Fake AI job candidates are forcing a hiring rethink at Arena, its CEO says

Arena's CEO, Anastasios Angelopoulos, has announced that the company is contemplating in-person onboarding procedures to address the issue of fake AI job applicants. In a recent podcast interview, Angelopoulos revealed that his AI-model evaluation firm had interviewed candidates who turned out to be AI-generated rather than real individuals.

These artificial candidates managed to pass the company's technical interviews, only to disappear during the hiring stage, causing disappointment and loss for Arena. The CEO described these applicants as "fake people applying to companies" and mentioned that his engineers had interacted with them, believing them to be genuine. Although Angelopoulos did not disclose how Arena identified the AI-generated candidates, he suggested that the source behind these fraudulent applications could be corporate espionage, cyberattacks, or attempts to gain unauthorized access to company data and code.

Given the increasing prevalence of such incidents, Arena is now considering requiring new hires to undergo onboarding in person, emphasizing that if someone wants a laptop, they must come to the office and undergo a handshake verification to confirm their authenticity. This issue of fake AI job candidates is not unique to Arena, as the FBI has warned about North Korean IT workers using AI and face-swapping technology in video interviews to secure remote roles at US companies, subsequently stealing sensitive data.

In response, several tech companies, such as Coinbase and Amazon, have taken measures to block bogus job applications, either by requiring in-person orientations or employing AI to identify and filter out suspected fraudulent applicants. According to Gartner's survey of 3,000 job candidates in the second quarter of 2025, 6% admitted to participating in interview fraud, and the research firm expects one in four candidate profiles worldwide to be fake by 2028.