[sumeethaldankar]

We are currently seeing a trend in our organization where people are getting hired for skills they do not possess by giving Interviews through dubious means like lip synching on video calls.

Due to the pandemic situation we are forced to interview candidates on video and it seems many times people especially from a certain region seem to be giving interviews the way sometime singers sing on stage ie via lip sync.

The candidates keep moving their mouths while it seems someone else answers their questions in the background through a head phone or by some sync tech. Many times we had observed this that what the candidate was saying and the way their lips moved did not match.

We unfortunately ended up hiring 2-3 such candidates, one was let go within a month as we found he was not up to the mark and another is in the process of being let go.
The above candidates when hired and joined the company were not able to perform their duties well and the project managers got frustrated with them to extent of asking them to leave.

I believe many such dubious candidates seem to have little exposure in the field where their claimed skill sets are in high demand and on the basis of fake interviews seem to get a job in the organization hoping that they will learn the work on the way. Once inside a company it becomes more tedious for the company to let them go so many times organizations manage with such fake candidates.

In one instance of fake candidate we asked the person whom we hired and was on boarded the same questions he was asked during the interview. He was not able to answer the same and mind you he had done very well on the interview. It was decided that we had been cheated and we decided to let the candidate go. It was unfortunate but we did not want such a person onboard. Has anyone else faced such a situation in their organization?

[iamahunter]

No such experience like lip-sync.

However, I have faced candidates who do stuff such as reading out answers from mobile or computer. OR Have another person solving queries for them on a board or book, and they reading it out.
These are easily spotted by their eye moment or reflection in the eyes/spectacles.
Once encountered a funny one where the candidate's hands were visible (as if she was thinking) and there were answers coming up on the chat. Simply asked to explain what she typed and she was dumbfounded.

Also encountered candidates who are too good are memorizing stuff.
I take technical interviews for SQL and DB DWH concepts, many times a candidate is perfect at answering all the concepts and definition. However in my next stage of interview I move towards ad-hoc technical question which I ask the candidate to apply logic and write a query, 90% of the rejections are at this stage.

[Kosfactor]

This happened a few weeks back, the appearance and the accent did not match. So asked certain questions that let out a giggle from the voice and a straight face from the person looking at the camera.

We can expect a lot of entertainment like this in WFH world.

[Samurai]

So the candidates in IT industry took 54 years to catch up to Padosan...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HwrMGpFaik

[J4J]

Yes, this is an issue I faced recently.
Just 2 days back, I was interviewing a candidate.

Feedback from the first two rounds were positive.
2 out of 3 positive feedbacks means that the candidate has high chances of selection.
When I interviewed, I asked 3 questions of medium difficulty and he solved it in an instant.
This got me thinking.

I deliberately asked a very difficult question that most students take long time to even understand. This candidate gave the final correct answer in under 10 secs.

Now I asked a very basic question and asked him to explain me each and every step. He couldn't answer that. He couldn't answer next set of easy questions that he could not find easily on the internet.
I created the test cases on the go so that he could not search it. He just gave up and didn't even bother to try.

I shared my concern with my seniors and they took a final round. They also shared the same feedback that something was fishy. He couldn't defend any of his answers.

Many companies have very few "in person" rounds (including a lot of top product companies). The candidates have to solve questions and make test cases pass.
For rest of the rounds, there are YouTube videos available that will help them clear those.

Please try attempting these questions and you will understand that it is very difficult to solve even one out of three questions. With good preparation most manage 1-2 questions.
The selection criteria for most companies is to solve more than 2 questions.

I'll blame the industry more than the candidates here for the following reasons:

1. They value only the final answer rather than the approach. So the candidates adjusted accordingly. Exactly the same thing we see with our education system.
2. Industry values disloyal employees more. A person with 3-4 switches in last 5 years has not learned anything professionally. But their packages are skyrocketing. This is because they spend most of their time preparing. A loyal employee, on the other hand, will work for the company and may not invest too much time in preparation. His knowledge will be limited. But will such a candidate have a chance against the other candidates? I don't think so.

I think that reference checks should be one of the main factors in selection process. A candidate with right attitude and aptitude can solve great problems. Checking how much a person can cram information will never help as is seen with out education system.

[amol4184]

Originally Posted by sumeethaldankar

We are currently seeing a trend in our organization where people are getting hired for skills they do not possess by giving Interviews through dubious means like lip synching on video calls.

Due to the pandemic situation we are forced to interview candidates on video and it seems many times people especially from a certain region seem to be giving interviews the way sometime singers sing on stage ie via lip sync.

The candidates keep moving their mouths while it seems someone else answers their questions in the background through a head phone or by some sync tech. Many times we had observed this that what the candidate was saying and the way their lips moved did not match.

Unfortunately this was observed even before covid set in.
Back in 2016-17 we had some telephonic interviews (in a conference) and we selected the candidates for another round which was to happen face to face. Rather surprisingly to me and my manager (who was the co-panelist) two of the candidates looked entirely clueless and failed to answer pretty much anything we asked. After we ended the interviews, my manager asked if these guys sounded different on the phone earlier? I was quite inclined to say yes but I could not be sure. We did of course reject them.

Later we heard same stories from other panelists and this incidence was reported to the HRs. After a while, we had a circular from HR to only conduct first round of interview over video and not just audio to reduce such incidents. Apparently they had such reports from multiple people across different accounts.
And that is when I first saw lip-syncing. Not extremely regularly but if I remember correctly there were at least two blatant offenders and we stopped the interview midway when the candidates started blabbering after we confronted. It was such a second hand embarrassment. I just cannot fathom the guts some people have to stoop down to such level of cheating. There are many other horror stories I heard from my colleagues and now remote interview always leave some doubt in my mind. Mind you its not just fake interviews but also fake degrees and experiences.

This was in the USA by the way. Considering the mad rush in IT jobs now + covid restrictions, I am sure many people have gotten in thru such dubious acts.

Just last week too, my wife was interviewing a candidate with 3-4 year experience for senior dev position. The candidate had headphones on. For every question asked, he would take a long pause, rub his temples and answer - not perfectly but somehow satisfactory. For some questions where she cross questioned he derailed and almost bungled up even the prior answer.
You just could not have a conversation with him. Since it became increasingly suspicious, she asked if he is reading the answers from somewhere or if someone was helping him somehow. He denied that vehemently and for remaining questions he stopped taking pauses and gave horribly wrong answers so much so that she started doubting if he was faking the experience too.
Our guess? His headphone was connected to a phone on which someone was prompting him answers and hence the excruciating delay every time. Terrible.

[Ananthang]

Originally Posted by J4J

Industry values disloyal employees more. A person with 3-4 switches in last 5 years has not learned anything professionally. But their packages are skyrocketing. This is because they spend most of their time preparing. A loyal employee, on the other hand, will work for the company and may not invest too much time in preparation. His knowledge will be limited. But will such a candidate have a chance against the other candidates? I don't think so.

I would humbly deny this point. I appreciate these guys try something new, learn new things and constantly keep improving on what industry needs.

There is a another thread where we asked 40+ folks to keep learning new things to survive which is exactly what these guys are doing and also getting paid . Their means of getting new job may be wrong but we should not say they are not loyal just because few are comfortable in what they are doing for years and few want to keep juggling.

This answer is coming from my point of view and I am with same company for the 17th year now.

I wouldn’t blame them but the organization who is short of panels, Each department operating in silos- HR want to fulfil, Company wants a body to bill, Panelist select people without knowing what level or what package they will be offered, more like buying something but without analyzing if it worth paying the cost.

Is there any power for middle managers to test or give a chance to someone who learnt a Technology new or even current organization provide the candidate with necessary opportunities who learnt something new by training in actual project. Fake is the only way he can earn a entry in to something they learn.

Most of the DevOps and Big Data Hadoop guys now, have once started with a Fake. I am not advocating fake here, but Organisation when they ask people to Reskill, they also have to find a means to use them. May be a few will fail but there will also be some good profiles who can scale up.

[Latheesh]

I have seen people giving fake telephonic interviews 15 years ago. It is not a recent trend. Body shopping companies used to take care of interviews and sometimes work too.

[catchjyoti]

I have also seen these fake interviews as far as 15 years back. They would use their friends to answer questions during telephonic interviews. Once recruited by the company, they will have these long calls with these same friends and be guided line by line on the code. And then if you are reasonably intelligent you do pick up skills after some time, so that these calls become fewer and shorter.

[GJ01]

We have caught a few such unscrupulous candidates. It was actually brought to my notice by one of the team members who was interviewing. What we then did is that when the person (and his playback singer) were answering - we made hand gestures to stop - didnt say anything on the line, just made a hand gesture to stop. The ensuing 10 - 15 seconds was a comedy of errors. The actual candidate stopped speaking - but the playback singer went on.

Since we were suspecting something amiss, we were also recording the teams call. Promptly sent the recording to HR and asked the vendor to be blacklisted, though in the current times I doubt they would have gone and blacklisted the vendor.

I do not want to create a political storm by saying where these candidates hailed from - we all are today way too short-tempered to take it and this thread will snowball into something else, but we too had such cases coming only from a particular region that has always been notorious for pushing fakes.

[charanreddy]

Couple of things I came to know from close circle.

1. This guy (X) was interviewing for a big tech company and was sure couldn’t get through. He asked his friend (Y) in the company for an idea and his friend got him referred through another colleague (Z). Now the funny part is Y interviews X as though he doesn’t know him and selects him to the role. for about 12 months X and Y behave as if they just met at the company.

2. I know atleast 3 people who don’t know how to do their work and outsource it to experts. So this person based of US, is on the call daily with some one from India With lot of experience in the field and pays him between 1000 $ to 2000 $ per month. Due to the experience this consultant is able to solve the issues in about 2 hrs and the US employee takes credit and makes upwards of 12 K $ a month.

Just a couple of examples . Software industry , especially on the service side is ridden with under qualified , devious people who want to cheat the system and make a quick buck.

[Vishal.R]

Yes as mentioned by others, have experienced few instances mostly from same specific regional background which is notorious for such things. Have also seen some of the best candidates from same regional background.

Earlier our company used to conduct interviews on Skype / teams voice calls but now video is mandatory. It also happened once that candidate suddenly started facing "technical issues" when We insisted on video. (Non video Interviews were still being conducted at that time)

But for me, frequency of such cases is very low so far, also checking LinkedIn profile etc also helps sometime, but as others mentioned, it's not very difficult to catch if interview is conducted more like a "discussion" (with some coding excercise for developer candidates) and less like a question / answer session. Plus being vigilant also helps.

[m8002?]

My Canada team experienced this first hand last year from somebody who had recently moved to Canada from where else, India

The candidate who gave the interview was lean, had a British accent and answered all the questions well. The person who joined was a little heavier ( not a reason to doubt after 1.5 months ), had a very Indian accent, different voice and did not attend video calls for 2 weeks citing some webcam issues. In the one or two calls she attended, the lighting was low and face not clearly visible.

So after a couple of internal discussions ( we had no proof that there was a swap ), we decided to have an unplanned tech discussion. We asked the same questions she aced in the interview and guess what, this person was clueless. We then asked her to resign immediately.

[am1m]

Wow, never knew the issue was this widespread. Now I understand why the background verification at my new job was so through. For the first time a company even wanted my graduation marks sheets (usually they only ask for the degree certificate). Fortunately, I had them, surprising since it's been more than 20 years since college and what I do now has nothing whatsoever to do with the degree/subject I graduated in!

Very unfortunate that this is becoming a trend. But as people have already pointed out, even if such a candidate gets through, the discrepancies should become pretty obvious in a month or two, and then there should be no hesitation in kicking them out.

All the comments about this being a particular issue from a certain region, is this the same region that is (in)famous for US visa and immigration fraud? Then perhaps companies should react the same way as the US embassies and subject resumes from that area to extra scrutiny!

Originally Posted by TorqueyTechie

Most of these people used to be under a consultancy and they were privy to all these.

This is a great point! If your organization is getting several of these kinds of candidates, chances are that the recruitment consultancy you are using is rotten and/or someone from HR is also in on it. At one of the jobs I was at, we were seeing absolutely mismatched resumes consistently. Later after some digging on Linkedin, I realized that our HR head (no less) used to work long ago at the same HR consultancy that was sending those resumes and best part, his wife still worked there! (Sometimes I think private IT companies in India, especially when it comes to recruitment, are as bad as any stereotypical corrupt government department! And personally, I think almost all recruitment consultants are a joke and a waste of time and money.)

[TorqueyTechie]

This is not a new thing but has been happening way before. Way back in 2012 when I was hiring for my team in US we were doing telephonic interviews. We found out that candidates with background from a specific region in India used to take help from others for cracking interviews. We used to hire him/her and then get to know that they were unable to perform even 10% of what they had mentioned in their resume. After this we switched to video interviews and faced issues with people lip synching and falsifying during interviews. This occurred so much that there was a bar from hiring people with that regional background.

Most of these people used to be under a consultancy and they were privy to all these. The idea was even if the candidates get paid for a month, it is fine for them. They will be then sent to another company. And even now when I am hiring for my team I unfortunately face these kind of situations and no surprise candidates are from same regional background. We have a stringent interview process for those candidates.

Originally Posted by am1m

All the comments about this being a particular issue from a certain region, is this the same region that is (in)famous for US visa and immigration fraud? Then perhaps companies should react the same way as the US embassies and subject resumes from that area to extra scrutiny!

Yes candidates are from the same region and we do have additional processes for them in place. Unfortunate but necessary. I always am wary of candidates from there and have my team go through the resume review & interview processes thoroughly.