Hacker News Reader

Comment by esafak | Hacker News Reader

As long as you are talking to them face to face; over the phone they will use AI with speech recognition and parrot its response, erasing all signal. Then the interview becomes all about AI detection.

View on HN

I've been hearing these kinds of things since 2014 (when I wrote a long post about the work sample process we had used at Matasano). I've been hiring continuously since 2008, so 18 years, and in that entire time I have never come close to hiring a scammer.

It might be a more salient concern now, in the era of AI agents, and we are much warier today than I was at Matasano, but generally I think this risk is more talked about than experienced.

Ive had people show up at onsites that were clearly not the same person I screened over the phone earlier as far back as 2013 at google. It’s real. Just ask any recruiters from well known companies and they’ll tell you. It’s happening to more and more startups too now because it’s gotten easier

I believe you, but again: I haven't experienced anything like this, ever. One of the clearest results we got at Matasano adopting this approach was a drastic reduction in turnover, which is exactly the opposite of what you expect to see if people are scamming their way into jobs they can't do. That's held up (I don't have the before/after comparison, but I do have the industry-wide comparison) over the years afterwards. We hire these people, then we work with them, and they're amazing.

I read that post back in the day and have remembered it ever since, and used it as a basis for the process at my current employment. Thank you!

(For those interested: https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com