The State of Candidate Fraud

Introduction

Oh what a year it’s been.

It’s no secret (in fact, it’s whatever the opposite of a secret is…maybe a primal scream) that AI has taken over a) technology innovation, b) the media landscape, and c) the enterprise investment calculus. Much attention has been paid to the widespread use of AI within the staffing and recruiting industry and the search for reproducible outcome data that can help these technologies augment and support human deliverables.

Meanwhile, jobseekers have also adopted AI, with much less fanfare but with arguably greater cumulative impact. More candidates for new roles than ever before are using popular large language models like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity to generate or edit their resumes and cover letters, distribute their job applications, and in many cases, pepper those applications with job description-specific keywords to evade AI-based screening tools.

The result is a battle ‘o the bots, as it were. AI resumes versus AI screeners versus humans who now face an uphill battle to determine what is fact, what is fiction, and how to separate innocent embellishments from nefarious intent.

As AI democratizes the ability to misrepresent oneself, threat actors are capitalizing on the affordability of committing fraud at scale. Rising incidences of DPRK-sponsored espionage operations and criminals posing as remote IT workers have forced employers and staffing agencies to go to great lengths to prove that their candidates are real humans with integrity. But it’s getting harder and more convoluted by the day.

We are providers of performance intelligence software that answers four questions: 1) is a candidate who they say they are? 2) how well can they do the job they’re applying for? 3) how did they actually perform when placed on assignment? And 4) how can staffing agencies unlock revenue within their relationship networks? As such, we have a vested interest in understanding and quantifying the precedence, composition, and sophistication of candidate fraud in the world of hiring.

So we surveyed 646 jobseekers, corporate hiring managers/recruiters, and staffing agency recruiters to figure out exactly what’s going on. This is our first-ever report on hiring fraud as part of our SurroundSound research program, but based on what we found it likely won’t be our last.

Incidentally, I first shared some of these survey findings in preview form in a webinar that RefAssured sponsored for Staffing Industry Analysts in September 2026, featuring the heads of contingent workforce management for Okta and Lyft. This webinar also provides a valuable client perspective on the cost of poor talent quality and fraud, as well as the unwritten social contract between staffing suppliers and their clients. It is available to watch on-demand at no cost should you desire additional context on this topic beyond what is analyzed in our report.

Here we go and thanks for reading.

All my best,

Vinda Souza

CMO of RefAssured

Methodology

We surveyed a total of 646 people:

• 107 corporate HR/hiring managers
• 103 staffing agency recruiters
• 436 jobseekers

As per normal survey workflows and skip logic, sample sizes varied slightly by question depending on relevance and branch behavior.

This survey was conducted between July 15 and September 4, 2026 and delivered via social media, email outreach, and audience targeting via Survey Monkey and SurveyCircle. We closed the survey upon reaching what we considered to be a viable threshold for statistical significance.

The survey was anonymous and did not include demographic screening questions other than category, i.e. “are you a jobseeker, in corporate HR, or at a staffing agency?” Respondents were not compensated for participating in the survey, nor were they incentivized in any way to answer questions in a specific way.

Great care was taken to preserve and maintain integrity in the fielding process. We did not use the word “fraud” in the survey title or outreach content, preferring instead the more neutral phrasing of “The State of Hiring” so as not to bias jobseeker (or any) respondents.

We used SurveyMonkey as our questionnaire hosting platform.

Key Findings

• Candidate fraud is a big (and bigger) problem: 84% of HR and hiring managers and 76% of staffing recruiters say candidate fraud is more common today than it was three years ago.
• Almost every recruiter has caught a candidate lying about their qualifications: 98% of HR and hiring managers and 95% of staffing recruiters have personally caught a candidate misrepresenting their qualifications, experience, or identity. About two-thirds of each group say this has happened more than once to them.
• Staffing agencies take accountability for fraud when it happens, but there’s a catch: 77% of staffing recruiters say their agency absorbs the cost of a bad placement alone or splits it evenly with the employer. Only 23% say the employer carries that burden alone. However, 24% of staffing recruiters say fraud is less common than it was three years ago and 58% (a majority) think it’s a minor problem, not a serious one.
• 88% of candidates admit to misrepresenting themselves on their resume: 88% of jobseekers have tailored a resume with keywords they grabbed from a job description, 74% have used a generative AI tool to write or edit their resume, and 78% of jobseekers believe AI resume tools make it easier for a candidate to look qualified for a job they haven’t done.
• And yet recruiters still trust resumes: Recruiters still lean on resumes more than almost anything else to screen candidates. 69% of corporate HR and 56% of staffing recruiters say the resume is still the most trustworthy way to determine if a candidate is fit for a role. Our findings suggest this is decidedly not the case.
• It is a brutal time to be a jobseeker: 81% of jobseekers say it’s harder to land an interview than it was three years ago, and 55% say their job applications rarely or never get a personalized response.
• Trust in AI screening tools to catch candidate fraud is low: Only 16% of corp HR recruiters and 11% of staffing recruiters completely trust an AI-powered screening tool (no human in the loop) to actually catch candidate fraud.

Let’s start with the elephant in the room before it steps on us.

The majority of recruiters, be they on the corporate or agency side, think that candidate fraud is rising not only in incidence but also in severity. 84% of HR and hiring managers and 76% of staffing recruiters say that candidate fraud has gotten worse in the past three years.

Meanwhile, when asked how big a problem candidate fraud is in today’s job market, 76% of HR and 84% of staffing recruiters think it’s indeed a problem.

But they don’t agree on how serious a problem it is. Among those who consider fraud to be a problem, staffing recruiters were more likely to call candidate fraud a “minor” problem (69%) versus HR and hiring managers (54%). And HR and hiring managers were more likely to call it a “serious” problem (46% versus 31%).

Thus, a higher percentage of HR and hiring managers think that fraud is getting worse, and a higher percentage of them think it’s a serious problem, than their staffing counterparts. That is likely because the consequences of fraud ultimately land at the employer, the company at which a candidate is actually placed, for whom the candidate performs a job.

So is it a serious problem or a minor one? Who’s right?

Well, based on evolution in jobseeker behavior, access to tools for obfuscation, and trends in communication that we’ll discuss later on in the report, fraud is indeed a serious problem. But awareness of and fear around the growing incidence of fraud may be contingent upon market education factors, and segment specific.

Full caveat – we did not segment IT versus healthcare versus light industrial versus other staffing sectors, so we cannot draw direct conclusions on any focus area. Anecdotally, because so many healthcare roles are in-person, we can imagine that identity fraud in particular isn’t as big of a concern to healthcare staffing professionals compared to IT staffing professionals, for whom remote placements carry significant risk.

Regardless, it’s very clear from our data that hiring managers consider candidate fraud a growing and highly tangible concern.

Next, let’s take a look at who owns it when fraud happens – staffing agencies or the employer? Alas, it’s complicated.

When asked who pays the bigger price when candidate fraud goes undetected and a fraudulent candidate is placed on assignment – the staffing agency or the client – 39% of staffing agency recruiters said that both parties absorb the cost equally. Almost the same percentage said that the staffing agency actually pays the bigger price, and 23% said the employer does.

Interestingly, that’s 77% (or a little more than 3 in 4 staffing recruiters – because that’s how math works) who say that their agency shoulders some responsibility for candidate fraud when it comes to fruition. That is a healthy indicator that most staffing professionals believe that quality and security are core tenets of the responsibility they have to their clients, and that they are not merely a passthrough mechanism for delivering any type of talent.

We’ve spoken in previous reports and webinars about the social contract between staffing agencies and their clients, and what it really means to provide proof of partnership. Is the primary responsibility of a staffing agency simply to deliver talent fast to their client? Or is it to deliver the highest quality, most vetted, more secure talent?

Our most trusted thought leaders and staffing customers to whom we have spoken on this topic would argue that it is all of the above: to deliver real human talent of high integrity, who have a demonstrated ability to do a job well, and to deliver this talent quickly with the lowest amount of acceptable risk.

The responses to this survey question suggest, reassuringly, that this viewpoint is not isolated.

When people hear the term “candidate fraud,” they usually jump to headlines around stolen identity, threat actors, North Korea-linked espionage circles, etc. And without a doubt, that’s happening and it’s happening more often than it used to thanks to the democratization of AI and access to tools that make impersonation easy.

But that’s not the only definition of fraud, and according to our survey, it’s not even the more problematic one. Candidate fraud is, at its core, fundamental misrepresentation of someone’s skills, qualifications, background, relevance, or identity. Pathways for perpetrating and motivations for committing fraud may vary in their nefariousness, but ultimately they all converge into a similar consequence: bad role fit, financial and legal impacts to an employer or staffing agency, and operational disruption.

Additionally, it’s becoming clearer that some of the safeguards meant to determine who is actually skilled and qualified for a role can also be used to identify who may not actually be real at all. In other words, people leave breadcrumbs when they’re lying. Sometimes those breadcrumbs are small, sometimes they’re big, but they’re always there.

But enough about bread.

This is the big headline stat of our report: 98% of corporate HR and hiring managers, and 95% of staffing agency recruiters, have caught a candidate misrepresenting their qualifications, experience, or identity. So pretty much everyone has caught a candidate lying about themselves in a hiring process.

Tellingly, 67% of staffing recruiters and 65% of hiring managers and corporate recruiters say it’s happened more than once.

Things actually get scarier when we take identity fraud out of the picture.

When we asked corporate HR and hiring managers only if they’ve ever hired someone who turned out to have misrepresented their qualifications or experience, 98.6% of them said yes. We round up in this family, so that’s 99% of HR recruiters and hiring managers who have hired someone who committed materially significant performance fabrication. And 68% of them said it happened more than once.

Next, we wanted to dive into why placements don’t work out.

When a new hire fails, what’s the most common reason? Is it because they turned out to be a threat actor? Is it because they baited and switched and had their friend show up instead? Is it because they committed a criminal act? Nope – that’s just 3% of cases.

The most common reason a new hire didn’t work out, according to corporate HR and hiring managers, was that they weren’t a good team fit (46%). Another 32% said they didn’t meet performance expectations despite seemingly being qualified. And 18% said they weren’t qualified for the role at all.

So for the realistic and growing concerns around identity fraud and criminal behavior, most new hires at the corporate level don’t work out because they weren’t properly vetted for their ability to do the job and their cultural fit for a specific team.

Continuing on in this theme, we know that almost everyone in staffing and corporate HR has hired someone who misrepresented themselves, but what percentage of candidates actually do this, according to those engaging with them?

It turns out hiring managers don’t think misrepresentation is rare. 58% estimate that a quarter to half of all candidates misrepresent themselves in some way, and another 18% think it’s more than half.

So how are these candidates misrepresenting themselves, according to both agency and corporate recruiters?

The number one most cited type of fraud is inaccurate or exaggerated skills. 61% of HR and hiring managers and 54% of staffing recruiters have seen a candidate list skills they don’t actually have. As 88% of jobseekers we surveyed admitted to adding keywords to their resume that match the job description of the role they’re applying for (likely in order to avoid getting screened out by AI screening solutions), this figure – while already concerning – will only grow with time.

Also, staffing recruiters run into hidden employment gaps and fabricated credentials more often than their corporate counterparts do (64% versus 50% for gaps, and 58% versus 45% for credentials). And while identity fraud captures the most headlines, it’s the rarest form of fraud that either group actually encounters (13% of staffing recruiters and 4% of HR and hiring managers).

Performance fraud (which incorporates false or exaggerated skills, credential or certification fabrication, inflated/misleading responsibilities or job titles, and AI-generated materials that misrepresent a candidate’s abilities) is clearly a much, much more pervasive problem.

You’ve heard the term “human in the loop” regarding AI solutions that can operate independently and take action that is either adjacent to or in replacement of humans? As AI tools grow in sophistication and outcome scoping, and as companies feel increasing market pressure to adopt and operationalize these solutions to help them a) increase productivity, b) reduce headcount expense, or c) alleviate margin burden, removing the human from the “loop” has become something of a fashion statement these days in tech and services circles.

But lest we delude ourselves into thinking that parachute pants are a flattering garment, maybe we should all just pause and think for a moment about the implications of this.

Well, well, well. This is confusing, isn’t it?

Corporate hiring teams trust AI screening solutions more than staffing recruiters do. 72% of corporate recruiters and hiring managers say they trust AI-powered screening tools either “completely” or “somewhat” to catch candidate fraud, compared to 69% of staffing recruiters. However, staffing recruiters are noticeably less likely than HR and hiring managers to say they would trust it “completely,” (11% versus 16%). Given the high volume of requisitions and candidates with which they engage daily, the staffing recruiter viewpoint here is subdued, perhaps unsurprisingly.

What’s interesting about the data is when we ask recruiters about how good AI would be at catching AI-generated fraud. In that case, confidence appears to erode. 34% of HR and hiring managers and 41% of staffing recruiters aren’t convinced that AI screening tools can tell a genuinely qualified candidate from one who used AI to game the application process.

The fact that 66% of hiring managers are confident that AI solutions could work in this regard is, however, a genuinely unexpected finding. Staffing recruiters, on the other hand, are noticeably more bearish on AI’s capabilities for candidate fraud screening across the board. Get that human back in the loop! At least at the agency.

So if recruiters are mixed on whether solely AI-powered screening tools work to catch fraud, what solutions actually DO catch fraud?

Let’s look at some charts!

When asked how recruiters in agency and corporate evaluate if a candidate can actually do the job for which they are being considered, tried-and-true qualitative measures still dominate.

Staffing recruiters lean heavily on remote interviews and resumes (65% and 64%) as well as real-time skills assessments and reference checks (48% and 47%, respectively).

HR and hiring managers tend to favor reference checks over resumes. While more than 50% of that cohort relies on remote or in-person interviewing, 48% of hiring managers use reference checks to determine if candidates can do a job, versus 44% who evaluate a resume or cover letter.

And comparatively, 64% of staffing recruiters versus just 44% of hiring managers think resumes are a valid way to assess talent. But here’s where things get odd.

When we asked whether resumes are the most trustworthy way to determine a candidate’s fit for a role, staffing recruiters were less convinced: 56% said yes, versus 69% of HR and hiring managers. So the group that leans on resumes the most in practice (staffing recruiters) also trusts them the least.

Few people admit to using gut feeling alone to determine if someone can do a job well (9% of HR and hiring managers, 15% of staffing recruiters). The 15% of staffing recruiters who say they trust their gut are likely just trusting their Spidey senses that something is off about the candidate’s application.

Those who still consider resumes the gold standard in evaluating talent may want to pay close attention to the next section of our report: what jobseekers say.

Much of this report has focused on candidates committing fraud in the application process, in various means and to different degrees of sophistication and severity.

While identity fraud has become more common, more costly, and in some cases more nefarious in its implications and motivations, this type of fraud remains relatively rare, as we previously reported. Only 4% of corporate recruiters and hiring managers and 13% of staffing recruiters confirm having personally encountered a candidate who committed identity fraud or impersonation.

The vast majority of fraud cases involve misrepresentation of a candidate’s performance history, skills, credentials, and employment gaps, and/or the use of generative AI tools to embellish or augment their application materials.

While we don’t condone this behavior, we understand it and sympathize with the sense of desperation and anxiety that many jobseekers feel in a job market that is increasingly difficult and unkind to navigate.

We interviewed 436 jobseekers, and 81% of them said that it feels harder to land a job interview now than it did three years ago. Keep in mind that three years go was 2023, when we were still in an uncertain period of post-COVID labor market normalization, and the unemployment rate in the United States in September 2023 was 3.8. As of August 2026, it was 4.1%.

So while we may still be at a supposedly “healthy” level of unemployment, there are a lot of unseen statistics underpinning that current 4.1%: an aging and retiring Baby Boomer generation, voluntary or involuntary withdrawal from the workforce among long-term unemployed persons whose unemployment benefits have run out, reduced immigration rates, low quits among those who have jobs, and reduced hiring, especially in non-healthcare sectors.

50% of the jobseekers in our survey said it was much harder, and 31% said it was somewhat harder, to land an interview now compared to 2023. Only 3% said it felt much easier.

More than half of jobseekers (55%) said their applications never or rarely get a personalized response from a staffing agency or corporate recruiting team. Only 6% said they get a response most of the time or always.

So that’s 94% of candidates who don’t often hear back from a recruiter when they’ve put effort into applying for a role. One could make the assumption then that they’d want to apply for a larger volume of roles to hedge their bets and increase the likelihood that at least one of their applications will get acknowledged. It would also, subsequently, incentivize them to become more aggressive in trying to make sure their resume gets seen, and that their candidacy is considered.

With the ubiquity of LLMs, many of which have free basic usage tiers, it is easier than ever before for candidates to leverage these solutions in an attempt to make it through more stages of the recruiting lifecycle.

Additionally, 55% of respondents are one to three months into their current job search with no luck. 18% have been searching for a job for more than six months.

Which leads us to the next set of data points, and why they may be increasing in popularity and viability.

88% of jobseekers admit that they have tailored their resumes with role-specific keywords taken from a job description or that they think may help their resume get seen or avoid being screened out before human review. As we’ve established that 66% of hiring managers seem to trust AI screening tools, it would make sense that jobseekers are getting creative to avoid those same tools from pushing them out of a process.

Additionally, 74% of jobseekers have used a popular large language model provider such as ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, or Gemini to write or edit their resume or cover letter in an attempt to make it appear more appealing or relevant.

Candidates are self-aware of what this means for the integrity of the hiring process as a whole.

78% believe those same AI tools make it easier than ever before for a candidate to look qualified for a job they haven’t actually done. In other words, jobseekers admit to doing something that recruiters say they’re struggling to catch. And they’re supposedly doing it to avoid getting exited from a process by AI screening tools, the same tools that corporate recruiters seemingly are warming up to.

Jobseekers are starting to see AI sitting across from them on the other side of the figurative recruiting table. 51% have now been screened or interviewed by a chatbot or AI recruiter in the past 12 months. That doesn’t mean they like it, however.

61% of jobseekers still say they’d prefer a human recruiter over a computerized one. Some external surveys state that candidates appreciate AI or computer-generated recruiters because they are more likely to get a response or respectful acknowledgement from a virtual recruiter. That’s a valid hypothesis. We had no unique perspective on this or pre-conceived notion on how this question would result, but our survey findings suggest that AI recruiters are not actually all that popular with candidates.

Final thoughts (well, not really final)

I had a teacher in high school tell me, “you can’t squeeze the toothpaste back in the tube.” And that’s the case with everything we’ve seen in this report.

Here are some of the central themes and tensions we’ve uncovered in this report.

• Resumes (a legacy recruiting tool) and AI screening solutions (a new recruiting tool) play an important role in hiring and no one fully trusts either one.
• Access to AI has been democratized, with downstream consequences on quality of hiring and process integrity. Jobseekers have access to the same AI tools that recruiters do. And they use them to make their resumes look better, or materially different, and to cut through an increasingly challenging hiring environment.
• Everybody has encountered fraud, and often repeatedly, but fraud doesn’t just mean identity theft or impersonation. Most fraud is performance fabrication. And while identity fraud is growing fast, and growing more dangerous, so is all fraud. Recruiters and hiring managers can’t afford to ignore any type.
• The social contract between staffing agencies and their clients is alive and well and evolving. Staffing recruiters take accountability for when candidate fraud goes undetected in the placement lifecycle, and feel a sense of shared responsibility for delivering quality outcomes.
• How corporate recruiters and agency recruiters qualify, vet, and evaluate talent may vary, but understanding if a candidate is who they say they are, if and how well they can do a job, and deliver proof of performance to key stakeholders has never been more important and urgent than in this environment of growing noise and waning signal.

For more insights on how RefAssured can help your team, please visit: https://www.refassured.com/solutions/

Appendix: full survey data

Want to analyze the data yourselves and find additional patterns? Please have at it, here you go.

HR and Hiring Managers

Q12. What’s the most common reason a new hire doesn’t work out?

Answered: 71

Q13. In your estimate, what percentage of candidates misrepresent themselves in some way during the hiring process?

Answered: 71

Q14. Have you ever hired someone who turned out to have misrepresented their qualifications or experience?

Answered: 71

Q15. How much do you trust purely AI-powered screening tools (no human in the loop) to catch candidate fraud before a hire is made?

Answered: 107

Q16. Compared to three years ago, candidate fraud today is:

Answered: 107

Q17. How big a problem is candidate fraud – including identity fraud, resume fabrication, inflated/inaccurate credentials, and misrepresented experience – in today's job market?

Answered: 107

Q18. Are you confident that AI screening tools can tell the difference between a genuinely qualified candidate and one who used AI to game the application process?

Answered: 107

Q19. How do you determine if a candidate you’re evaluating for a role can do the job well? (Check all that apply.)

Answered: 107

Q20. Which of the following types of candidate fraud have you personally encountered? (Select all that apply.)

Answered: 107

Q21. Are resumes the most trustworthy way to determine if a candidate is a fit for a role?

Answered: 107

Q22. Have you encountered a candidate who misrepresented their qualifications, experience, or identity?

Answered: 107

Staffing

Q10. Which of the following problems do you encounter more often in the recruiting process?

Answered: 103

Q11. When candidate fraud goes undetected and a bad placement is made, who pays the bigger price?

Answered: 103

Q15. How much do you trust purely AI-powered screening tools (no human in the loop) to catch candidate fraud before a hire is made?

Answered: 99

Q16. Compared to three years ago, candidate fraud today is:

Answered: 99

Q17. How big a problem is candidate fraud – including identity fraud, resume fabrication, inflated/inaccurate credentials, and misrepresented experience – in today's job market?

Answered: 99

Q18. Are you confident that AI screening tools can tell the difference between a genuinely qualified candidate and one who used AI to game the application process?

Answered: 99

Q19. How do you determine if a candidate you’re evaluating for a role can do the job well? (Check all that apply.)

Answered: 99

Q20. Which of the following types of candidate fraud have you personally encountered? (Select all that apply.)

Answered: 99

Q21. Are resumes the most trustworthy way to determine if a candidate is a fit for a role?

Answered: 99

Q22. Have you encountered a candidate who misrepresented their qualifications, experience, or identity?

Answered: 99

Jobseeker

Q2. As a jobseeker, does it feel harder to get an interview now compared to three years ago?

Answered: 436

Q3. How long have you been engaged in your current job search?

Answered: 436

Q4. When you apply for a role, how often does your application receive a personalized response?

Answered: 436

Q5. Have you been screened or interviewed by a chatbot, AI agent, or computerized recruiter in the past 12 months?

Answered: 436

Q6. Do you prefer interacting with a computerized recruiter or a human recruiter?

Answered: 436

Q7. Have you ever used AI tools (such as ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, or others) to write, rewrite, or edit your resume or cover letter?

Answered: 436

Q8. Have you ever tailored your resume with keywords specific to the role you’re applying for?

Answered: 436

Q9. Do you believe using AI tools to write/edit resumes makes it easier for candidates to appear qualified for a job they haven’t done before?

Answered: 436