool to make it seem like they are looking straight at the camera even though they are staring at a second device on the side that they are using to generate answers to technical questions or coding challenges.
Cheating With AI Is Becoming An Even Bigger Problem
Technical interviewers are not only evaluating candidates but are also battling a growing industry of tools designed to fake things better than ever before. Most troubling, perhaps, is that this behavior is no longer in isolation. Startups like Cluely, which recently raised a $15 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz, are actively building platforms that allow candidates to easily cheat during interviews and coding tests at scale. Its products vary from stealth browser overlays to real-time answer streaming and automation to replicate legitimate responses, all while being undetectable.
Cheating with AI is beyond just being a problem; it is an ecosystem. It is spreading rapidly, and most companies are unprepared to handle it. Remote hiring was meant to make recruitment more scalable and quicker. Instead, it has opened up a whole array of blind spots that AI-driven cheating tools are now taking advantage of.
Emerging Business Opportunities
AI-powered cheating has altered the recruitment scene, and organizations can no longer rely on traditional screening processes to identify the best talent. Static take-home tests, resume screening and generic technical questions can no longer represent a candidate's true capability in the current age. To remain competitive, hiring teams need to revamp their processes to seek authenticity and minimize AI manipulation.
One major shift is the move toward AI-powered technical interviews and live coding tests, paired with proctoring functionalities such as multi-camera arrangement, screen monitoring, eye-gaze tracking and speech cadence analysis to detect abnormal behavior. These tools are meant to ensure that the candidates are not leveraging external AI tools or hidden prompts during the session.
Many companies are also incorporating code plagiarism detection software that puts submissions through huge databases of current solutions, flagging copied or AI-generated code. To reduce risk even more, some teams have replaced take-home assignments with collaborative, timed exercises where candidates explain their thinking out loud as they work through them. This makes it far harder to utilize prewritten solutions or receive assistance from third parties.
To prevent impersonation and more advanced forms of deception, companies are introducing identity safeguards at multiple stages of the interview process. These involve screen and camera recording, photo ID verification, multi-camera configurations and facial consistency analysis. These verification layers are catching instances where applicants utilize avatars, visual manipulation or even completely different individuals to take interviews.
AI tools that help candidates cheat their way through the hiring process represent an emerging trend, while at the other end of the spectrum—i.e., companies that are building tools to counter these cheating tools—is a business opportunity that has emerged as a result of those cheating tools. Similar to viruses and the anti-virus software industry, this is sure to be an ongoing battle that won't end any time soon.
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