Fake job seekers are flooding US companies that are hiring for remote positions

AI generated recruits are a fiction. That's not to say there aren't fake or bait and switch recruits but this idea makes no sense.

Some background. I'm a senior developer who has performed hundreds of interviews and seen dozens of questionable recruits long before AI. Typically the scam is that an offshore consultancy wants to place some roles to collect wages. Many of these agencies are from collectivist cultures, so in the mind of the agency, they all work in our project. This may not be true, but the agency sees the position as theirs, not the recruit's. So they typically don't the issue with putting recruit A in front of the interviewer and then slotting recruit B in after the position is secured. I've seen this done with A talking while B moves their lips on camera. Now with chatGPT (and earlier to some degree with just Google Search) we just see applicants eyes focused on something they're reading when we ask questions. All of this is just as easy as an AI generated applicant (if not easier) and quite likely to get the recruit hired.

A lot of this narrative is pointing the finger at China, North Korea and Russia/Ukraine. The best candidates I've fielded have been Ukrainian, Russian and Chinese. These are countries well known for their tech sectors. North Korea has executed the largest crypto heists in history. These are not groups who need to fake it.

So who does this narrative serve? It serves the RTO CEOs. This makes CEOs scared to hire remote workers and lets the ones who demand it have a reason.

If anything the panic around AI should reinforce the need to think critically about these things.

We've had more than a few in my company. We work in Cybersecurity for the company, so we've definitely seen them and seen the details. I don't actually think they're that hard to avoid .. but to say they're not a problem at all is not fair. I agree with you that if taken the wrong way that this is just ammunition for "return to office" efforts.

A LOT of people are far worse at interviewing than they think they are. And so, a bullshit artist can get hired. Technology now allows these bullshit artists to propagate more, and do more damage than would have previously be possible. AI in the workplace is a similar problem. Can you tell the different between someone who really just leans on ChatGPT all day but is actually incompetent? Probably so, but someone who was that incompetent just wouldn't have previously been able to hang on for quite as long, or deceive so many people.

[edit]

It's clear that my comment was not clearly written -- when I said "A LOT of people are far worse at interviewing than they think they are," I was referring to the people holding the interviews, and not referring to candidates. I'm shocked at just how bad a lot of folks are at holding interviews, and just how misplaced their confidence in their ability seems to be.