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Comment by stickfigure | Hacker News Reader

Offering the contrarian view:

Why not just take a picture? If you're interviewing so many people that there's a genuine risk of forgetting who is who, a picture seems useful. I'm sure I'm not the only person who will forget your name in 3.5 seconds but never forgets a face.

Maybe this is my time at Pivotal speaking, but your first day on any team you get your picture taken with a polaroid. It goes on the pairing board. It's not weird.

"Thank you for interviewing with us! Mind if we take a picture so we can keep our who's who straight when the team is making the decision?"

All that jazz with IDs sounds unfriendly, sure. A snap isn't. Hell, make it a selfie with a team member.

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Photo-ID cards are reasonably common at many organisations, and are part of the on-boarding process.

Less so in smaller start-ups, but part of the process.

If you don't have ID cards, they could be part of, say, a company directory, wiki, or other system.

This isn't inherently adversarial and can be integrated into proceedures reasonably smoothly.

Make a photo id for everybody you interview?

If issued for a day pass, possibly.

Again, this fits into workflows and isn't directly confrontational, but does preserve a record for comparison.

I think in this case it was all remote. But yeah, I don't think it would be that hard to add protection against this fraud in ways the candidate wouldn't even notice.

Even easier, just take a screenshot.

This is what we do. We literally take a screenshot when interviewing a candidate and ask them to turn on their cameras during meetings (at least the first week or so)

I guess the point was that they are not interviewing enough people for there to be any risk. This was just a fluke.

That’ll work… until they have the actual candidate take the interview with someone coaching them offscreen. Edge cases!

That seems like it would be incredibly hard to perform convincingly and if you could, you've found your true calling in hosting/announcing/commentating live events not sucking at software gigs.

My wife interviewed someone who tried it (she noticed), so people at least do attempt this.

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