Linktree reduces candidate fraud and reclaims recruiting time with Persona

Founded in 2016, Linktree is a link-in-bio platform used by more than 70 million creators, brands, and businesses worldwide, including TikTok, Selena Gomez, Red Bull, and the LA Clippers. Its customizable landing pages let users share links, accept payments, embed images and videos, and host lead-generation forms, all through a single URL. With over 1.2 billion unique visitors a month, Linktree ranks among the top 300 most visited websites globally.

Problem: As Linktree scaled, fake candidates overwhelmed its recruiting team and became a security threat

In 2022, Linktree reached a $1.3 billion valuation, fueling hiring across its global offices.

“We’re an international company,” says Josh Quick, director of IT at Linktree. “We see a huge volume of applicants daily, with about 40 to 50 candidates reaching the final rounds of interviews every month.”

With hundreds of applicants flowing in, a few bad actors were bound to try their luck. Some just want steady jobs and paychecks, while others have more malicious intentions. The rise of DPRK IT workers, for example, has shown how fraudulent candidates can use employment to fund the regime, steal sensitive data, demand ransom, or carry out a combination of these attacks.

Sure enough, in 2025, Linktree began seeing a rise in fraudulent applicants attempting to infiltrate its hiring process. “We were seeing fraud across the board,” recalls Josh. “Bad actors using deepfakes during interviews or candidates using screen control tools during coding interviews. It was hard to tell who we were actually speaking to.”

What started as a recruiting headache quickly became a company-wide security concern that the recruiting team couldn’t address alone. Linktree’s CISO got involved, and Josh found himself co-leading a “tiger team” spanning security, IT, and recruiting. After all, if a fraudulent candidate slipped through and became an employee, they could steal data, compromise systems, or create backdoors before anyone noticed.

But that wasn’t the only concern. For the recruiting team, every fake candidate who made it to the final rounds sent the team back to square one.

“It was extremely frustrating for our talent team,” Josh says. “Finding a fake candidate late in the process often meant starting the search over entirely.”

For a fast-growing company like Linktree, wasting precious time on fraudulent candidates was unacceptable. Linktree’s lean recruiting team already had packed schedules juggling sourcing, screening, interviews, and administrative work like updating tracking systems. Every hour spent vetting a fake candidate was an hour stolen from identifying and engaging genuine talent.

“Our recruiters were spending significant time and energy on candidates who were fabricating their identity or impersonating someone else,” Josh explains. “That’s time they could have spent building relationships with real candidates and moving the right people through our pipeline.”

Solution: Linktree partners with Persona to gain assurance that candidates are who they say they are

Linktree knew it needed a candidate verification solution that could save its recruiting team time while giving its security team confidence that fraudulent candidates wouldn’t slip through and gain access to its systems and data.

After researching top identity platforms, Linktree ultimately chose to partner with Persona for a few reasons:

Candidate verification built into the recruiting team’s existing workflow

With just four recruiters on the team, there was no bandwidth to manually verify each candidate’s identity. Linktree needed a solution that fit into its existing hiring processes without adding extra work.

Persona’s customizable workflows take candidate verification almost entirely off the recruiting team’s plate. Most steps run automatically, and the few that require a decision take only a single click:

• When a recruiter moves a candidate past the hiring manager interview phase within Gem (Linktree’s ATS), Gem automatically triggers a Slack message to the recruiting team via Linktree’s Persona Check Bot.

• The Slack message gives the recruiter a choice: click “send” to email the candidate a link to complete a government ID and selfie check, or “skip” to bypass it.

• Candidates complete a quick verification process that includes a government ID check that flags forged or tampered documents, a selfie liveness check, and a selfie-to-ID comparison to confirm they match the person pictured on the document. Throughout the process, Persona also analyzes fraud risk signals, such as inconsistent GPS data, proxy usage, and copy-and-paste activity.

• When the candidate completes the flow, the recruiting team receives a Slack message with the verification status and a link to the full Persona case record for anyone who wants to dig deeper.

“Candidates get verified without our recruiting team ever logging in to Persona,” Josh says. “It’s literally just a couple of buttons in a Slack channel.”

Proven experience supporting Okta, a leader in the IAM space

While Persona’s automation capabilities checked one box, Linktree also needed to ensure that Persona was reliable and trustworthy.

For Josh, that confidence came from an unexpected place: an Okta session at Oktane (Okta’s identity and access management conference), where he learned how Persona powers Okta’s internal workforce identity verification.

“Knowing that Persona works so closely with Okta gave us peace of mind,” Josh recalls. “If Okta relies on Persona for its own internal verification, we knew we could, too.”

Verification coverage across the candidate and employee life cycle

Another factor that set Persona apart was its ability to support both candidate and workforce identity verification.

“Thinking long-term, we knew we eventually wanted to verify candidates as well as our existing employee base,” Josh says. “With Persona, we could do both: verify candidates during the interview process and verify employees before they access sensitive apps.”

Linktree hasn’t rolled out employee verification yet, but knowing the option is available gives the team confidence for the future. When Linktree is ready, Persona can connect the identity verified during hiring to the same person’s employee identity after they join the company, maintaining continuity from candidate to employee.

Results: With Persona, Linktree keeps bad actors out of the hiring funnel and its recruiting team focused on real candidates

Since implementing Persona, Linktree has reduced candidate fraud in its hiring funnel, sometimes before the verification process even begins. Once applicants learn that identity verification is required, some fraudulent candidates withdraw before reaching later rounds.

Fewer fraudulent candidates in the funnel means fewer potential bad actors reaching Linktree’s internal systems. It also gives the recruiting team time back. Instead of spending hours determining whether a candidate is a real person, they can focus on whether that person is the right fit for the role.

For Josh, the value of Persona comes down to how little his team has had to think about the technical deployment now that it’s running. “With Persona, it’s set and forget,” he says. “And that’s what I really like about it.”