The rise of candidate fraud: What’s changing, and how Persona can help
Candidate fraud isn’t just a headline-grabbing anomaly. It’s becoming a systemic risk fueled by GenAI, fake identities, and remote-first hiring.
In an April 2025 Gartner® report, Mitigate Rising Candidate Fraud Through Identity Verification, Gartner predicts that one in four candidate profiles worldwide will be fake by 2028. To help security, HR, and legal leaders navigate this new risk, we’ve pulled out key insights from the report and explain how Persona helps put them into action.
Insight #1: GenAI makes candidate fraud easier to commit and harder to catch
You’ve likely seen stories about North Korean IT workers making it through established companies’ hiring pipelines. These are real examples of the havoc candidate fraud can cause, but in many cases, the deception is more subtle.
Gartner notes that 39% of candidates have used GenAI during the hiring process. While some use it to write resumes or prep for interviews, others go further: falsifying addresses to qualify for remote work or higher pay, generating fake documents, altering video appearances, and even using proxies to stand in for interviews.
Some do this to hide skill gaps, while others do so to bypass regional restrictions or inflate salary expectations.
Persona’s take
While candidate fraud might feel like a new and daunting challenge for HR and recruiting teams, it’s really a familiar story: fraudsters following opportunity. The use case may have evolved, but the underlying behavior is similar to what we’ve seen across financial services, gig platforms, marketplaces, and the many other industries we serve.
And that’s good news because it means you don’t need to start from scratch.
At Persona, we’ve spent years helping organizations detect identity fraud in high-risk, high-volume environments. We’ve seen how bad actors adapt their tactics, and we’ve built tools to stay ahead of them.
This allows us to help hiring teams:
Spot deepfakes and proxies with liveness detection
Confirm document ownership with selfie-to-ID matching
Catch location inconsistencies using device signals
And more
By applying proven fraud prevention methods to hiring, organizations can stop candidate fraud before it compromises systems, IP, or trust — all without adding unnecessary friction to the process.
Insight #2: Background checks alone aren’t enough
While background checks remain a core part of hiring, they’re not enough on their own to detect, deter, and deny candidate fraud. As Gartner explains, “Traditional employment verifications and background checks are ill-equipped to uncover fraud in the recruiting process, as they occur in later stages of hiring and rely on candidate-provided identity data.”
Gartner is clear: background checks serve a critical purpose — screening for risk — but they can’t catch fraud such as GenAI-powered deception or location obfuscation.
Persona’s take
Background checks help you determine whether a candidate is safe to hire… but only if you’re evaluating the right person. That’s where identity verification comes in.
Identity verification and background checks act as complementary layers of defense: background checks help ensure a candidate is safe to hire, while identity verification confirms that the person being evaluated is truly who they claim to be. Since background checks are typically more costly and time-consuming than identity verification, we recommend placing IDV earlier in the funnel to ensure you only run background checks on verified users.
With tools like selfie-to-ID matching and location intelligence, Persona helps prevent fraud before you extend the offer — not after it’s too late.
Insight #3: Timing IDV requires balance and collaboration
Gartner recommends deploying IDV “early in the recruiting process,” but it doesn’t prescribe an exact moment. You might incorporate it during the video interview or skills assessment stage for maximum assurance, or you might consider verifying candidates prior to onboarding for minimum friction. The right time depends on your risk tolerance, candidate experience goals, and more.
Persona’s take
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to identity.
That’s why we built Persona to be flexible enough to verify identity whenever trust matters most to your business, whether that’s:
Before the interview to catch impersonation early
Post-assessment to confirm real skills belong to the real person
Prior to asset provisioning to reduce insider risk
Our work with diverse teams from Remote to Figma shows that thoughtful implementation tailored to your organization’s risk tolerance and use cases makes all the difference.
Insight #4: Candidate fraud requires a cross-functional response
Gartner also emphasizes that recruiting can’t fight fraud alone. Organizations need cross-functional strategies that include IT, HR, IAM, and cybersecurity — especially as remote access and insider risk grow.
In particular, Gartner calls out the importance of working with legal teams to avoid bias, protect privacy, and stay compliant with local laws, writing, “Despite the recruiting function’s best efforts, recruiting alone will not be able to catch every instance of candidate fraud. Recruiting leaders should work with legal counsel to figure out where in the recruiting process is best to verify identity to minimize the possibility of hiring discrimination based on candidate documentation.”
Persona’s take
In workforce IDV evaluations, we’ve seen legal teams raise red flags that stall deployment — before implementing, they want to ensure PII is handled carefully and that identity checks don’t introduce discrimination. That’s why it’s critical to involve legal early and ensure IDV is implemented in ways that reduce bias, minimize compliance risk, and respect global data privacy regulations.
One key advantage of automated IDV? It can help reduce legal risk by:
Offloading document review from interviewers
Minimizing exposure to sensitive PII
Supporting configurable retention policies and consent handling
Stop candidate fraud before it starts
At Persona, we help organizations know who they’re hiring with minimal lift for both the candidate and your HR, IT, legal, and security teams. Our fully automated platform includes:
Selfie-to-ID matching for identity validation
Liveness detection to prevent spoofing and proxies
Location intelligence to verify where the device is
Easy reverification throughout the employee life cycle
A wide variety of risk signals to help you detect anomalies in login behavior or device changes
And more
Interested in learning more? Chat with us to see how Persona can help.