It has been a while since I posted to the K9 Ventures blog. I’ve been heads down working with K9 portfolio companies and spending my time running HiHello as the co-founder and CEO of that company. Along the way, I’ve learned and am learning a LOT. Like a lot, a lot. After 10 years of building K9, my knowledge and advice to founders were becoming dated. To continue learning the best approach was to learn by doing – actually run a company so that you have first-hand knowledge and experience of what it is like to build a company today. HiHello has helped me do just that.

I’m hoping that over the next few months, I will be able to find more time to write and document some of this learning so that it is available not only to K9 founders but also to founders elsewhere whom I do not have the time or the privilege to engage with.

One of the lessons we’ve learned in building HiHello is to recognize and filter out fake / scam engineering candidates from our recruiting pipeline. Yes, you read that correctly. The demand for software engineers continues to exceed the supply by several orders of magnitude. If you look back at the number of degrees awarded in computer science over the last 10 years, and the number of open software engineering positions, it is clear that as Software is eating the World the demand for software engineers is dramatically outpacing the supply. Software Engineers also tend to command a much higher salary. So if you follow the demand and you follow the money, it’s no surprise that scammers have figured out a way to scam people in a new “high-tech” way. 

Recruiting engineers is hard enough, but having to deal with fake/scam candidates makes it that much harder.

I haven’t gone deep enough down the rabbit hole to provide detailed evidence, but all the indications are that this has now become an organized crime activity, most likely focused out of Asia (China in particular). COVID, the transition to most tech jobs now being remote, and working from home has been an accelerator for this trend.

Here is the pattern that we’ve observed:

• We post a job description for a software engineering role on LinkedIn and or AngelList (now WellFound).
• We receive several inbound applications for this position who all have incredible resumes. The resume is not only well written in fluent English but also often has a much better visual design than you see from real candidates!
• The resume will often focus on mentioning technologies rather than projects. It will be a keyword soup – mentioning all the cool technologies that are being used in companies today. There will be little to no mention of the project or what was being built, but more focus on identifying what technologies were used in a position.
• The name of the candidate will often be very American-sounding. This is true not only of the first name but also the last name of the candidate. So names like David Smith are not unlikely. We’ve also seen some of the common Hispanic names in our candidate pool.
• The email address will often include the works dev, pro, soft, etc in their email addresses or the domain of the email address.
• They will claim to have attended a US university/college typically in Computer Science. We’ve seen lots of resumes that show universities in Texas, Florida, and Arizona. Some of them will be less well-known universities, but others will be legit universities like UT Austin, Texas A&M, etc.
• The real tell appears when you reach out to the candidate and start scheduling. Their written communication will be poor (in stark contrast to what you would guess from the quality of the resume and the claimed level of education)—with poor grammar, and poor attention to detail.
• When you get on Zoom with the candidates there are several other interesting tells. First, the person that had a very American-sounding name will be speaking with a thick accent.
• They will claim that their camera isn’t working or in some other way try to avoid turning on their camera. If you insist that they have to run on their camera, they will eventually turn it on, and you’ll see someone where there is a very clear disconnect between the name and the appearance of the person. To put it bluntly, the very American name doesn’t match up with the appearance of someone who is clearly of Asian origin. (Note: it is common for a lot of first and second-generation immigrants to have an American-sounding name, but the disconnect here is usually with the last name, the accent, and the speaking ability of someone who claims to have spent several years studying in the United States)
• They will often use a virtual background or be up against a blank wall so that you have no clear indication of the rest of their surroundings.
• If you’re alert you will also sometimes be able to hear that there are other people in the room with them. Initially, it may feel like roommates but in other cases, it’s been clear that it’s probably a call center.
• If you ask them to describe their background or tell their story, you’ll get a “click-whirr” response – a rather well-practiced and sometimes even eloquent response. But if you try to probe deeper into what did the company do, and what was the project they worked on, the responses will be very superficial, and the candidate will be unable to provide sufficient details.
• The fun part comes when you start to ask questions about their personal story. Something as simple as where did they grow up? Where did they go to school? I distinctly remember one candidate saying that he grew up in Texas, but the whole time he pronounced Texas as Tex-ASS. I’m pretty sure that if you grew up in Texas, went to school and college in Texas, no matter what background you come from in that many years of living in a state, you learn to pronounce the name of the state better than Tex-ASS.
• At times when you ask a technical question, you may also notice a pause or a delay in their response. We speculate that this is because they may have another audio channel open Concurrently with someone listening in to the call and then feeding/prompting them the answers/responses. 

None of these candidates have made it through our screening process at HiHello. In the beginning, maybe some of them made it through an initial screen by us giving them the benefit of the doubt, but none of them made it through a second round. But these candidates are a massive time-suck. Recruiting engineers is hard enough, but having to deal with fake/scam candidates makes it that much harder.

You may be wondering how this whole scheme works. I certainly was, until one of our engineers at HiHello received an inbound from someone offering him $60-$80/hr just to attend a couple of Zoom meetings and pretend to be someone else on those calls. Here is the full text of their proposal (phone number redacted):

The proposal above suggests that this isn’t just a case of a few bad apples/lone wolves. This is an organized group that is doing this on an ongoing basis. If you have several low-quality programmers in China/Vietnam working in a sweatshop being fronted by a native language speaker – it can sometimes take months for someone to realize that they are being scammed. In the meanwhile given what engineers cost, the scammers would easily have pocketed tens of thousands of dollars in the process. If executed well this scheme could be more effective than peddling drugs!

At HiHello, we’ve become very attuned to identifying these scam candidates. We’ve developed new ways of identifying when not to engage with candidates. Some of the techniques we’ve adopted are:

• Looking at resumes more closely to ensure that people are talking about the projects in sufficient detail and not just throwing technical jargon and buzzwords around.
• Checking the timeline on resumes closely to ensure that it makes sense.
• Having a high bar for communication – both written and verbal. As a remote team, how people communicate is critical and so while we don’t have a preference on where someone is from, their ability to communicate with our team in fluent English is critical. (Note, our emphasis is on the ability to communicate, not accents).
• Asking more questions to dig deeper into a candidate’s personal story, journey, and location.
• Several of us (this happened organically without coordinating with each other) also started to take screenshots during Zoom calls to make sure that we could show other members of the team who we communicated with to verify that all of us talked to the same person!

I’m sure there are lots of other good stories about recruiting engineers that are not getting shared. My purpose behind this post was to help bring more attention to this issue which is a real and growing issue in engineering recruiting. If you have some good stories, please feel free to share them in the comments.

And of course, HiHello is hiring amazing high-quality engineers. We have a super fun team. We have a high bar on who gets to be part of that team. If you think you’re an awesome engineer, then you can check out our open positions at https://jobs.lever.co/hihello.