Does Salesforce Have a Resume Fraud Problem? : Tom M
by: Tom M
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### Summary of Resume Fraud in Recruitment In today’s tech industry, particularly within the Salesforce ecosystem, employers face increasing concerns over **resume fraud** and **fake candidates**. This includes individuals exaggerating their qualifications or using false identities to secure job positions. With over 70% of respondents in a survey admitting to lying on their resumes, the problem is more widespread than many realize. **Key Details:** - **Resume Fraud:** Defined as providing false or misleading information on resumes, ranging from exaggerations to sophisticated tactics aimed at deceiving AI screening tools. - **Impact on Employers:** This fraud costs companies approximately **$600 billion annually** and can significantly increase hiring costs, especially for mid and senior roles. - **Fake Candidates:** This term encompasses various types of individuals who apply for jobs without the necessary qualifications or intentions, including identity fraudsters and interview proxies. - **Client Experiences:** Recruitment agencies report a troubling rise in fraudulent applications, with one client estimating that **85% of candidates** have misrepresented themselves. - **AI Influence:** The advancement of AI technology has made it easier for candidates to cheat, complicating the hiring process further. ### Additional Context The rise in resume fraud is attributed to the highly competitive job market and the ease with which candidates can embellish their credentials. As AI tools such as Cluey assist applicants in deceiving employers, the need for better verification processes has become critical. Experts recommend enhanced screening methods, such as in-person interviews with ID verification and more personalized questioning during interviews. ### Conclusion To combat resume fraud, companies must implement rigorous verification methods and adapt their hiring practices to ensure they can trust their candidates. The ongoing challenges in recruitment highlight the need for vigilance and innovative strategies to maintain integrity in hiring. ### SEO Hashtags #ResumeFraud #TechRecruitment #HiringChallenges #Salesforce #JobMarketTrends #FakeCandidates #AIInRecruitment #EmploymentIntegrity #RecruitmentSolutions #ResumeVerification
“How do I know whether the person I hired is who they say they are?” “How do I know they have the skills and experience they say they do?” “How do I know they’re a real person?” These are both questions that no employer should have to ask, but ones that are unfortunately having to be considered more and more, especially in the tech sector.
Resume fraud has emerged as one of the fastest-growing job market trends in the Salesforce ecosystem and beyond, and the tricks behind it – from exaggerated resumes to interviewing with AI – have the potential to derail the market unless the right measures are put in place.
What Is Resume Fraud?
According to business.com, resume fraud – sometimes referred to as resume inflation – is ‘when a job applicant includes false or misleading information on their resume’. Although initially tame-sounding, the extent of resume fraud can be as simple as exaggerating experience or as complex as rigging a resume for AI detection software with fake resume services.
Resume fraud, perhaps surprisingly, is also more common than one might think. According to a survey conducted by Pollfish, more than 7 in 10 respondents said they’ve lied on their resume before, with 68% of those who say they lied admitting it was to simply improve their chances of being hired.
Although arguably unethical, it does appear to pay off; 73% of respondents said they’ve landed a job using an application they lied on, and nearly half never faced any consequences for lying.
What Are Fake Candidates?
The term “fake candidates” is a bit broader, but essentially refers to individuals who apply for a job but are either not qualified, not interested in taking on the job, or not who they say they are.
This includes individuals such as identity fraudsters who use false identities to pass background checks or secure visas; interview proxies who send someone else to complete a technical interview or assessment on their behalf; and “ghost candidates” submitted by recruitment agencies who either don’t exist or never respond when contacted.
What Are the Impacts?
Resume fraud may just seem like a way for candidates to get a better chance at a job position, and although this is part of it, it can be detrimental for businesses. Resume fraud is estimated to cost employers $600B annually, and the cost of a bad hire starts at 30% of their salary for entry-level employees. The cost is much higher for mid and senior-level employees.
On the surface, it may seem like avoiding recruitment fraud should be a fairly simple process. After all, you can find people out through an experience test like a coding test, and you could contact references in their past workplaces or educational institutions to see if they attended, right?
Theoretically, yes, but when businesses routinely receive over 100 applications for one job in less than a week, utilizing the man-power needed to sort through these applications (even with the help of an AI filtering tool) is often a struggle.
Mat Roche, the Founder of recruitment agency Third Republic, says that resume fraud and fake candidates are “now becoming one of the biggest challenges to hiring Salesforce talent.”
“There’s so many enhanced CVs, fake candidates, deep fakes, etc,” he explained. “We’re hearing more and more horror stories from clients, and it’s really compromising recruitment integrity.
“LinkedIn is a big part of the problem; it’s much worse than what it was even a year ago.”
Client Horror Stories
As a recruitment agency, Third Republic has been a frontline witness to this trend for the last few years. It’s something that both Mat and a number of the company’s clients have admitted is a fastly growing problem.
According to a company that wishes to remain anonymous, 12 months ago, 3% of candidates were cheating in their technical assessments assigned at the application stage. Today, this number has risen to 30%.
Another anonymous client said that they believe that a staggering 85% of candidates are either lying or exaggerating information on their resumes, which is even higher than the averages recorded in Pollfish’s survey.
They told Salesforce Ben that the problem has gotten so bad that they feel they can’t trust resumes at all anymore, and rely on Third Republic to ensure every candidate they see is 100% legitimate and vetted – something that can be difficult for companies operating autonomously to achieve.
How Bad Can It Get?
Resume fraud and fake candidates are certainly not limited to one particular sector or industry, and stories from the wider tech industry illustrate just how pressing a problem this is, with cases of reading from AI all the way to faking identities.
Matt Ewalt, General Manager at digital transformation consultancy Provectus, says that the problem may run deeper than many people anticipate.
“The level of resume fraud is massively on the rise,” he said. “The CIO of a Fortune 500 company recently told me they had hired remote workers in key tech roles, and that they’re finding out four or five months after they’ve been hired, onboarded, and activated, that they were fake candidates, and even foreign nationals that were never in the United States”
He also shared that a VP of another major brand that he had interacted with reported that 30% of their data scientists quit after four months and then disappeared with their LinkedIn profiles taken down. This strongly suggests that these hires may have been fraudulent, potentially hired to access proprietary processes and intellectual property before leaving.
Brock Hubbard, Chief Commercial Officer at Third Republic and ex-VP of Partner Strategy Services at Salesforce, shared similar experiences, citing misrepresentation in the hiring process to be “one of the biggest threats to trust in the Salesforce ecosystem.”
“After more than 20 years in this space, including eight at Salesforce, I’ve never seen this level of deception and outright fraud. “From candidates overstating skills to situations where someone entirely different shows up for the interview, the impact is real.”
Xavery Lisinski, the CPO of Elements.cloud, also spoke on his unfortunate experiences with resume fraud, stating that he has come across candidates who on their resume claimed to be experienced in Flow, Apex, and synchronous or asynchronous jobs, but didn’t know the difference between them when it came to the interview.
Another professional took to LinkedIn to explain how they had spent a couple of weeks phone screening with those she thought were actual job candidates. They were actually callers from a call center in China.
Why Is This Happening?
So, the main reason behind recruitment fraud is to theoretically give candidates a better chance at scoring a particular job, but is that where it stops?
At least for the tech industry, this might not be the case. It appears that there is an entire business model built on the back of this practice, with consultancies already spearheading clean-up projects for the messy aftermath.
Andrew Day, a Salesforce Architect at 22 Nexus, says that he has witnessed a lot of people (particularly overseas hires) lying about their credentials to get their hands on new technologies.
“I know of one consultancy in particular that lied about their Health Cloud experience and left a mess for me to clean up,” he said. “This is very common, and a lot of us in the ecosystem have made a living off of cleaning up their messes.”
Mayank Shrivastava, Technical Consultant at Salesforce, said he’s also experienced this firsthand.
“I randomly get messages and calls from agencies and consultancies offering to pay for giving proxy interviews as well as job support for people hired through proxy, and now can’t even do basic tasks assigned to them.”
We also can’t deny how AI’s rapid progression has made it much easier for individuals to cheat the system – job interviews, tests, and more. Cluey – the AI in-browser tool – is just one example of how powerful this technology is. It is able to view your screen, listen to your audio, provide AI-generated answers, and be virtually undetectable to anyone observing your screen.
What Can Be Done to Solve This?
It is evident that there is a pressing recruitment problem across the tech industry and beyond, and its branches – resume fraud and fake candidates – both need to be addressed.
As unfortunate as it sounds, employers can no longer assume that applicants are genuine as easily as they previously could, and more checks/procedures need to be put in place for both peace of mind and time and resource purposes. Not too dissimilar to the way credit checks are far more intensive than they used to be, this method of approach can be a big aid in the recruitment process.
Different experts have different ideas on how this can be approached, with some citing the return to in-person interviews with ID checks for hybrid and on-site roles.
For remote roles, this answer isn’t so clear-cut, but it is worth ensuring that you can identify a real person over a video call or phone call, and that they have the experience they say they do by asking them high-level questions relevant to the role.
Darrell Gallegos, an experienced Salesforce Architect, says that it needs to be considered methodologically: use a site like LinkedIn as a base-level verification source, use deliberate, non-standardized questions in the interview, and consult references wherever possible.
“There is no excuse for the use of fraud, but as fraudulent players come into the game, it’s time to up the defense by modifying the process,” he said.
Danny Gelfenbaum, Head of Delivery and Operations at Bkonect, says that it becomes much easier to spot fraudulent applicants by asking them deeper questions on things that they will actually be doing in the job they’re interviewing for.
“That’s exactly what I do when I interview someone, especially those who blab on about how great and knowledgeable they are,” he said. “I put it to the test and ask them to prove it by answering my questions; show me the documents they created, tell me the details of something… very quickly, you can see what’s what.”
Final Thoughts
Resume fraud is undoubtedly one of the fastest-growing and pressing issues affecting tech industry recruitment, and as AI and technology as a whole advance, it is likely to get a lot worse unless companies can put in place the right procedures to tackle this problem.
Verification, personal, example-led interviewing, and fraud awareness training are all going to be aspects that require attention as this progresses, as without them, companies will not only be affected financially, but they will also miss out on hiring strong talent.
At a time when both hiring and obtaining jobs are more difficult than ever, these issues need to be addressed promptly to ensure both the stability of the market and the future of some of our brightest, most diverse industries.
The post Does Salesforce Have a Resume Fraud Problem? appeared first on Salesforce Ben.
May 21, 2025 at 04:35PM
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