Job seekers are getting increasingly bold by 'cheating' in interviews — and AI is making it worse

• Job seekers sometimes use AI to cheat in interviews, which highlights flaws in the hiring process.
• The rise of certain tech has made it easier to deceive interviewers.
• Experts suggest clearer guidelines and tech solutions to address cheating and improve hiring.

The interviewer asks you a question. You start reading a response generated by artificial intelligence from the side of your screen — maybe even using another app to make it appear your eyes are fixed on the camera.

It can feel like there are endless ways to dupe a hiring manager in a job interview — especially one that doesn't involve meeting IRL. The internet is, of course, filled with posts about how people try to sneak past the difficult questions interviewers sometimes ask.

It all points to a hiring process that can be terrible for job seekers — and for employers.

Executives told Business Insider that improving the hiring process would require more conversations about what constitutes cheating. Many employers will also need to better explain how the application process will unfold so fewer job seekers might be tempted to get sneaky.

"A lot of the efforts to cheat come from the fact that hiring is so broken. So you're just like, 'Oh, my God, how do I get through? How do I get seen? How to get assessed fairly?'" Lindsey Zuloaga, the chief data scientist at HireVue, told BI.

Is using AI during a job interview cheating?

Part of the problem now is that not everyone agrees on what's unethical. There are easy calls, like if someone feeds you answers during an interview. But what about a quick internet search to look something up? Or how about having an AI bot ingest a job description and toss out questions that could come up in an interview?

Greg Yang, a cofounder of xAI, posted on X in early October that he'd caught someone cheating during an interview.

"The candidate tried to use claude during the interview but it was way too obvious," Yang wrote.

He "wasn't even mad," he said, but, instead, was curious about how people cheat in job interviews now.

"So we had a nice chat at the end where they taught me all the tricks," Yang said.

It's understandable why an interviewer who catches someone in the act might be more curious than angry.

HireVue's Zuloaga pointed to using chatbots to complete coding challenges as one example of a question without a clear answer.

"Customers have different views on whether using ChatGPT is even cheating or not," she said, adding that, according to one line of thinking, "it's just part of the developer's toolbox now."

Zuloaga said employers could take simple steps, like defining what cheating means and what the expectations are.

"They can say, 'Hey, we want to hear from the real you. Although tools like ChatGPT can be really useful in preparation for an interview, please speak from your own experience,'" she said.

Zuloaga said there wasn't a reliable way to detect when a candidate might be using generative AI, but that one tell might appear when a job seeker's answers lack specifics.

"Are they speaking comfortably and fluidly about things that they actually did?" she said.

Genuine answers, Zuloaga said, usually involve candidates walking through their experiences and the problems that they've solved.

Employers are trying to fight cheating during interviews

Kirthiga Reddy is the CEO of Virtualness, a startup that uses blockchain technology to authenticate certifications workers can earn through formal education or various boot camps.

She told BI that it's often too easy for people to say in an interview that they have completed coursework or training on a subject and even slap a phony achievement onto their résumé.

Reddy, who previously worked as a managing director at Facebook for India and South Asia, said the cost of verifying workers' credentials was high, both for employers and for workers.

Virtualness, which launched in late 2023, hopes that if employers use technology to verify a worker's credentials, bosses can worry less about the risks of taking on people who don't have the skills they claim or, worse, those who might have nefarious intentions. It can also help workers who have actually earned credentials stand out.

Even if people who misrepresent themselves get caught, Reddy said, those with fake bona fides could have prevented honest job seekers from making it through the application process.

"You might have missed out on really great candidates or have included a bunch of candidates who you should not have included in that whole search process," she said.

The startup Kanny hopes character assessments can help employers get a better sense of the people they might be hiring.

Kanny uses reviews from a job candidate's colleagues — past and present — to rate the person's integrity, accountability, respect, humility, confidence, and grit.

Kanny CEO and cofounder Sean Vassilaros told BI that understanding a job candidate's "work character " gives employers a better shot at avoiding a bad hire, and workers can better understand their own strengths and weaknesses through peer reviews.

"The most important thing when hiring is not hard or soft skills or even expertise. It is character," he said. "It's also the most important or most difficult thing to ascertain."

Why it might be tempting to cheat

Zuloaga said part of the push to cheat came from job seekers' exasperation over what can be an arduous process. That can include what feels like unending interviews.

Octavius A. Newman previously told BI he went through a dozen interviews for a role as a creative lead and didn't get the job.

A drawn-out process isn't necessarily helpful for either side, according to Jennifer Schielke, the CEO of the staffing firm Summit Group Solutions and author of "Leading for Impact."

She tells clients they should be ready to hire as soon as they advertise a role. As Schielke previously told BI, layoffs and lengthy job searches have left many people looking for work without a sense of security.

Ravin Jesuthasan, a coauthor of "The Skills-Powered Organization" and the global leader for transformation services at the consulting firm Mercer, told BI that one challenge around hiring is that both sides are using AI more often.

Employers are using it in the hiring process, and candidates are using it to beef up their applications, help with interview prep, and even apply for jobs. And some, of course, are using it to cheat.

"It feels like this is an arms race that is just going to keep accelerating," he said. "I'm not sure that there is an end in sight."

An earlier version of this story appeared on August 16, 2024.

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