Average Job Posting Draws 270 Applicants as Fraud Reshapes Screening

The average open role on Greenhouse now draws 270 applicants, up from 116 in 2022 — while the average recruiting team has shrunk by more than half over the same period. Greenhouse CEO Daniel Chait shared the figures with Forbes last month, and they frame a compliance-and-process problem talent acquisition cannot stop talking about: fraud.

At an HR Tech conference last month, every screening vendor agreed on one point. The application document recruiters use to screen no longer carries trustworthy information. Where they disagree is on the fix. One camp wants more verified data about the candidate. The other wants candidates to produce evidence of real effort.

Why did the resume stop working?

Applications now cost nothing to submit, and some candidates may not even know a job exists on their behalf. Hari Kolam, co-founder of Findem, put it in one sentence: "The volume of applicants and the [surface] quality of applicants essentially increases because generating English has become a commodity."

The top of the funnel has filled with resumes written, tailored and often submitted by AI. Stacy Zapar and Magen Gicinto addressed the fraud problem in their keynote at the Summit.

What does the evidence camp propose?

The evidence camp starts at the bottom of the funnel, with the background check, and argues the check was never really checking. Yardstik CEO Andrew Johnson describes a traditional check as one that gathers information at the point of hire, never verifies that the Social Security number belongs to the person typing it, and never looks again. "You're just assumed good forever," he said.

Yardstik, which closed a $30 million Series B in September, matches a driver's license to a face and the face to the Social Security number first. It reads device and network signals — an email address created last week, or an application for a Minnesota job from a phone in the Dominican Republic. It keeps what it verifies, so one in ten applicants it sees has been checked before. In gig and remote roles, Johnson said, the company sees fraud rates of 10 to 15 percent. One early customer discovered a ring selling stolen Social Security numbers used to clear screening.

Findem applied the same logic to the resume itself. On October 20 it launched Authenticity Suite Pro, built on Glider, the assessment and proctoring company it acquired this spring. The product checks claims against Findem's database of patents, licenses and company histories, then flags conflicts: mismatched employment dates, a company that does not exist, repeated applications from one location. Flagged candidates get a consent-based, proctored session with a liveness check and a government ID. Recruiters receive a report with a plain-language outcome: successful, unsuccessful or inconclusive.

Fama, which screens social media, looks for evidence in what candidates have already said in public. Its Lens product, launched in October, starts from a written policy and screens against it, with every decision traced to a specific policy element. CEO Ben Mones cited a social media company that bars alcohol references for under-21 influencer campaigns. Lens flagged an ice cream cake — the recipe contained rum. It was consistent with the policy, and exactly what the customer wanted flagged.

Can interviews and simulations replace the screen?

The other camp asks candidates to generate evidence instead. Greenhouse acquired Ezra, a voice AI interviewer, about six months ago, announcing the deal at the last ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit. Founder Ophir Samson, who now runs voice AI for Greenhouse, knows the reputation problem. "The conversation right now on Reddit and LinkedIn threads is: this is bad," he said. "Which honestly, if I received the same information that many of these people received, I would feel the same way."

His framing: the real choice is a written application disappearing into a bot-filled stack, versus a 10- to 15-minute conversation in which Ezra asks role-specific questions, the candidate answers aloud in real time and can ask questions back. "You don't have to guess what they're interested in. They're asking you," Samson said.

XLOT, a two-person startup from Munich, pushes effort furthest. Instead of a work test, it drops candidates into a simulated first week: one task, incomplete information, and a simulated manager and peers to question. The company filed for a patent in October covering the mechanism — information about the business appears only when the candidate asks. The platform scores the solution, the reasoning, the questions asked and the questions not asked. Co-founder Ilya Billig sees the effort as the filter. "Companies will be getting a short list instead of a stack of resumes," he said — a short list of motivated candidates who demonstrated the right skills.

Whichever camp employers pick, candidates who pass still reach an interview. Katherine Loranger, chief people officer at Safeguard Global, is retraining managers accordingly: "It's not going to be about learning what they did, but learning why they did it, what they were thinking, how they would do things differently, and what they've learned. Things that they can't get out of that AI chat module in their interview prep." It makes candidates uncomfortable, she acknowledged. "But that's where we figure out where they are."

With application volume up 20 percent year over year on Greenhouse alone, the screening segment's moment seems set to last well past the current conference cycle.