Comment by mkl95 10 hours ago
> As US-based companies become more aware of the fake IT worker problem, the job seekers are increasingly targeting European employers, too.
All the US companies I've worked for made sure I was legit before I could log into anything, so I assume background checks to be ubiquitous there, save for the cheapest companies. European employers on the other hand...
It feels like you're going through some kind of security clearance.
To be honest, getting insight and access to a major company's networks and maybe customer data is perhaps the same kind of risk to the company as it is for the government to give someone access to (top) secret files. It might not be so much a negotiating tactic as awareness that more sophisticated spies and criminals than the ones in the OP article are targeting your company.
Who's doing a hard credit pull at all, especially before salary's negotiated and the offer's extended?
I’ve seen reports from people who were contacted by companies asking to use their identity for jobs. The deal was that the company used their likeness and identity to secure the job, but they would do all of the work and split the paycheck with them.
There are a million reasons why this is a bad idea, but I’m sure they don’t have trouble finding people excited to collect free paychecks.
I also got contacted via LinkedIn by a “normal” profile of a Dutch guy with normal connections, that was even connected to people I know, offering me the same. I politely suggested it’s not a great idea and declined
I was once contacted on LinkedIn by an individual asking to use my identity to work in the US
We got catfished by an outsourcer on Upwork.
Great interview, good questions, really solid candidate.
His first day on the job, his English went to shit.
Then he refused to pick up the phone or call me back. Lame excuses about how it’s loud there, then he lost his voice, then scheduled a call with the real “Jeff” the American who couldn’t answer anything about what we had discussed an hour earlier.
Reported to Upwork but I sort of doubt they did much about it.
Video calls super important and asking questions that wouldn’t be a normal interview question. Helps to have candidates walk through and explain code they haven’t seen to reduce any prep work that may have happened. I’ve got a few questions I ask that no one is preparing for. I’ve interviewed a couple people that seemed kinda sus, maybe not working as someone else but definitely lied about their capabilities but somehow passing the coding test. This was before LLMs ruined everything too.
> European employers on the other hand...
Many European employers
- don't or rarely offer remote jobs, so they often don't have this problem.
- even if they do some video or phone interview for pre-screening, they nearly always expect the prospective employee to come to a live interview if they are not weeded out by this pre-screening. It is thus expected that you at least live in a country from where you can easily travel to the place where the employer is located.
- often expect their employees to be able to speak the national language, or at least learn it fast. This also makes times hard for North Korean fake IT workers.
I live in Finland, and while it is not universal it is extremely common for IT-companies to have a working-language of English.
The country is small and hires both immigrants, and people who specifically relocate to start working at the English-only companies, as well as local candidates.
Learning Finnish will obviously make your life easier, in many many ways, but companies themselves do not seem to expect or require it.
I've heard this before about Finland and found it really interesting as to my knowledge English isn't particularly more societally prevalent in Finland than in nearby countries such as Sweden, Denmark or the Netherlands. Any idea if it's as common in those countries as well? By the sounds of it in Finland there's more IT companies operating in English than in Finnish.
It’s definitely common in Denmark, enough that it’s a perennial national debate. Maersk is a huge employer that officially made their corporate language English something like 20 years ago, which spawned discussions about whether you should need to speak a foreign language to get a job in your own country. In practice the answer is yes, for some sectors.
I worked for years in an English-language work environment in Denmark (I am not Danish), and learned maybe a handful of phrases of spoken Danish the entire time. I was expected to be able to read the occasional email in Danish, but 1) written Danish is not hard in comparison, and 2) even years ago Google Translate was good enough.
It would have been nice from a social perspective to have known more spoken Danish, but my employer didn’t really care, and it isn’t easy to learn if you don’t have strong local connections. Danes will just immediately switch to English by default, and even if you ask them to continue in Danish, you need a decent level of Danish pronunciation to make yourself understood, which is not trivial to get to.
This is at least the experience that I (and many people who I know) had.
> I did not speak the language
As I implied: if you are really talented, you don't have to speak the native language yet, but it is expected that you learn it fast.
Where I am in Europe you couldn't even get a (legal!) job in a bar without showing proper ID, and having your identification (id card number) checked and be present in the contract.
The fact that "fake people" can be employed for high level IT companies in the US is just unfathomable to me.
The background checks don't always work because they typically use stolen identities or use the identities of Americans that they've paid. They basically have to in order to pass I-9 verification.
There are also different levels of background checks. For instance, previous employment verification can be time consuming so some companies skip it. Checking references aren't useful because they can be faked (you have to run background checks with employment verification on the references to make sure they are who they say they are).
That’s only one of the scams. You pass background checks if you’re new to the US. It’s a fairly common grift to place contract programmers at big companies with fake degrees and experience, who then send the work back to Asia to be done overnight. It’s easier now with ChatGPT - you can send photos of screens and instantly extract the text.
You also have people who outsource themselves. That’s one of the ways that the people who work multiple jobs pull it off.
The thing I don't like is that US companies take it too far, to the point they're violating my privacy and making me uncomfortable.
Why do you need to do a hard credit check before you give me an offer? Why do you need to know exactly how much I owe on my credit cards, car, house, how much I'm paying per month, and how much I've made at every job for the past 7 years?
That feels... excessive. And weird. And kind of unfair. Now you know my paycheck, and the paycheck before that, and how desperate I am. Well, there goes negotiations.