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Comment by flowersjeff | Hacker News Reader

Happened with my partner, and have heard of this from a lot of friends. This is a real issue. It hurts 'real' candidates and everyone that takes time to be apart of the hiring process.

HR dept's are simply unable/ill-equipped to handle this new reality. Honestly, at larger org's this is really an upper management issue first and foremost, as HR dept's are sort of benefiting from these frauds. ( Before you go off on that last sentence, I did say 'sort of' - and I personally believe in 'you get what you incentivize'...so)

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I'm not actually sure it hurts real candidates?

If garbage is flooding the market, it forces employers to pay higher wages for a chance to actually get something good.

This pushes wages up for real, skilled engineers.

How do higher wages discourage fraud?

it's probably to avoid spinning the wheels down in the budget garbage being referenced here and wasting a bunch of time. Pay the upfront cost and leapfrog over the delay.

That only works if the upfront cost actually does anything to make the fraud more difficult. Just paying higher salaries does fuck all, the fraudsters will adapt to the higher prices and reap more profits.

Yup that's what I'm thinking. Higher wages would encourage more elaborate fraud (faking identity, paying a strong interviewer to sit in for you, paying people to pretend to be your references, paying someone in the company to refer you) because the payday makes it all even more worth it.

I was thinking along the line of putting it towards higher quality sourcers on the recruiting half. There's some some specialty boutique stuff out there in many spaces.

As I see it, the hurt is going to come from more hoops expected, as any burdens are always passed down to the individual. In in an ideal world, companies would actually read/think/analyze all the data/metadata they already have; however, we don't live in this world. And the individual's going to have to spell everything out in gross detail.

When a fake candidate accepts an offer, the first real runner up candidate gets a rejection and has fewer offers to choose from.

> If garbage is flooding the market, it forces employers to pay higher wages for a chance to actually get something good.

I don't think garbage in any market drives up the prices for anything.

Those looking for something good just waste more time looking, and some of them give up and settle for garbage.

Exclusivity drives up prices. If you're the sole supplier of something badly needed, you can charge a lot for it. If a second supplier shows up, but with garbage, you're likely not going to be able to charge even more.

If enough people do it this can create a negative feedback loop. It’s called Market for Lemons https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

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