Candidate fraud used to mean an inflated job title or a stretched employment date. It now means AI-generated applications arriving by the thousands, fabricated resumes that read better than real ones, coached reference rings submitting feedback from a single IP address, and proxy candidates showing up to interviews. The problem has grown so quickly that Kyle & Co., the research and advisory firm founded by industry analyst Kyle Lagunas, released a full report on it this summer: The State of Candidate Fraud Detection & Prevention.

In November, Lagunas will deliver the opening keynote at the ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit, and the day before, he will facilitate the RIS Executive Forum, an invitation-only working session for senior TA executives on AI in talent acquisition. I spoke with Lagunas about the report, which began as a follow-up to the firm's AI interviewer research and kept expanding as the team pulled at the thread.

Lagunas traces the problem to what he calls a perfect storm: "automating a lot of decision-making before we were fine-tuning it, and also downsizing a lot of our human workforce at the same time as we were also increasing our virtual interviewing," he said, recalling his reaction at the time: "This is going to be really problematic. And it has proven to be."

The report maps a spectrum of fraud that runs from resume embellishment to outright crime, a range Lagunas calls lowercase fraud and uppercase Fraud. "Some candidates are intentionally inflating their experience and creating completely fake resumes, but they're doing it just to get a job. They're not doing it in order to scam you." At the far end sit the criminals. "There are the other ones that are trying to literally get access to sensitive systems and information."

KnowBe4, the security awareness training company, hired a North Korean operative posing as a U.S.-based software engineer in July 2024. Using a stolen American identity, he passed multiple interviews, a background check, and reference verification, and was caught only when endpoint security software flagged him attempting to install malware after receiving his company workstation. Cases like that are the rare extreme, a small slice of overall candidate fraud. Most of what recruiters encounter every day sits far closer to the lowercase end of the spectrum.

The lowercase version is not just a problem of separating the real from the embellished, but also a candidate experience problem the profession has not begun to address. "There's a social contract that we have with candidates that is not established yet," Lagunas said. He challenged me to name career sites that tell candidates how the employer expects them to use AI and what uses it will reject. I could not name one. Neither could he.

The uppercase version is a security problem, and the early technical fixes are backfiring. Lagunas described a conversation with the head of assessment at one of the world's largest tech companies, which had turned on an ATS feature that flagged fraud signals like suspicious IP addresses and email addresses. "It was creating so many false positives that the signal became useless, but worse than useless," he said. "Hiring managers would see a signal of this may be fraud, and they were immediately like, oh, that's fraud, like this is a fraudulent candidate, instead of looking at it a little bit more critically or just being circumspect. It was introducing more layers of bias into the process, and it didn't work."

The report identifies nine stages of the hiring lifecycle where fraud enters. That is a lot of doors to lock, but adding headcount alone doesn’t help. "Resources alone are not the solution. It really is more of intentionality and process design," he said. "You can redesign your process if there's one person in the team or one million people in the team."

Some of the redesign is as simple as reading the fine print of the reference check. "Require references, look at the IP addresses of those people, and look up the phone numbers of those people," he said. "Typically people aren't being that sophisticated with their references. You'll see three references all from the same IP address." The report calls the IP address and device fingerprint of a candidate's references the most reliable and least gameable fraud signal in the market.

Some of the fix costs money that TA teams cut years ago, with budget returning for in-person interviews. Lagunas calls this smart friction, deliberate slow points in a process that has been optimized for nothing but speed. "We really just went to move as fast as we could with as few human resources as possible," he said of the first wave of AI adoption. "We're automating the things that never got optimized, and that's another vulnerability for us."

The biggest surprise in the research was the organizational vacuum around fraud prevention. "CISOs don't really want this. They are not grabbing this away from TA," Lagunas said. Nobody claiming the problem is worse than the problem itself. "When nobody owns it, you can't create accountability. You can't create standards. You can't get commitment."

Lagunas expects ownership to land with the fastest-growing team in recruiting. "I won't be surprised if it becomes a part of the RecOps gig," he said. "I don't think that it should be living completely outside of our space. It should be something that's connected to the work that we do."

No single tool stops candidate fraud. The best practice emerging from the research is layered defense: top-of-funnel filters to catch the obvious fakes, identity verification deeper in the funnel, and human diligence covering the seams.

Products like Greenhouse's CLEAR identity verification partnership are emerging to address different types of fraud, though no single product can do it all. Even a verified ID has limits, as Lagunas noted: "you can still spoof a driver's license."

For leaders starting from zero, Lagunas has some advice.

"Doing something is better than nothing."

— David

P.S. On September 18, Lagunas is partnering with ERE to present a free webinar on the report’s findings.

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Featured Story

AI Doesn’t Eliminate Accountability

We’ve got a good one from Raghav Singh this week. In it, he makes the point that employers remain accountable for AI-assisted hiring and workforce decisions, even when those decisions rely heavily on outside vendors or automated recommendations. As we become more reliant on AI, this will only become a bigger issue in TA. (ERE)

More Recruiting Insights

Careerminds acquires Jobrapido to build global job-search group. Careerminds has acquired Jobrapido, adding a job-search and programmatic recruitment platform active in 58 countries to its growing portfolio of outplacement, career-transition, and workforce technology businesses. (AIM Group)

Recruit raises outlook as HR Technology outperforms expectations. Recruit Holdings, parent company of Indeed, raised its full-year guidance after its HR Technology business significantly exceeded expectations in the first quarter. Posting volume was down, so they are squeezing more revenue out of every job posting on Indeed. I may dig into this ore next week. (Recruit)

iCIMS: Job openings rise while hiring struggles to keep pace. iCIMS reports that U.S. job openings were up 17% year over year in July while hires were flat. Does this mean that more hiring is on the way? (ICIMS)

Workday, Silver Lake, Greta Garbo and possible futures. There’s been a lot of conversation about the potential Silver Lake-backed take-private of Workday this week, but this one stood out. According to Otter, going private could give the company room to streamline its portfolio, rebuild its culture, and pursue a more fundamental reinvention for an AI-shaped future without quarterly public-market pressure. (Thomas Otter)

Webinars

Employer Brand Ask Me Anything (AMA)

August 21, 2026 | 2:00 PM EDT | 1 Hour

Candidates don’t start with your careers site anymore. They start with an AI search result, a Reddit thread, a TikTok from a former employee, or a Glassdoor page nobody on your team wrote. Discover how employee voice and experience-first branding can help TA leaders earn trust in the age of AI. (ERE)

How to Hire for AI Fluency Now That It’s a Critical Skill

August 26, 2026 | 2:00 PM EDT | 1 Hour

Drawing on patterns from more than 60,000 AI-enabled technical interviews, CoderPad’s Bayo Ojuri offers a practical framework for defining, assessing, and scoring AI fluency by role. The webinar focuses on realistic exercises, fresh questions, consistent criteria, and observable signals that help hiring teams distinguish genuine capability from polished but shallow answers. (ERE)

Veteran Hiring Ask Me Anything (AMA)

September 1, 2026 | 2:00 PM EDT | 1 Hour

Most hiring organizations say they value veterans. Few understand the true meaning of the transition, or what’s on the other side of it: candidates trying to translate high-consequence experience into a résumé and an interview recruiters can recognize and quantify.

Sean and Bradley have each lived the transition and led hiring teams on the other side. Bring your questions and get answers from two people who’ve actually done both. (ERE)

What AI Is Actually Delivering in Recruiting: New Research from Kyle Lagunas

September 18, 2026 | 2:00 PM EDT | 1 Hour

Kyle Lagunas has spent the past three years studying how AI performs inside real talent acquisition teams. His research includes a survey of more than 350 senior HR and talent leaders, a head-to-head evaluation of 12 AI interviewing platforms, and an in-depth look at the rise of candidate fraud.

In this session, Kyle will share the findings that matter most to recruiting leaders. He will break down where AI is delivering measurable value, where tools are falling short, and what organizations should consider before making their next investment. (ERE)

Conferences

ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit

San Diego, CA
November 10-11, 2026

Talent acquisition is moving fast. The best leaders are not just chasing trends. They are comparing notes, testing new approaches, and learning from practitioners who are already deep in the work.

This November, the ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit comes to San Diego for two days of practical insight, honest discussion, and peer-to-peer learning. You’ll hear real examples from recruiting teams tackling today’s biggest questions, from AI and automation to candidate trust, quality of hire, hiring manager alignment, employer brand, and recruiting at scale.

Experience the future of talent acquisition next month. We hope to see you there! (ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit)