They Knew He Was A Scammer, So They Offered Him A Job

Startup Checkr, a background-check company, deliberately offered a job to a suspected scammer who used a stolen LinkedIn identity and an AI-generated resume to apply for an engineering role, after CEO Daniel Yanisse told the team to 'continue playing the game with him.' The applicant, dubbed Ulysses, appeared as a different person on video and had suspicious IP and VPN addresses, and the LinkedIn profile warned of impersonators using LLM-generated resumes. Checkr's move highlights the growing problem of AI-assisted job application fraud, with recruiters expecting at least 30% of resumes to be AI-written.

On April 8, recruiters and a hiring manager at startup Checkr logged on to meet over video chat with a promising applicant for an engineering role. And immediately, they knew something was wrong. On paper, the person – whom we will call Ulysses, in honor of the Trojan Horse that was aiming at their company – seemed highly qualified, with a career as a software engineer dating back a decade, and the kind of casual, outdoors selfie-style profile picture with salt-and-pepper beard that says: “I’ve got job security at a leading tech company” — in this case, Stripe. Recruiters can expect at least 30% of resumes they receive to be fully or partially written by AI. But when Ulysses joined the video screener over Zoom, the person who logged on looked very different: clean-shaven, far younger in a baseball cap and hoodie, and Asian. His IP address and VPN address both seemed suspicious. His resume didn’t appear normal. And the interviewer thought he could hear other voices in the room. Were they coaching Ulysses? Feeding him answers? Or taking similarly sketchy interviews? The “About” section on Ulysses’ LinkedIn page seemed to have anticipated this possibility. “WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING: A whole bunch of AI bots, hackers, and marginal marauders have been applying to jobs using my name, my LinkedIn profile hi and an LLM generated resume,” blared the page. “I am not currently applying for work,” it added, while encouraging recruiters to waste any impersonators’ time, then push them out the door of a fast-moving car. Okay, so this engineer was probably not really applying to a job at Checkr. But the interview team were intrigued, because of the irony of the situation: applicant verification is kind of Checkr’s whole thing . So in a plot twist of a decision that went all the way up to co-founder and CEO Daniel Yanisse, the Checkr team did something a little crazy. “Let’s continue playing the game with him,” Yanisse told the team. They decided to offer Ulysses a job. The rest of this post is for paid subscribers. To read it, try one month free. Even better, support our independent startups reporting by taking 20% off an annual subscription, in our Summer Sale.