Remote Hiring Opened the Talent Pool — and the Fraud Surface

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Before COVID forced everyone out of the office, hiring for most companies was a pretty localized exercise. You posted the job, you interviewed whoever could physically show up, and you picked someone. If you were based in a mid-sized city, you hired from a mid-sized city talent pool.

Remote work changed that. Suddenly a company in Topeka, Kansas could interview candidates in Portland, Maine — or anywhere else. This meant more competition for good candidates. However, it also meant a dramatically better shot at actually finding the right person for the job. And depending on your market, the cost savings weren’t trivial either.

Most of the data suggested remote work was as productive as in-office work, sometimes more so. The case for keeping it was strong. A lot of companies made it permanent, or at least optional.

The Fraud Problem Nobody Planned For

But there’s a problem that came along with all of that — one that didn’t get much attention until recently. When you expand your hiring geography to anywhere with an internet connection, you also expand your exposure. As a result, you encounter applicants who are not who they claim to be.

I’m not talking about resume padding. I mean organized fraud. That includes fake identities. There are people swapping out mid-interview so that the person who actually shows up on day one is not the person you interviewed. AI is being used in real time to answer technical questions the candidate doesn’t actually know. And in some well-documented cases, state-sponsored actors — North Korean IT workers operating under false identities — get hired. These workers receive company laptops and exfiltrate data almost immediately.

The FTC reported that US businesses lost a staggering amount to this kind of fraud in 2024. And that’s not just the companies that hired someone fraudulent. A significant chunk of that is wasted time. This includes the cost of running three, five, or seven interview rounds on a candidate who turns out to be fake, and having to start over.

In this episode of the TechSpective Podcast, I talk with Den Jones, CEO and founder of 909Cyber, about a product he’s been building to address exactly this problem. Den has spent 30 years in identity and zero trust — at Adobe, Cisco, and elsewhere. 909Shield applies that same thinking to the hiring process itself. This happens before a candidate ever gets to the first interview, before a company ships a laptop, and before access is provisioned.

More to the Conversation Than Just the Product

We get into how the fraud actually works — and it’s more varied and more organized than most people realize. We also talk about what a solution looks like, the tradeoffs involved in verifying someone’s identity across multiple touchpoints, and the data privacy questions that come with building a biometric trust layer for hiring.

There are also some side conversations worth tuning in for. For example, whether it actually matters if an employee works for multiple companies simultaneously, as long as they’re delivering. Also, whether using AI to answer interview questions should disqualify someone when employers are often mandating AI use once they’re hired. And whether return-to-office mandates, at least in some cases, are partly a response to this fraud problem rather than the real estate economics most people assume.

Den also traces how 909Shield came to exist — which did not start with a plan to build a remote hiring verification platform. It started with a passion project to help cybersecurity students find part-time work while they were still in school. Later, that evolved into a freelancer marketplace and then into a fraud-prevention product for remote hiring. This is its own story, and it’s worth hearing him tell it.

909Shield is launching in mid-June. Den is actively looking for design partners — companies doing meaningful hiring volume who want to help shape the product and lock in early pricing. If your organization does a significant amount of remote hiring, this conversation is worth your time.

Check out the full episode on the TechSpective Podcast.