You are real. Now prove it.

By Jim Stroud

Jake Moore built a woman out of software.

She had a LinkedIn profile, a resume, a passport, and an Instagram feed with beach photos of her husband and dog. Her name was Jackie Morris. She applied for a marketing job paying about $40,000. Of 262 applicants, four got interviews. Jackie was one of the four. She cleared three rounds and won the job.

Moore is a cybersecurity advisor at ESET. He built Jackie with about $50 of software that swapped his face and voice in real time. Two companies hired her. Neither caught it.

Here is why that is your problem. Jackie is why the recruiter on your next video call is squinting at your face.

Everybody is suspicious of everybody now

Gartner predicts that by 2028, one in four candidate profiles worldwide will be fake. In a survey of 3,000 job seekers, 6 percent admitted they had cheated in an interview by posing as someone else or sending a stand-in.

Faking a person is cheap. Researchers at Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 gave the task to one person with no image-editing experience, a free artificial intelligence (AI) tool, and a five-year-old computer. He produced several working fake identities in about 70 minutes.

Some of the fakes are organized crime. The Justice Department has charged more than 40 people tied to North Korean schemes that placed operatives in American jobs using stolen identities.

You are competing in that pool. So is every honest classmate you know.

The scam runs the other direction too

Fake candidates get the headlines. Fake employers take your money.

Job scam losses reported to the Federal Trade Commission climbed from about $90 million in 2020 to more than $500 million in 2024, and university career centers now warn students about AI-generated postings, fake recruiter profiles, and deepfaked interviewers. New graduates are the target of choice because you are eager, unfamiliar with the process, and unlikely to question a company you have heard of.

The FTC’s red flags are worth memorizing. A recruiter emailing from Gmail instead of a company domain. A request for your driver’s license, Social Security number, or bank details before an interview. An offer that arrives before anyone has talked to you about the work.

Real employers do not need your bank account to schedule a phone screen.

The interviewer might not be human either

Greenhouse surveyed 2,950 job seekers this year. Sixty-three percent had been interviewed by an AI in the past twelve months, up from 50 percent six months earlier. Thirty-eight percent quit a hiring process because it included one.

Entry-level roles get this first. High-volume pipelines are where companies deploy screening software, and that is exactly where you are applying.

Anyone who has met an online date who looked nothing like the profile knows this feeling. Except now both sides are the one squinting.

Your thin profile is a problem you can fix

Here is the trap nobody warns seniors about. A LinkedIn account created three weeks ago, with eleven connections and one stock-looking headshot, matches the profile of a synthetic identity. You are real and you look manufactured.

Build history before you need it. Connect with classmates, professors, internship supervisors, and campus recruiters now. Use the same name spelling everywhere. Keep your school email visible on the account. A profile with two years of small activity beats a perfect one built last month.

Rules for the interview

• Turn the camera on and keep it on. A dead webcam reads as a red flag in 2026. Test your setup before the call.
• Do the weird thing they ask. If an interviewer asks you to stand up, turn your head, or hold a pen next to your face, do it without complaint. That is a liveness check. The candidates who refuse are the ones who get flagged.
• Expect an identity check. Have your license or passport nearby. Assume a live selfie match before a final round.
• Do not use AI during an interview unless invited. Cisco’s talent leaders put it plainly: if you were not explicitly told you could use AI in an assessment, treat it as off-limits. Using ChatGPT on a second monitor during a technical screen is the fastest way to become the story your career center tells next year. Ask what is allowed before the call.
• Say yes to meeting in person. Gartner found 72 percent of recruiting leaders now run in-person interviews to fight fraud, and the Wall Street Journal reported that Google, Cisco, and McKinsey brought back face-to-face rounds. If travel is a problem, say so and ask whether they cover it, or offer to meet at a campus recruiting event. Showing up in a room separates you from every fake in the pipeline.
• Verify them before you verify yourself. Look up the recruiter on the company’s own site. Confirm the role on the official careers page. If a recruiter contacted you first through Instagram, Telegram, or WhatsApp, treat that as a stop sign.

The advantage nobody expected

Being a real person with a traceable history used to be assumed. It is now a competitive edge.

You have professors who will vouch for you, an internship supervisor with a work email, and a campus career office with actual relationships at these companies. Those are verification channels a fake identity cannot build.

Use them. Show up. Be the candidate who exists.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR 

Jim Stroud is a Career Intelligence Analyst, labor market strategist, and Head of Market Strategy & Industry Engagement at ProvenBase. With more than two decades of experience in recruiting, sourcing, and labor market analysis, he helps organizations and job seekers make sense of a rapidly evolving employment landscape. 

He is also the publisher of Career Intelligence Weekly (which tracks the hidden job market), Job Search 3.0 (an online job-hunting course) and host of The Jim Stroud Podcast (commentary on the world of work). He is also an international conference speaker, job search workshop facilitator for college students and author of multiple books on career strategy and recruiting.