Will the real slim shady please stand up…

As the pandemic began, recruiters, along with the rest of the world, had to modify our way of doing business (and life in general). Suddenly, working from home wasn’t just a convenience – it was a necessity. As the Director of Talent Acquisition at CC Pace, remote work wasn’t a seismic shift for my team as I’ve long believed that recruiting can be done effectively from home. We could continue to source, screen, and pipeline candidates from our home office and still manage to meet candidates face-to-face throughout the interview process… just with one small change (enter the video chat). However, that small change had a bigger impact than I ever anticipated.

With remote work becoming the norm, professional ‘norms’ started to evolve – and not all for the better. New challenges emerged that were unprecedented. As if recruiters didn’t already have a tough time finding top-notch candidates that fit in with team and company dynamics, a slew of new challenges were introduced. Among them is the fake candidate.

Fake candidates come in many forms. If you’ve been involved with recruiting or hiring for technical positions, you’re probably chuckling to yourself (or cringing if I’m bringing up suppressed trauma) because you know what I’m talking about. If you’re one of the lucky ones who hasn’t been personally victimized by fake candidates, allow me to elaborate.

Breaking Down the Fake Candidate Personas

First, we’ll start with the ‘classic counterfeit’, which is a candidate who has a fake resume. These are real people who concoct a fake work history tailored to fit the needs of the position they are seeking. These resumes generally include fictional skills and fictional employers. In my experience, counterfeit candidates are doing this to get higher-paying jobs and are prevalent within the corp-to-corp contract/freelance world.

Then there is the ‘bait and switch’ applicant (this is a particularly infuriating one). This approach happens when unethical companies bring candidates to the US, sponsor their visas, and tremendously inflate their resumes, marketing the candidate as a highly skilled technical consultant. Again, the company is trying to recoup its investment quickly. This scenario might sound familiar to the ‘counterfeit candidate,’ and so far, it is. Cue the ‘bait and switch’. This happens when a technical interview is scheduled, and a very senior, highly skilled technical person takes the interview and lands the job, only to have a lesser qualified or even unqualified individual show up for the job. Seriously, who would ever think that this is acceptable?! But sadly, it happens.

My final example (save the best for last, right?) is a new emergent class of faker: ‘the moonlighter.’ You’ve heard of this! Just as the nickname suggests, this is the candidate who has the skills and experience to land a great job. However, instead of landing a great remote job (with a great salary), they decide to accept two full-time jobs (or maybe more!) and work them simultaneously, doing just enough to get by. Not only is that unethical (and a sure way to get fired fast), but it’s also giving the rest of the remote workers a bad name.

While we’ve tried to make light of these new challenges, in all seriousness, they have really complicated the job market. It impacts recruiters and employers in the worst of ways. Experienced recruiters have become very savvy at identifying these folks early in the process, although you can never be 100% sure 100% of the time. However, you can look at individual red flags and make a reasonable judgment. Here are a few of the red flags that can help you identify the real candidates from the pretenders. Note -some ‘legit candidates may show one or two of the signs below, but if more than a few of these concerns arise, further investigation may be warranted.

When verifying a candidate on their LinkedIn profile, be wary/concerned if:

They don’t list their full name
No details or limited information is provided (especially education)
They don’t have a photo (or use a stock photo, cartoon image, etc.)
A very low number of LinkedIn connections
They show no upward progression in their job history; only senior-level positions are visible
Work history only shows large worldwide companies (which makes it difficult to verify on social media)

When conducting a video interview, be aware of:

Video: Not turning on the camera and/or, when asked to use video, giving an excuse as to why they cannot do this.
Long Pauses: When answering questions, the candidate appears to be reading a script or ‘Googling’ to look for answers.
Mute: If you notice audio going on and off, along with a delay in answering questions, your spidey senses are probably going off (and for good reason!).
Other Red Flags:
- Sharing strange phone numbers that don’t line up with past or current physical locations.
- Giving generic descriptions of their role and projects they have worked on.
- Lacking knowledge of the companies they have worked for in the past.
- Requiring 100% remote, even if the position is located in the area they claim to reside.

Hopefully, these tips help to protect your organization from hiring a fake candidate (or you feel like you have a support group if this is something you’ve experienced yourself). While you can’t be 100% sure every suspicious resume is a fake, our goal is to find the right, real candidates for our clients – every time. At CC Pace, we’ve instituted a lot of standard procedures to help us identify and eliminate the fake candidates from the get-go so that you never have to experience a counterfeit candidate, a bait-and-switch, or a moonlighter at your organization! Give us a call if this is something you need help with!

When it comes to work trends, one thing is clear: the future is all about flexibility – but what does that really mean? Like many things, it tends to mean something different to just about everyone, as there is no ‘one-size-fits-all approach’ when it comes to applying it to the workplace. As many companies seek to craft their definition of adaptable work policies, CC Pace is in the middle of the crosscurrents in deciphering the right balance of flexibility, both for our staff and our team of consultants who are navigating various clients’ policies and expectations.

While we can’t tell you what policies are right for your organization, we can share some of the impacts we’ve seen these decisions have when it comes to recruiting. It should come as no surprise that companies with the strictest remote work policies are having the hardest time finding, and retaining, top talent. They’re having to dig deeper into their pockets to make a hire and are losing good employees to their competition at unprecedented rates. In fact, according to a recent poll, 54% of workers said they’d leave their current job for one that provided more flexibility.

Employers with varying ranges of flexibility (hybrid to fully remote options) attract up to an average of seven times more applicants than fully onsite positions (CareerBuilder). Job seekers have spoken, and they want flexible work options. So much so that, on average, they are willing to take a 14% salary decrease to work remotely, according to a recent survey by ZipRecruiter. Companies with flexible options are less likely to roll out the red carpet to get top talent and go into high-stakes salary negotiations compared to their inflexible competitors.

While employees mostly adjusted well to the changing landscape of this new work environment, companies (read: management), have had mixed results. We see continued refinements as hiring managers try to balance where the future is headed with how their positions stack up relative to the competitive alternatives that job seekers have. This often leads to misaligned expectations – job requirements that say, “completely remote,” to maintain a competitive edge, while managers casually mention to the recruiters that they’d ‘really like it if the candidate was within driving distance to the office’ so that they could ‘occasionally meet up.’ In other cases, all positions are hybrid roles, with no exceptions (although exceptions are made for the ideal candidate). This behavior is confusing and can contribute to a costly increase in turnover as current staff asks, “but what about me?”.

In our experience as a consulting firm, this newfound ability of clients to work with a hybrid/distributed workforce has allowed us to expand with clients that we would not have previously been able to support. Take a manufacturer who is located far from a major city; working with them to transform their IT department would have been cost-prohibitive in terms of sustained travel expenses. The happy middle ground here is spending some time face-to-face up front to establish the basic bonds necessary to be successful throughout the engagement. In this case, we need an employee who can ‘travel a little’ and would rule out anyone who cannot. Surprisingly, there are plenty of job seekers that remain adamant on being ‘fully remote’.

These observations don’t appear to be post-pandemic trends that will die out when the market shifts. In the world of technology services, we have seen that when the C-suite mandates ‘no remote work,’ it pushes away the top talent. After all, these are the same people logging in from home on the weekend when the system goes down, aren’t they? Beyond location, Europe’s 4-day workweek trial run in 2022 caught the attention of both employees and employers alike (albeit maybe for different reasons) and has inspired a lot of chatter stateside. Currently, Maryland has a bill on the table that, if passed, would offer major tax incentives to any businesses that scale back to a 4-day (32-hour) work week without employees losing any pay or benefits. It would be a major shakeup to the US workforce. But that’s for another post…

The bottom line is flexibility isn’t just good for your employee morale. It’s good for your bottom line. Companies with the right balance of flexibility save on upfront recruiting costs, employee turnover and can find higher-quality resources than their less-flexible counterparts. The haves and the have-nots have turned into the flexible and the inflexible.

All sides point to flexibility as a work trend that’s here to stay. In response to this trend, we’re creating an ease of coworking index offering to help organizations measure how easy it is for employees and teams to work together – particularly in remote and hybrid environments. Keep an eye out for this service to be released later in the year!