Hiring in the age of deepfaked candidates

Something changed in technical hiring over the last year. A meaningful share of applications now come from people who are not who they say they are, or from a language model that wrote every word on their behalf. For a seed stage company with one open engineering seat and no recruiting team, that is not an annoyance. It is a real risk. Here is how we handle it.

Long answer questions still work

The questions that ask a candidate to explain something in their own words are the highest signal part of any application. Not because of the answer itself, but because of the texture. Real people write like people. They are specific, they mention the messy parts, they occasionally ramble. When every answer reads like polished marketing copy, that tells us something.

We will say the controversial part out loud. If you are a candidate, please skip the language model on those questions. It is very easy to say nothing in a great many words, and it costs you the one place where you could have sounded like yourself.

Pick up the phone

A short call does more in five minutes than a resume does in five pages. We would much rather text and call candidates than trade formal emails, because we can move faster and because a real conversation is very hard to fake. If you are actively looking, take the calls.

Verify before a founder ever sees a name

No candidate reaches one of our clients without a real conversation with us first. That is the whole point of a boutique search. The screening layer is not a form, it is a person who has talked to them, checked the work, and is putting their name on the introduction.

Know the tells

Reluctance to turn a camera on. A career history that cannot be corroborated. Answers that shift between conversations. An unwillingness to talk specifics about work they claim to have done. Any one of these can be innocent. Together they are a pattern.

The good news is that this cuts both ways. In a market full of noise, being unmistakably human is now a real advantage for candidates, and a real screening process is a real advantage for companies.