The Rise of the Adversarial Candidate

Brutal hiring practices have created an apex class of adversarial candidate
Cover photo by Peter on Unsplash

Context: This is a response to a LinkedIn post about the very real challenge of detecting imposters in hiring pipelines.

I've encountered a dozen variants of this story in the past months working on provenance and reputation tooling. The flip side, and I think this is key:

The real people who needed a job got pushed aside by the impersonator.

And that is... inevitable. Because the impersonator's job is to defeat the interviewer. The brutally adversarial nature of hiring has created an apex class of adversarial candidate.

Their expertise is in navigating the complex, demanding, and increasingly arcane process of surviving the hiring funnel. Add in a bit of the "we only hire the best" gatekeeping culture, and this is a perfect storm: a system optimized to favor adversarial actors over real people.

This is NOT an indictment of OP's process - which sounds very diligent - but a systems problem emerging across the industry. The OP's conclusions here are spot-on: real human relationships matter.

I'd go even further. Startup/rapid-scale culture treats people as fungible cogs in a growth machine. Whatever its trappings, the overarching frame tends to be extractive. Even "culture fit" usually boils down to "how do we mitigate the chance they'll immediately burn out (or, for managers, burn people out)".

Shifting this dynamic will require real relationships - and that means rehumanizing the cogs. It's going to require a return to cooperative processes and positive sum outcomes - not just for "the business", but for each of the humans that the business touches. Even the ones who don't end up joining the team this time around.

Maybe that's not such a bad thing.

Original post on LinkedIn