how are you actually evaluating candidates in 2026?
Let me start from where i'm sitting: i talk to founders, hiring managers, and recruiters every week, and the same conversation keeps coming up. nobody trusts their pipeline anymor
Application volumes have doubled since 2021. Cheating on technical assessments doubled in just six months last year, from 15% to 35% of candidates. One in three hiring managers has personally caught a fake identity in an interview. @Anthropic had to rewrite their interview questions after so many people cheated during the interview with Claude.
The screening tools most teams are using were built before any of this was happening. They're trying to detect 2026 problems with a 2019 architecture.So I'm genuinely curious how teams are adapting in practice.
Are you still trusting the signal from your current ATS and screening flow? Have you caught a fake candidate yet? What did you change after?
If you could throw out everything and rebuild how your company evaluates candidates from scratch, knowing what you know now, what would be the first thing?
I'm just dropping it open. would love to hear what's actually working, what's not, and what you're seeing in your pipeline right now.
Replies
I am a developer and I am interviewing developers from time to time. I have seen a couple of cases when people would pass the screening, because they persuaded the HR person to think that the candidate has a lot of knowledge and nice skills - however during the technical interview they'd fail miserably, and my conclusion is that they are fake or maybe they aren't as good as they presented themselves.
I'd also need to mention the fact that it's hard to find a developer that has nice soft AND hard skills, but eventually we're able to find a good developer after 10-15 tech interviews.
If I was able to rebuild the process, I'd try to find a solution for HR people being completely out of the development field. I believe that one of the reasons why the screening doesn't always work well is that HR people quite often cannot feel that fakeness just because they couldn't know what fake looks like
@sk_uxpin I don’t fully trust ATS pipelines anymore. I’ve started adding deeper identity checks and more conversational technical rounds.
@sk_uxpin @henry_lindsey Honestly, I’ve become more skeptical of anything asynchronous. I assume external help unless proven otherwise. What’s worked better is pairing sessions where candidates collaborate with someone from the team.
@sk_uxpin @henry_lindsey @lakeesha_weatherwax For me, the biggest realization is that scale broke trust. The old funnel assumed honesty at the top. That assumption no longer holds.