Feb 23, 2026 9 min read

🥝 One Great Leader, Dying SDLC, Coherent Actions, Debts, Skip Levels, Dev Environments, Recovery, Juggling: TMW #470

The fake job applicants are coming! Learn how to spot them early

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Thank you to QA.tech for sponsoring this week's TMW - end-to-end QA with AI testing tool for a modern dev workflow.

Hello, hello, hello, welcome to the week!

The AI Wore A Suit

The most active Slack thread this week was sparked by members comparing notes on a wave of fraudulent job candidates using AI tools, deepfake video filters, and fabricated identities - many posing as engineers based in Eastern Europe. The discussion ranged from genuinely alarming links to North Korean remote worker infiltration schemes, to practical detection tips, to some very funny interview anecdotes (fish drawings, "loading faces," and a fridge ordering caviar...). It closed with a detailed red-flag checklist that deserves a wider audience - and an open question about whether piling on more screening processes is actually the right response, or whether trusted referral networks are the smarter long game.

Deepfake candidates are a real and growing problem: bare-minimum LinkedIn profiles, suspiciously perfect answers, and reluctance to use a virtual whiteboard are the most common tells.
Early, cheap background checks beat late, expensive interview time: most ID validation services only charge for completed checks, making them a low-risk first filter.
The community was split on the solution: more detection process vs. fewer, higher-trust hiring channels. What do you think?

Imagine your next hire turns out to have been AI-assisted through every stage of your screening process - what's the single step that would have caught them?

That's it, let's look at some links....

Andy @ CTO Craft

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Reads of the Week

Leadership, Strategy & Business

Culture, People & Teams

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