Top tips for safer hiring in the deepfake era

HR teams must be aware of a range of cyber risks associated with taking on new team members, writes Louisa Vogelenzang.

If you’ve spent more than a minute or two working in HR, it’s likely you have a nightmare recruitment tale to share.

That’s because, in common with other human-centric practices, hiring is an imprecise science. Individuals who present well on paper or in an interview can turn out to be unqualified or ill-suited for the role for which they’ve applied, or a poor match with your organisation’s culture.

In a worst-case scenario, a nightmare hire can, accidentally or deliberately, inflict significant damage on your operations, damage that can be difficult and expensive to repair.

Good processes and practices can help you find and hire the right people for your vacant roles and integrate them smoothly into your operations.

High-tech hiring hazards

In today’s times, those processes and practices should include mitigation measures for a range of cyber-related risks.

Interviewee impersonation, for starters. For businesses that interview and hire workers remotely, determining whether candidates are bona fide applicants, not bad actors who are intent on infiltrating their systems and data, is becoming tougher and tougher.

Cyber security vendor KnowBe4 recently published a paper detailing its own experience of accidentally hiring a fake employee from North Korea, an individual whose attempts to access the laptop supplied to them in unusual ways soon set alarm bells ringing.

From disguising their IP addresses to using deepfakes to participate in online interviews, there’s a myriad of ways bad actors can harness the power of AI and digital technology to try to gain an “in”.

Stopping scammers in their tracks

Against this backdrop, HR professionals need to become the first line of defence, detectives who can spot the clues that indicate an aspiring employee isn’t who, or what, they appear to be.

Those clues include cameras that are repeatedly out of order during online interviews and videos in which an applicant’s fingers and face appear unnatural or distorted. The latter is an obvious deepfake tell, one which reflects the fact that AI technology is not yet able to flawlessly replicate the subtleties of human movement and expression.

Meanwhile, more rigorous reference checking – think completing police checks, requiring candidates to provide government-issued proof of ID and verifying it live on video, and switching from email contact with referees to phone or video calls – can help organisations distinguish genuine jobseekers from scammers seeking to deceive and disrupt.

Implementing a least-privilege policy

Limiting new employees’ capacity to access critical systems and data is another way to mitigate the risk of internally generated disruption and data breaches, whether intentional or deliberate.

You can do so by implementing a least privilege policy – a term used to describe the strategy and practice of giving users access only to the resources they need to do their jobs.

Collaborating with departmental managers and your organisation’s cyber security team will enable you to identify what those systems are, for every employee on the payroll, and to put stringent controls in place around their use from day one.

Getting newbies off to a safe start

If you’re diligent, you’ll have your cyber team play a part in the onboarding process, too. In today’s times, hackers and cyber criminals are relentless in their efforts to infiltrate organisations’ systems and data via malware attacks, phishing emails, and social engineering.

An alert workforce is your best form of defence. A cyber awareness training regimen will help ensure yours is aware of the risks and ready to raise the alarm when they spot something that looks suspicious.

The optimum time to deliver that training? On a new starter’s very first day. Advising them of what to report, and who to report it to, as part of the official onboarding process will lessen the likelihood of their tenure commencing with a serious cyber incident.

And regular refresher sessions throughout the year will remind them and their colleagues to remain vigilant all day, every day.

Keeping watch together

Finally, it pays to be alert in the weeks and months after new employees take up their duties. This is where your cyber team and hiring managers have a critical role to play, regularly checking in with new employees via video calls and your cyber team and using threat intelligence to identify and monitor potentially fraudulent or malicious activity. Working in partnership, you’ll stand a better chance of weeding out rogue operators before they’ve had the chance to damage or defraud.

Fortifying your hiring process in 2025

Bringing new people into an organisation has always carried an element of risk, and in the digital era, that risk has expanded and intensified. Being alert to the opportunities that technology has created for bad actors and taking steps to mitigate the threat will help ensure the integrity of your hiring process and further protect your organisation from cyber incidents now and into the future.

Louisa Vogelenzang is the senior director of cyber security at Dayforce.