Should you give cheaters a second chance in hiring?

Picture it: You’re hiring a software engineer and have prepared a skills test for candidates to check their fit for the role. 

You find someone you’re excited about, but your test platform informs you that they didn’t take the test themselves. Instead, they asked someone else to take it for them. 

What do you do?

For many employers, this could be a straightforward answer: Reject them immediately and perhaps send a snippy email to boot. Job done. 

After all, you caught them in time that you haven’t spent (too many of) your resources on them. There’s no need for you to waste anymore.

That is your prerogative. However, one can’t help but wonder if there is a better way. 

After all, it’s not necessarily true that cheaters possess no skills you’d want in a potential hire, and this could be an isolated mistake. 

Is it worth giving cheaters the benefit of the doubt or helping them evolve past this misstep?

In this blog, we examine the pros and cons of banning cheaters permanently from roles in your organization versus offering them an opportunity for growth.

How common is cheating in traditional hiring?

To understand how to tackle this problem, it’s important to first understand what cheating looks like in different types of hiring and how you can spot it. 

Traditional hiring refers to the hiring methods we know best and revolves around two key tools: 

1. The resume 

2. The unstructured interview

Cheating can go unchecked in both of these stages.

Lying on resumes 

The resume is a long-standing hiring tool that is still most recruiters’ go-to screening method for applicants. However, it’s a broken system.

Resumes are a huge time-sink to sift through and have no standard format, meaning that every resume contains different information about candidates. 

This lack of standards makes it hard to compare applicants objectively. 

Resumes are also likely to contain outright lies. 

One 2020 survey found that 78% of candidates had lied on their resume, or at least thought about lying – and that’s only the ones who admitted it.****[1]

Lying on resumes is even encouraged by top recruiters, who recommend that candidates “beef up” their resume by using “keyword stuffing” to ensure that applicant tracking systems (ATS) put them at the top of the pile.

In mild cases, you invite someone to interview who, under scrutiny, reveals they don’t have all the skills and experiences listed on their resume. 

In severe cases, you end up in resume recruiting hell, with a hire who is grossly incompetent because they claimed nonexistent skills on their resume – and you didn’t have the means to check them.

The worst part? Even when applicants are honest, the information isn’t a strong indicator of their performance in a role. 

Research by the London School of Economics has found that prehire work experience – the key information you receive from a resume – is not a good indicator of job or training performance or retention.

Lying in unstructured interviews

Unstructured interviews are the second area in which candidates can be dishonest in traditional hiring.

In an unstructured interview, the interviewer improvises the conversation, deciding which questions to ask and how without pre-established criteria for “good” answers. 

In this scenario, the license given to the interviewer means that unstructured interviews are highly susceptible to unconscious bias. 

A hiring manager’s response to different interviewees could determine the questions they ask and the perceived success of each candidate’s answer.

Research by Yale University found that even when interviewers had previously received training about objective hiring, male and female scientists still preferred to hire men.[2]

Besides being vulnerable to interviewer bias, unstructured interviews give applicants more room to manipulate the truth. 

Candidates who have lied on their resumes continue to exaggerate their skills in an interview, and the interviewer has only an unverified resume available to corroborate their claims.

In cases like this, you may not even realize a candidate has cheated until you check their references or you hire them.

How common is cheating in skills-based hiring?

Unlike traditional hiring, the impact of cheating on skills-based hiring is minimal. 

Two major skills-based hiring methods, which occur at the screening and interviewing stages, drive this difference: proctored Internet tests and structured interview techniques.

Proctored Internet tests 

Here’s the ugly truth: It’s impossible to stop candidates from lying on their resumes. 

The resume’s format encourages lying, so many recruiters see it as par for the course.

By contrast, there is some evidence that applicants are less likely to cheat on online tests in the first place. 

One study found that just 13.84% of online test-takers were cheaters – a non-negligible amount, but still considerably lower than 78% of resume candidates.[3]

Even if they intended to cheat on a skills test, it is easier to stop candidates from doing so thanks to the sophisticated anti-cheating protocols that systems like TestGorilla put in place to prevent it.

The main anti-cheating protocol employers should be aware of is online proctoring software. 

At TestGorilla, applicants must permit screen sharing and turn on their webcam. 

Built-in software then determines their identity matches that of the registered test-taker, and they are not using the internet to search for answers.

Cheating in this context is challenging enough that research shows that those with the most need to cheat are less able to cheat well, so they would be unlikely to reach the interview stage anyway.[4]

As a result, researchers consider online proctoring effective when reducing the impact of dishonesty in online testing.

It’s highly unlikely that cheaters would slip through the net. Even if they did, the next stage would weed them out.

Structured interviews 

Traditional hiring typically favors unstructured interviews, in which you ask each candidate different sets of questions. 

Different questions give room for cheaters because they can influence the conversation away from the key skills areas they have fabricated in their resume or disarm interviewers with their charm or confidence.

By contrast, the structured interview approach dictates that interviewers ask all candidates:

1. The same questions 

2. In the same sequence

3. Assessed by the same preagreed criteria 

When interviewers consult test results during the interview, it becomes easier to spot inconsistencies in candidates’ claims about their skills. 

On the rare occasion that a cheating candidate makes it to an interview, it becomes easier to notice – for example, if:

• They performed poorly on a core skill in their skills test but claimed in the interview to have extensive knowledge 

• They performed well in the skills test but can’t answer basic questions about that skill in the interview 

Many still try their luck – but before we can decide what to do with them, we must first consider why they cheat.

Why do candidates cheat in the first place?

Understanding why applicants cheat is relevant because it can help you craft more effective anti-cheating protocols. 

One study found that, although no system could eliminate cheating, the most effective strategy was understanding cheaters’ motivations.

Understanding why applicants cheat can also help you think with more nuance about the repercussions of cheating when you catch them in the act.

Many employers assume applicants cheat because they do not have the skills required for the role and want to access better compensation and benefits than their skills merit.

We won’t pretend this isn’t sometimes true. However, it is not the only possible motivation for cheating.

Candidates also cheat because they see some element of your hiring process as a waste of time or more valuable to you than to them. 

A candidate could have total confidence in their skills for the role. Yet, if they’re applying to many different roles, they do not see the value in spending an hour demonstrating them to you. 

They instead look at cheating as a shortcut to the same outcome.

One way to head this off is with clear communication. Be proactive and clear in communicating with candidates about why you are administering skills tests.

Ensure you place particular emphasis on the benefits of skills testing for applicants, namely:

• You take all candidates’ scores into account 

• You don’t make hiring decisions informed by unconscious bias 

• You assess candidates on their holistic fit for the role – for instance, in terms of culture add – as well as their core skills 

From a candidate’s perspective, displaying these advantages of skills-based hiring can make them less likely to cheat. 

Our State of Skills-Based Hiring Report 2022 found that more than half of applicants prefer skills-based hiring. 

Another reason a candidate cheats is that they don’t trust that a hiring manager even uses the information they’re lying about. 

They think you’ll just use the data to create a shortlist, then never look at it again. They believe they deserve a place on that shortlist, so what’s the harm in cheating?

This reason is a leftover from the resume era. 

The famous statistic that recruiters look at resumes for less than 10 seconds before making a decision has damaged candidates’ confidence in the recruitment process.[5]

So to sum up, there are three types of cheaters: 

1. Those without the skills for the role who want to access roles they aren’t qualified for 

2. Those with the skills for the role who want to take shortcuts 

3. Those with the skills for the role who don’t believe they can get a fair chance without cheating 

We do not condone cheating at any time, but should these different crimes merit different punishments?

Permanently banning cheaters from your company: Pros and cons

Permanently banning cheaters is a common policy in other digital environments, for instance, online gaming. 

Gaming systems like Steam use valve anti-cheating (VAC) technology to automatically detect system cheats on users’ computers, banning users from playing VAC-protected games in the future.

At TestGorilla, we don’t place blanket bans on any users because there could be a reasonable explanation for every red flag raised by the system. Instead, we raise these flags for employers to investigate.

Let’s weigh the pros and cons of permanently banning applicants if you confirm they cheated on your skills assessment.

Pros 

The old saying “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me” applies here. 

Allowing someone to come back – perhaps by waiting until the current hiring manager has left – could mean you incur the cost of a bad hire in the long run.

By cutting off the application process when a candidate has cheated, you limit your overall hiring cost by reducing the time and resources you spend on candidates you don’t ultimately hire. 

This cost-saving is no small matter – a 2017 Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) report found that the average cost per hire in the US was more than $4,000.[6]

Although you are not actively investing in the cheating candidate’s rehabilitation, particularly if this is a one-time mistake, a permanent ban teaches a strong lesson about the risk applicants take when cheating and acts as a deterrent.

Cons 

The fact is that a permanent ban isn’t a realistic fix for most companies. 

You can tell a cheating candidate never to darken your doorstep again, but following through relies heavily on an existing tech infrastructure to keep tabs on past candidates. 

For instance, you can use an internal talent marketplace to log all the information you gain from skills tests. 

Nevertheless, this could be costly or unwieldy to maintain if you’re keeping unsuccessful candidates’ information on file with the skills data of your current employees.

Secondly, by washing your hands of the candidate, you are not doing anything to stop determined cheaters from repeating the pattern at another company. 

After all, there’s no Glassdoor for applicants, and you can’t leave a scathing review to warn others off.

Finally, cheating is often the result of poor communication about the reasoning behind recruitment protocols. 

You could be unfairly penalizing applicants for flaws in your own candidate experience. You also don’t want to miss out on their real skills. It could seem strange, but some recruiters argue that cheating shows problem-solving ability and tenacity.

What are the alternatives to permanently banning cheaters?

Let’s say you decide not to permanently ban a cheating candidate. What now? Do you just let them walk away scot-free?

Not quite. You can take plenty of measures to help rehabilitate a cheating candidate, starting with less all-encompassing recruitment bans.

Temporary or specific bans 

Consider only temporarily banning applicants from applying to your company – for instance, for a year – or banning them from applying to a specific role or department.

Choosing temporary bans requires some thought and negotiation with the candidates to determine their motives. 

Think of something similar to the punishments used when students plagiarize work or cheat on examinations. They usually are:

• Awarded 0% for the exam on which they tried to cheat without the opportunity to resit, providing the incident is isolated and specific to that exam (for example, taking notes to the exam hall) 

• Awarded 0% for the whole class if the cheating is larger-scale or coordinated with others (such as sharing answers with other students)

• Temporarily suspended if it’s a repeat offense 

• Forced to attend a plagiarism workshop

You can argue that this analogy isn’t appropriate. Students are paying universities and therefore have an ongoing relationship with them. 

By contrast, a cheating candidate does not have a relationship with you because they are not yet your employee. 

It is also difficult to ascertain whether cheating is a serial offense or an isolated incident because you cannot easily liaise with other organizations they’ve applied to.

With this in mind, let’s look at academics who plagiarize. In these cases, universities hand out more severe punishments, even fines for copyright infringement.

A cheating candidate is not “stealing” the same way someone who plagiarizes academic work is committing intellectual property theft, but they are causing your business to incur costs.

A more punitive permanent ban makes more sense.

A frank discussion with the candidate 

The other option – perhaps best used in conjunction with the above – is to openly discuss their cheating with the candidates.

A discussion is the most effective option for well-meaning candidates who do not believe they are lying about their skills so much as taking a shortcut.

However, many would argue that it’s not your responsibility as an employer to rehabilitate cheating applicants. 

They are, by definition, not your employees, so there’s no obvious return on your investment from meeting with them when you have no intention of hiring them.

It’s also likely that this conversation would require ambushing the candidate by inviting them to an interview. 

Few candidates would accept an invitation to be dressed down by a potential employer for cheating.

Besides being potentially traumatic for the candidate, ambushing a cheater is a lot to ask of your hiring managers. 

The emotional labor of confronting a cheating candidate and dealing with their response to your accusation is no small feat.

Finally, as well as an investment of time and money, this route has little perceptible return on investment for your public image. 

While your hiring managers discuss the incident online, applicants who cheat are unlikely to want to shout about the incident, lessening your message’s impact.

To ban or not to ban: A question of values

When you use a skills-based hiring approach, it is unlikely that you encounter the dilemma of whether to ban or rehabilitate cheating candidates. 

If you face this situation, it is better to consider it not as a question of investment but of company values. 

Suppose you work in HR or recruitment or have a social mission. In that case, thinking about the message you’re sending to your employees by treating cheaters as complex individuals rather than a monolith is a good idea.

It shows you are an organization that understands the unique value of every candidate and has an environment in which failure is not shameful but something to grow from.

With this in mind, it is worth the time and effort simply to show, in a tangible way, that you respect applicants and believe in the capacity of individuals to change.

Switch to skills testing to reduce the impact of cheating on your hiring process

How to treat candidates who cheat during the hiring process isn’t even a question many employers and hiring managers consider.

However, as we’ve explored in this blog, cheating can be surprisingly commonplace, especially when traditional hiring methods are used.

In these cases, digging deeper into why people cheat can help you better understand your candidate experience and be fairer in how you respond.

To reduce the risk of cheating, read our blog outlining candidate experience best practices.

If you want to give cheaters the lowest chance of making it to your interview, read our blog about how to get started with skills-based hiring. 

Finally, to find applicants who share your core values with minimal impact from cheating, use our Culture Add test to hire the best. 

Sources

• “Hiring Charlatans?”. Checkster. Retrieved June 21, 2023. https://www.checkster.com/are_you_hiring_charlatans

• Agarwal, Pragya. (December 3, 2018). “Unconscious Bias: How It Affects Us More Than We Know”. Forbes. Retrieved June 21, 2023. https://www.forbes.com/sites/pragyaagarwaleurope/2018/12/03/unconscious-bias-how-it-affects-us-more-than-we-know/?sh=3333fe6e13e7

• Aguado, David, et al. (December 2018). “Cheating on Unproctored Internet Test Applications: An Analysis of a Verification Test in a Real Personnel Selection Context”. The Spanish Journal of Psychology. Retrieved June 21, 2023. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329364614_Cheating_on_Unproctored_Internet_Test_Applications_An_Analysis_of_a_Verification_Test_in_a_Real_Personnel_Selection_Context

• Cavanaugh, Katelyn J. (2018). “Predicting Score Change: An Empirical Investigation of Cheating on Unproctored Employment Tests”. Old Dominion University Digital Commons. Retrieved June 21, 2023. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1066&context=psychology_etds

• “Eye-Tracking Study”. (2018). Ladders. Retrieved June 21, 2023. https://www.theladders.com/static/images/basicSite/pdfs/TheLadders-EyeTracking-StudyC2.pdf

• “SHRM Customized Talent Acquisition Benchmarking Report”. (2017). Society for Human Resource Management. Retrieved June 21, 2023. https://www.shrm.org/ResourcesAndTools/business-solutions/Documents/Talent-Acquisition-Report-All-Industries-All-FTEs.pdf