Hiring has gone remote. Virtual interviews, online assessments, and cross-border recruiting have become the norm. With those changes comes a sharp rise in fraudulent behaviors such as impersonation, unauthorized assistance, and cheating during hiring assessments.
Plus, the rise of GenAI enables job seekers to create polished answers to open-ended assessment questions in an instant. On the surface, they may look qualified—but that doesn’t mean they actually are. For recruiters, this blurring of the line between authentic qualifications and AI-generated content creates real risk.
Our research suggests that as many as 5–15% of applicants have “intent-to-deceive” or “no intent to stay.” Recruiters are left second-guessing their decisions, and organizations face higher turnover, wasted time, and added costs.
Talent acquisition therefore must change the way they evaluate candidates.
Harver’s Three-Tiered Approach to Fraud Prevention
At Harver, our mission has always been to connect the right people with the right opportunities in a fair and accurate way. That means ensuring every assessment truly reflects a candidate’s own skills and potential.
To achieve this, we’ve built a three-tiered hiring fraud prevention strategy designed to detect, deter, and report fraudulent activity:
- Anti-Cheating Features: Prevent and minimize dishonest behavior during assessments.
- Fraud Detection: Identify and flag potential fraud during the application process.
- Proctoring Capabilities: Monitor test takers and restrict suspicious activity in real time.
Introducing Harver Proctoring
Proctoring is the newest enhancement to our hiring fraud detection suite, providing an added layer of verification without disrupting the candidate experience.
By monitoring for specific fraudulent behaviors, proctoring helps identify suspicious activity in real time and prevents impersonation or external assistance.
This ensures assessment results reflect a candidate’s actual capabilities—not inflated or manipulated performance—so hiring teams can make confident, data-driven decisions.
With more accurate insights into candidate fit, organizations can reduce early attrition and improve long-term success, all while maintaining a seamless, respectful experience for applicants.
How Proctoring Works
Once enabled, proctoring combines three simple but powerful features:
- Periodic Photo Capture: Candidates’ photos are taken at intervals to verify that the same individual is completing the assessment and later interviewed.
- Copy-Paste Prevention: Candidates cannot cut, copy, or paste within assessments, which reduces the use of external tools like ChatGPT.
- Focus Change Detection: Recruiters are alerted when candidates switch browser tabs, windows, or interact with other apps during the assessment.
Every flagged behavior is logged on the Candidate Detail Page, giving hiring teams a clear, actionable record of suspicious activity. This visibility ensures recruiters can follow up with confidence, while also protecting candidates who play by the rules.
Who Needs Fraud Prevention?
While hiring fraud prevention matters for every organization, it’s particularly critical for:
- Talent acquisition teams hiring at scale, in industries like BPO and retail, who need consistent and fair assessments across thousands of candidates.
- Regulated industries such as finance, healthcare, and government, where compliance and verification are essential.
- Remote and hybrid teams, especially those hiring across borders or in offshore markets where in-person verification is difficult.
- Early-career and entry-level hiring, where impersonation and test sharing risks are more common.
Download the white paper: “Fairness in Hiring & Talent Management Drives Better Business Outcomes”
The Cost of Fraud and the Value of Integrity
The price of fraud is steep: wasted recruiter hours, poor candidate fit, higher attrition, and reputational risk. But more importantly, fraudulent assessments undermine fairness for candidates who are genuinely putting their best foot forward.
As the provider of science-backed assessments, we see it as our responsibility to ensure that results remain a valid, reliable source of truth about candidate fit. With the addition of Proctoring, Harver takes another step in protecting the integrity of hiring.
