Hiring goes high-tech as AI cheating surges

Bengaluru: The prevalence of cheating during hiring assessments and interviews is on the rise as job applicants increasingly employ artificial intelligence (AI) to manipulate the recruitment process, forcing employers to adopt new strategies to combat the malpractice. A report by HirePro, a recruitment automation and talent assessment platform, reveals that 45% of assessments were flagged for cheating in FY26, a sharp increase from 32.4% in FY22.

Nearly half of all assessments now carry an integrity risk. AI-assisted cheating has emerged as the fastest-growing form of malpractice, up by 50% year-on-year in FY26, as candidates use AI prompts to generate responses in real time during interviews and assessments. S Pasupathi, HirePro's chief operating officer, notes that early-stage screening is the most compromised, weakening overall talent quality before interview filters are applied.

Companies have shifted from using assessments merely as a filtering tool during campus recruitment to integrating them as core selection criteria, leading to a technology arms race in detection, verification, and monitoring mechanisms. Traditional forms of external assistance and identity fraud are declining as technology-enabled methods gain traction, but device-based cheating has stabilized while video and screen manipulation have nearly doubled to 9% in FY26 from FY23, with deepfakes increasingly used to impersonate candidates during assessments.