Glut of Fake LinkedIn Profiles Pits HR Against the Bots | Hacker News Reader

Glut of Fake LinkedIn Profiles Pits HR Against the Bots

krebsonsecurity.com

115 pointstodsacerdoti98 comments

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You know the scene in the 2014 Godzilla movie where the Japanese Godzilla expert says "Let them fight..."?

That's pretty much my reaction to recruiters and HR wasting time on linkedin bots.

Until it becomes standard practice to require verified LinkedIn work history.

What's when I move to a yurt in the forest

Please verify your yurt. Click on the real yurt from the following 6 pictures...

Hello I’m from the high speed train project and we’re going to eminent domain your yurt. Get packing!

not until you click on the right "does this picture contain a high-speed train" image

That will never happen. LinkedIn has long since peaked. Since it became cluttered with odd influencer types posting largely meaningless fluff, and more and more recruiters who make no effort to read candidate pages before spamming, its value has continually declined each year.

LinkedIn may have a higher effort:reward ratio than it used to, but is there something else that has higher utility to someone looking to get noticed for a new job?

Since we're here, post to a "Who's looking to get hired" thread. I got a good lead with that the last time I tried. Other than that, ask around and create a relationship with a good recruiter or two.

My country has one or two job posting sites that have much better signal-to-noise ratios and are heavily watched by recruiters. It's in fact much faster than LinkedIn to get going for both sides.

Internationally I'd rather check HN's job threads and the likes.

Submitting resumes have always worked for me.

i found hired.com and y combinator jobs to be a bit more meaningful these days. Othre than that I have tried indeed.com but it seems its mostly bait and switch in london..

The attention I got through LinkedIn wasn't really worth it. They'd notify me of a shiny new job, I'd notify them of a hard $$$$ salary floor, and they'd laugh their way out of the conversation. Other channels like CodeFights, Triplebyte, and Google's foobar were a lot lower effort and a lot more fun for substantially greater dividends, and now waiting for former co-workers to recruit me is about as far as the search goes.

Hi. It me. Bob Schlomly - President of Kicking Ass and CEO of Taking Names. I'm here with my 500th post of the month telling you how much I hate it that the go-getters are being denied water-cooler comradery like the good old days, as I post this from my childhood bedroom on my dad's old laptop. I have very strong opinions on a very many things that I have never personally experienced but hope to do so whenever I decide to get over my crippling anxiety and become the man everyone told me I could become after I won first place in Ms. Bealer's third grade spelling bee. Work hard, have fun, subscribe to my newsletter and purchase one of my courses that teaches you how to create your own courses and have a great day, champ. The future is you.

This is so funny because it is completely spot-on. The only word you failed to work into this screed was "rockstar". Hilarious.

I had a candidate reach out to me looking for a new position after a gap in his employment. He was not the traditional candidate, and most would have passed on him, but being the #angel recruiter that I am, I decided to speak to him on the phone.

The conversation that transpired was #inspirational. I learned that he had been helping an old lady cross the street and got hit by a car. While he was laying on the street, a 100lb vulture swooped up and he had to use his fire-breathing abilities to fight the vulture off. He was dropped 50 ft from the air and sustained multiple injuries. This explained his gap in employment.

If it wasn't for my ability to #adapt and give all candidates from all walks of life a chance, this individual would not have been able to find fulfilling employment. Luckily we were able to match him with a fantastic #startup firm as an AP clerk. This is why I love my job. #GiveEveryoneAChance #DreamJob #PleaseSendMeAMessageForFantasticOpportunitiesLikeThis

or alternately

================================

I had a candidate reach out to me looking for a new position after a gap in his employment. He was not the traditional candidate, and most would have passed on him, but being the #mediocre recruiter that I am, I decided to speak to him on the phone. The conversation that transpired was #beautiful. I learned that he was launching a line of scented candles and got implicated in a class-action lawsuit against big-pasta. While he was running up a large mountain, a furious gorilla charged and he had to use his mother's cookbook to make friends with the agitated beast. He was hugged very hard by the animal and lost all sense of pride. This explained his gap in employment. If it wasn't for my ability to #becool and give all candidates from all walks of life a chance, this individual would not have been able to find fulfilling employment. Luckily we were able to match him with a fantastic #landscaping firm as a data ninja. This is why I love my job. #GiveEveryoneAChance #DreamJob #PleaseSendMeAMessageForFantasticOpportunitiesLikeThis

#cryingCEOmeme

LinkedIn has become such a cringefest it's not even funny anymore. It got worse than Twitter which only is still in everyone's mind because pseudo-relevant Tweets are screenshotted easily and reposted at all corners of the Internet. Not because it's good content, but because these post have the right visual dimensions to allow for such type of borrowed content.

As someone who has just joined the workforce in the past few years, I have never understood LinkedIn. The job hunting seems like a budget version of Indeed or similar. The "social media" aspect is by far the least engaging, most spammy, useless stream of information that's possible. The recruiters on there ruin things even further, adding to the pile of spam that we already deal with. I really don't see the point of LinkedIn past declaring who you work for.

I use it mainly as a digital rolodex. But that's about it. Not that it would be possible to schedule meetings easily and follow-up with conversations. But then, this would make it an email client.

All the greater motivation for people to grind for independence from the rat race.

>> Until it becomes standard practice to require verified LinkedIn work history.

Unless LinkedIn truly believes they are the new standard practice of work history.

In my entire career I’ve never had a LinkedIn account, I’ve never had LinkedIn brought up in an interview, and I’ve never looked at an interviewee’s LinkedIn account. It’s nowhere near as important as the industry seems to think.

I feel the same way about bots wasting recruiters and HR's time as recruiters and HR feel about wasting my time.

I always though LinkedIn had pivoted years ago, into a Dating Site. Are they still doing recruiting? :-)

I constantly have to contact LI to remove users from my company l, LI requires a 4 week window for the account to respond to the removal request. My company is less than 10 people and I’m marked as the founder on LI.

All I can say is good. The sooner LI put in actual usable controls, the better.

Back in the days before I got into SWDev, I was working as eventtech(sound/light), which is quite a shady buisness at time. Most companies only have minimum employees and hire freelancer when needed, for events obviously. Anyway since not all events are successfull, paying and agreements may not always be honoured, which results in lot of backtalk and rumour regarding liquidity and/or payment practice of said companies. Anyway of course this was also mirrored in online discussion of specific forums, for Germany especially in the PAForum. The answer from PAForum to counter fake accounts was actual proof of identity, by sending a copy of passport and a phone call. This made this forum no1. for jobs and feedback about companies, since people needed to add their reputation for it. Services are hard to scale and need a lot of moderation but for specific needs it may make sense.

I'm wondering how well Google is going to fare against the next wave of things like GPT-3, DALL-E, etc. The quality of content+link farms, comment spammers, etc, is going to continue to improve.

My cynical prediction: Google search (as we now know it) will be retired. Google will provide AI-generated text which attempts to answer the user's prompt, with links to results in a handful of curated sources such as wikipedia.

I already use GPT for this purpose, and it works terrifyingly well. You can even ask it for citations, and it provides you with a link.

Beware--it's prone to bullshitting. This one time I asked it for the symptoms for pulmonary hypertension: shortness of breath, chest pain, lightheadedness, and fainting. Check. Then I asked it for a citation...

It linked me to an article on hemorrhoids.

Or is it smarter than all of us and detecting some link between pulmonary hypertension and hemorrhoids.

"This study showed that patients with hemorrhoids displayed a 27% increased risk of CHD after adjustment for the confounding factors. Risk factors for the development of CHD are more common among subjects with hemorrhoids than those without hemorrhoids except for diabetes mellitus."

https://journals.lww.com/md-journal/fulltext/2017/08040/asso...

Can you post your prompt/params ?

> it's prone to bullshitting.

We may be closer to human-level AGI than I thought.

Their fields of research, such as large language models and image generation and the newly demoed “multi search” feature all strongly point towards this being the case.

How would this work with new information, e.g. breaking news? Would Google be manually putting in anything new that comes up or would they have the legacy Google crawler running in the background to feed to the AI system?

How will Google monetise this though?

Ads will still exist.

"Dear GoogleBot, how can I center a div?"

- To center a div horizontally on a page, simply set the width of the element and the margin property to auto. Or, you can use WebSiteBuilder® which simplifies it for you. Use 'this' affiliate link for 10% off in the first month.

that's first year

second year: there are 25 different ways of centering a div with potential fallbacks for older browsers and user technologies, please consider WebSiteBuilder® for all your div centering needs. Otherwise click here to read about the 25 different ways to use, text guaranteed 86% accurate.

third year: WebSiteBuilder®

I’ve started doing this already. Just last week I had a question about how to interpret labeling on construction wood. Google came up with nothing for SEO spam. GPT3 explained it completely.

What did you use to “ask” GPT-3?

>Google search (as we now know it) will be retired.

I think so too, but I think it's still pretty far out.

In order to do this, Google's AI-generated text needs to be better than the web results they return today, 100% of the time. It's the same reason why Google has never made 100% of the first 10 results ads. If users make a search and advertisers aren't bidding on the keyword, Google will return 0 results, and the user is less likely to come back and make a new search.

Google's AI needs to consistently be better than the content created by webmasters. Across billions (trillions?) of different search phrases.

Maybe there is an intermediary step where Google uses AI-generated text in a small subset of searches, and then expands out gradually. But there is so many unique searches it seems like a tall task.

Also, if Google displaces webmasters with AI-generated content, what incentives do websites have to create the new content Google will need to train their AI on to answer whatever humans want to know over the next 50 years?

Algorithmically generated content by itself might not be a bad thing for users' search experience IMO, as long as the engine can differentiate between "right" and "gibberish" content.

Linking to verified sources (research papers, official websites, verified social media accounts) when writing about these topics might make this easier. LLMs will then be able to understand if one if misrepresenting what was stated in the linked sources or not.

Any sufficiently advanced spam is indistinguishable from content.

LinkedIn seemed useful at first (10+ years ago), now it really is just a source of spam and "recruiters" sending emails for totally irrelevant jobs.

I worked at a large internet company when LinkedIn was growing. It was an immense source of spam because it encouraged people to upload the whole address book. And for years, they wouldn't let you tell them not to send you anything else unless you created an account, which yeah, not going to create an account at viral spam central, thanks.

I once arranged a date. 2007. My date said "I'm glad LinkedIn's good for something."

I recently created a fake LinkedIn account, because I don't like the fact that some users are notified when I lookup their profile, and it's impossible to use LinkedIn without being logged in.

The fake profile is an ordinary tech worker, not esp. skilled in anything and with a short work experience; but it's a lot of fun to be fake... My alter ego has 50+ connections now. There are moments when it feels quite real...

As a hiring manager I’m encountering a tremendous amount of hiring fraud. One person interviews and another shows up.

I have seen most of this activity with an address out of the DC area and I suspect they do this systematically and collect 2-3 weeks pay until fired at multiple companies.

LinkedIn is uniquely positioned to avoid site integrity issues because there is an honest to god source of truth - HR itself. Federate the data custody and allow company and employee to publish who is working where.

That puts companies in control over if and when their employees can advertise their work history. I'm not sure that's something I'd want, since updating a LinkedIn profile is many peoples' first step to finding a new job.

Yeah, I wouldn't want my employer to have any control whatsoever over my LinkedIn profile. I would abandon the service instantly if that were to happen.

Yes I can’t wait for a vexatious employer to rewrite my employment history for me.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/02/10/apple-a...

> …there is an honest to god source of truth - HR itself.

Or alternatively (and what LinkedIn is doing), employees can "open their employee-only experience" by verifying their work email address associated with a company.

That is already public for things like executive positions, but you'll still have the problem of verifying that it's the actual person creating the account.

That would fail in the EU regulatory wise (GDPR)

Wot. Manually approving who works for your company doesn't run afoul of GDPR.

> honest to god source of truth - HR itself.

Is that why most career advice includes "HR is not your friend"?

I'm not sure what question you're asking them, or what point you're trying to make if it was rhetorical.

Surely most people who agree with not trusting HR departments would still say that it's OK for the HR department of a company you've chosen to work for to, well, know that you work at that company.

How about approve any part of your linkedin profile? That ok?

Would you like to explain to HR why you're editing your linkedin profile?

What company would ever voluntarily publish their employees list to a site used by people to find new jobs?

"Hmm, https://virus.def.inite.ly looks shady, but all the Fortune 500 CISOs are posting I need to download this immediately or my computer will blow up"

I hope bots win. They will show more humanity than HR.

But then out of work HR people might learn how to program bots in their image…shudder…

I'm also seeing these used to spam people with sales pitches.

Fake profiles seem incredibly easy to avoid because LinkedIn is one of the few "real identity" social networks.

I can only conclude that they don't care.

I don't understand. Why would someone create lots of fake profiles?

The most obvious reasons might be spam or stealing contact information from the site. Those profiles could also be used for mass-liking of posts, to trick the algorithms for the feed.

well we have been seeing fake people going for jobs posts here, so if you create

profiles A,B,C

C gets enticing job offer from recruiter You hire actual user D you based your profile on to take tests etc.

You get job offer but we need recommendations

Please talk to my friends A and B!

Recruiting firms often create fake developer profiles to attract other recruiters messages. Then, they'll recruit for that ideal profile and present the candidate blindly to the companies HR or hiring managers, hoping to secure a relationship/placement fee.

There's thousands of bots with obviously recognizable pictures from Thisdoesnotexist on both LinkedIn and Quora. Quora is arguably more insidious as these are ranked and spreading huge amounts of disinformation. Someone should really step in and create a neural network to recognize and flag artificially generated profiles

Wouldn't that be a GAN but with more steps?

It's curious how every single fake profile is of a woman. Suggestive of honey trapping, perhaps, but then why so many accounts.

It's like reverse tinder

... but HR are bots.

90% of those on Linkedin at least.

So... when do we reach the point where bots hire other bots?

(Or are we there already?)

As long as money changes hands it counts as a GDP increase right?

AI bots vs HR bots, popcorn time.

All you have to do to beat an HR bot is request a JD, the company and a salary. 95% of recruiters refuse to answer this. (At least based on my experience)

LinkedIn is creating an excuse to purge people, not fake profiles. Like most of the corporate social media sites, it is heavily censoring people who speak out on subjects they are experts on. Covid and Ukraine being high on the list, but even disparaging Queen Elizabeth will get your account restricted.

Unless you work in the medical field or for the military, why would you even talk about such irrelavant things?

Well now, Robert Malone was recently deplatformed for his views on the Covid Response[1], despite being an expert in the sort of tech used to build these vaccines with citations going back to at least 1990. I'd hardly call his opinion 'irrelavant'.

[1]https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0ZCLBEbktYqp1lSheZS81E

Oh the guy that claims he invented mRNA but pushes hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin?

Help! Police! FBI! Ministry of Truth! Somebody!

A non-physician is over here commenting on medications they've never prescribed!

Is that what corporate journalists say about him? You'd do well to go to primary sources when there's misinformation about. His publication history is a matter of public record.

He's actually pro-vaccine as a personal choice, his objection to the public policy at the time centered on the need for informed consent to medical procedures. What well-meaning people find so dangerous about that I'd love to know.

> In November 2021, Malone shared a deceptive video on Twitter that falsely linked athlete deaths to COVID-19 vaccines. In particular, the video suggested that Jake West, a 17-year-old Indiana high school football player who succumbed to sudden cardiac arrest, had actually died from COVID-19 vaccination. However, West had died years earlier, in 2013, due to an undiagnosed heart condition. Malone deleted the video from his Twitter account after receiving a cease-and-desist letter from West's family. Malone later said on Twitter that he did not know the video was doctored.

> In an April 1, 2022 interview, Malone made the unfounded claim that COVID-19 vaccines are "damaging T cell responses" and "causing a form of AIDS". Malone claimed that he had "lots of scientific data" to back up his claim, but did not cite evidence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_W._Malone?wprov=sfti1

I find that about as plausible as the other side's claims about Dr. Fauci's role in the AIDS crisis. In the (lengthy) interview I linked I never once heard him make those sorts of claims, he just hammered the point about informed consent. Which I'd really like those who agree with his deplatforming to stop dodging.

You don’t believe what, exactly? The quotes? The source from the article is the AP, are you claiming the AP fabricated these quotes?

> In a video circulating widely on social media, Dr. Robert Malone, a frequent critic of COVID-19 vaccines who once researched mRNA vaccine technology, made the claim that the vaccines are “damaging T cell responses” and “causing a form of AIDS.” “People think, when they hear AIDS, they hear HIV. No, the vaccines aren’t causing you to be infected with the HIV virus,” said Malone, during a taped interview with a website that focuses on COVID-19. “They are causing a form of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, that’s what AIDS stands for.” In the interview, published April 1, Malone claimed that “lots of scientific data” support his claim, but cited no evidence. The claims are unfounded.

https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-covid-technology-s...

I think, based on statements I actually heard him make and my Bayesian priors towards corporate journalists, that articles like this one grossly misrepresent the substance of whatever he was actually saying.

Well I can see why you’d put so much faith in a man of such unimpeachable integrity.

Sarcasm received, and reciprocated for your own attitudes towards the New York Times and Washington Post.

I find it amusing that simply because I pointed out the faults of Dr Malone, you assume I’m some sort of devotee of the Washington Post/NYTimes. This is a fabrication inside your own mind.

So this topic is rather new to me, in particular about this Dr. Robert Malone. That being said, it seems to me that you are far more sure about their incompetence than you should be.

I would assume the quotes are not fabricated. I'm also looking at corporate journalism and wondering why I should trust the messages in the articles it produces. This excerpt appears to be a pretty good example of exactly why I should not trust it.

> In a video circulating widely on social media, Dr. Robert Malone, a frequent critic of COVID-19 vaccines who once researched mRNA vaccine technology, made the claim that the vaccines are “damaging T cell responses” and “causing a form of AIDS.”

The emphasis is on the part of that sentence that is supposed to prime the reader to start thinking from a certain perspective. (This person is against COVID vaccines and you're not supposed to like that.) The quotes in that particular sentence are also very likely cherry-picked out of their original context just looking at how they are fragments of a sentence interpolated into the author's thoughts.

> “People think, when they hear AIDS, they hear HIV. No, the vaccines aren’t causing you to be infected with the HIV virus,” said Malone, during a taped interview with a website that focuses on COVID-19. “They are causing a form of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, that’s what AIDS stands for.”

This is the presentation of the doctor that is most fair. The quotes are full sentences, and it's notable that the meaning here is not disagreeable.

> In the interview, published April 1, Malone claimed that “lots of scientific data” support his claim, but cited no evidence. The claims are unfounded.

This quotes only the subject (either direct or indirect; we've lost that context) from a complete thought and attempts to suggest that it is ridiculous to believe their completion of the thought.

Anyway, maybe it comes across that I believe everything Dr. Malone has to say but I wasn't kidding when I said this topic is new to me. This excerpt of someone's opinion does a very poor job of convincing me that I should agree with the opinion. I do think it does a good job of priming readers to think a certain way but I don't consider that to be a virtue in journalism.

Disregarding any editorializing from the AP, not following up these quotes:

With concrete and compelling evidence, is irresponsible and unbecoming of someone who is claiming expertise in a subject.

That’s the point. One can have a discussion about the integrity of the media in general, but that doesn’t have any bearing on the facts of Dr Malone’s public behavior. We’re talking about someone who clearly knows the ethics of his profession who is going around making extremely inflammatory statements without providing evidence, and tweeted out a video claiming a kid died from the Covid vaccine without actually making a basic effort to examine its provenance.

Y’all want to sit here and point fingers but my point was never about the integrity of the media nor tech companies. The original question was more or less “I don’t see why they have a problem with this guy“ and I answered it.

> Disregarding any editorializing from the AP

I can't! That's the only thing you provided.

I do now understand your opinion of those quotes (and I don't disagree, FWIW) but that had been left out until now.

> I can't! That's the only thing you provided.

Quotes aren’t editorializing. I’m referring to the quotes + the fact that he has yet to provide any proof of those assertions.

Why is it that when journalists say shit you agree with, they're just reporting the news, and when they don't, they're corporate journalists?

Bob Malone was not an inventor of the mRNA vaccine. He was a co-author of a paper detailing how injecting RNA into muscle fibers could produce protein. For those playing at home, this is the equivalent of signing your name on someone else's paper on how to crack an egg and then declaring that you invented hollandaise sauce.

Because when I listened to him speak with enough time to give as much context as he wanted, it was clear that's not a claim he makes. He may have said something to the effect that he did a lot of early research in the field, possibly something that, if interpreted uncharitably, could imply he was taking more credit than was due him. But falsely attributing an untrue statement to someone and then calling him a liar for the thing he didn't say is precisely the kind of skillful misinformation I've come to expect from corporate journalists since the Iraq war. How someone can say 'trust the experts' in the morning and trust the New York Times over a widely-cited scientist in the evening is beyond me.

And please, tell me where in this account's relatively short history I've ever agreed with a corporate journalist on anything. While you're at it, tell me whether you're for or against informed consent for medical procedures.

NIH has recommended Ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19. It may not be approved but it’s recommended.

2022 Clinical trial results of Ivermectin (truly unbiased funding):

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8248252/

Withdrewed 2020 clinical trial white paper touting that Ivermectin does not help (funded by Moderna)

https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-100956/v4?redirect...

And the recommended treatment still listed Ivermectin on official US government website:

https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/therapies/ant...

Maybe tune out some mainstream media and social media too?

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