Candidate fraud is rising: how HR teams can protect their business

“AI, for all its wonderful things, has also created an opportunity for those to impersonate others or create synthetic profiles of themselves,” Evans said. She added that WorkPro has observed a shift in the sophistication of the documents being used to support false applications. “We’ve definitely seen an increase in AI-created documents, identity documents in particular,” she said.

Evans said the risk is amplified in remote recruitment, where an employer may never meet a candidate in person. In some cases, she said, the person interviewed, the person who completes an assessment and the person who ultimately starts the job can be three different people.

“One person might turn up for the interview, another completes the assessment, and then another person starts the job,” Evans said. The issue has already prompted HRD to detail the warning signs HR teams should watch out for when screening applicants, including multiple submissions from the same device or IP address. A Gartner report cited in that reporting forecast that one in four job candidates globally could be fake by 2028.

The legal risk of getting it wrong

Evans said the consequences for employers who fail to verify a candidate’s identity are serious. “It’s a criminal offence to hire someone who hasn’t gone through the proper hiring process,” she said, noting that if an unverified worker is injured on the job, the employer can face a workers’ compensation claim “for someone that you didn’t even hire.”

In extreme cases, she said company directors who repeatedly fail to apply appropriate risk frameworks to hiring “can be liable for that on behalf of their company, which can mean jail time.”