For decades, staffing firms have relied on résumés, interviews, background checks, and references to determine whether a candidate is both real and qualified.
Today, AI-generated identities, emerging technologies, and increasingly remote hiring processes have made it easier for someone to appear as a person they are not. Candidate fraud has reached epidemic levels and shows no signs of abating.
So how do agencies identify candidate fraud and mitigate the resulting fallout from allowing unverified talent into their pipeline? It’s not enough to verify someone’s location and address. Recruiters must establish trust that the person they are about to submit is truly who they say they are, and that they can do the job for which they’re being hired.
Here’s what you need to know about candidate fraud in the staffing industry for 2026 and beyond. To discuss these learnings and what they mean for your staffing agency, contact our team.
What Is Candidate Fraud?
Candidate fraud is the willful misrepresentation of a job applicant’s identity, capabilities, or background. It is most often committed by threat actors who obfuscate their actions through fake or stolen identities but can also be used by legitimate candidates who falsify their qualifications or background to obtain employment dishonestly.
Why the Need to Prevent Candidate Fraud Is Surging in Staffing
Several forces are converging to make candidate fraud prevention and risk mitigation essential for staffing firms to a degree the industry has never before faced.
Generative AI has facilitated the use of sophisticated deepfakes and has made it easy to generate fraudulent schemes at scale. One in three surveyed firms report experiencing AI-driven impersonation and candidate fraud firsthand.
Bad actors use borrowed identities, faked employment histories, and coordinated reference schemes that can’t be easily detected without the use of dedicated tools.
And with the rise of remote work, candidates can appear to be anywhere. Without biometric proof, anyone can claim a U.S. identity from anywhere in the world. This has necessitated the use of tools like digital fingerprinting to geolocate candidates.
Finally, clients largely expect staffing firms to own the risk and burden for the successful verification of candidates. While some industries, such as healthcare, have more stringent compliance safeguards in place than others, reducing the likelihood of fraudulent candidates entering the placement pipeline, candidate fraud identification and prevention has become a prominent responsibility for all staffing firms.
The Difference Between Candidate Fraud Detection and Identity Verification
In staffing conversations, these terms are often used interchangeably, but candidate fraud detection is only one component of identity verification.
Candidate fraud detection highlights suspicious behavior. Common examples include:
- Digital Fingerprinting: Does the IP address match where the candidate claims to be? Are there geofencing irregularities or other signs of foul play?
- Social Proofing: Are there discrepancies in their employment dates? Is their LinkedIn presence thin or newly created? Has their email address recently appeared in a dark web dump?
These indicators, while helpful, have become table stakes in the industry. Many software solutions feature these capabilities, but fraud detection alone cannot answer the most important question: is this person actually who they say they are?
Identity verification answers the above question in a straightforward sense. It confirms a person’s identity through means including government ID authentication and biometric detection (which confirms that a live human is present, and that their face matches the ID they’ve provided). Modern candidate fraud relies heavily on high-quality fake physical or digital IDs that cannot be caught by the human eye. Only real identity verification can reliably detect them. But it cannot act alone.
The Crucial Importance of Performance Validation
Comprehensive verification of location and identity is an increasingly necessary defense against the rise of candidate fraud, establishing authenticity and protecting against candidate impersonation and misinformation.
But authenticity alone doesn’t speak to the quality of the candidate. Performance fabrication is on the rise, as candidates with a wide range of motivations (from those attempting fraud to those who are simply trying to stand out in a crowded field) turn to generative AI to create resumes and CVs. The result of this is a sea of sameness and poorly written, pattern-centered job applications that exaggerate, embellish, or outright misrepresent a candidate’s skills and achievements. The antidote to performance fabrication? Performance validation, of course. This process helps firms determine if the candidate, real or note, can do the job they’re professing to do.
Performance validation done right provides validated peer and manager feedback, real performance data, consistent reporting, and high-quality, thoughtfully designed reference checks to ensure integrity, credibility, and legitimacy of reference-givers and professional relationships.
When combined, the two processes create a two-checkmark standard. The former verifies that the person is real, the latter validates their experience and ability.
How RefAssured Helps Prevent Candidate Fraud
RefAssured’s automated reference checking process delivers verified and validated performance data sourced from real peers and managers through a candidate fraud-resistant workflow, producing a reliable picture of how the candidate actually works with examples of past performance to illustrate the degree to which they can excel in a role. By unifying these two essential trust signals – identity and performance – RefAssured helps staffing firms submit and place talent with confidence and meet the rising expectations of clients who want to know that the person they’re hiring is real, that they have the capability to do the job in question, and to what degree that capability extends.
Staffing agencies face unique challenges that our team has spent decades navigating, and the RefAssured platform is purpose-built to address these head-on. Let’s talk.