Minimizing Candidate Fraud in Hiring with Internal Partnerships with Ari Garcia, Quora

Candidate fraud isn’t just a recruiting problem. It’s a company-wide risk, too.

Ari Garcia, Global Recruiting Operations Lead at Quora, joins Shannon to break down how hiring teams can partner with security, leadership, and with tools like Ashby to address fraud without compromising the candidate experience.

With nearly six years at Quora, Ari brings a systems-focused lens to solving cross-functional challenges inside a fully remote, global organization. She shares how her team built alignment across departments, trained interviewers to stay focused on signal over suspicion, and developed criteria for identifying fraud, which keeps the process fair and efficient.

The conversation also explores the weight of false positives, the risks of moving too fast, and why fraud detection can't sit with recruiting alone.

Key takeaways:

1. Candidate fraud is a business issue: Hiring one wrong person can jeopardize trust and security.
2. Partnerships make the process: Aligning with security and leadership ensures stronger prevention.
3. Candidate experience still comes first: Interviews must stay human even when suspicion is present.
4. RecOps drives clarity: Building systems helps teams act with confidence, not guesswork.

Timestamps: 

(00:00) Introduction

(00:14) Meet Ari Garcia

(03:06) Why candidate fraud is rising across remote companies

(05:18) How to build cross-functional buy-in on fraud

(07:19) Using tools like Ashby to flag fraud signals

(10:46) Protecting candidate experience while preventing false positives

(15:35) What Ari would do differently starting from scratch

(18:14) Evolving fraud detection with RecOps and security partnerships

(22:50) Why hiring fraud hurts business goals and trust

(24:14) Final advice for making fraud prevention a priority

Transcript

Ari Garcia (00:00):

If we ever do hire someone fraudulent, I think you can come up with an action plan together. And recruiters are recruiters for a reason, we're not security experts.

It's okay to lean on other teams and build out those partnerships and work with them.

Shannon Ogborn (00:13):

Welcome to Offer Accepted, the podcast that elevates your recruiting game. I'm your host Shannon Ogborn. Join us for conversations with talent leaders, executives, and more to uncover the secrets to building and leading successful talent acquisition teams. Gain valuable insights and actionable advice from analyzing cutting-edge metrics to confidently claiming your seat at the table. Let's get started. Hello and welcome to another episode of Offer Accepted. I'm Shannon Ogborn, your host and this episode is brought to you by Ashby, the all-in-one recruiting platform, empowering ambitious teams from seed to IPO and beyond. I am stoked to be here today with Ari Garcia. She has been at Quora for nearly six years. She started as a recruiting coordinator and grew into her current role, which is leading the RecOps function at Quora, which is a fully remote and global company. Love to see it. Along the way, she's worn many hats and recruiting from sourcing to full lifecycle recruiting and she always has this goal of empowering recruiters to do their best work as effectively as possible, which is huge in today's world. Her passion really lies in creating systems and strategies that make the recruiting process seamless and impactful. So I'm super excited to have her here today and get to our topic of candidate fraud. Thank you, Ari, for joining us.

Ari Garcia (01:31):

Yeah, thank you so much for having me. We've been using Ashby for a few years and we're just really excited to chat today. So yeah, I'm excited. Thank you.

Shannon Ogborn (01:40):

Amazing. Well, I sort of tease it a little bit. We are going to be talking about candidate fraud today and just want to give a little bit of context to the listeners. We are not today going to be getting into the specifics of what identifiers Quora uses for candidate fraud or even maybe some certain percentages that you've seen in the historically with candidate fraud. The reason for that is we really want to protect the integrity of fraud detection systems. People who are frauding and scamming are getting smarter and smarter and if we put certain amounts of information out there, they might be able to use that to become better and that's absolutely not what we want. So we won't get into some of that. So maybe that might cause some frustration to the listeners and I totally get it, but Ari is very open to you all DMing her, assigned to her DMs on LinkedIn and chat more about those specifics. But otherwise we're just going to keep it sort of programmatic of how they've decreased their candidate fraud. So I would love to jump into first why candidate fraud detection matters and why is it such a big priority for Quora in 2025 in particular, and of course beyond.

Ari Garcia (03:06):

Yeah, definitely. I think I've been hearing this from so many people in my network that in the last few months, especially in the last couple months I want to say it's just becoming an ever increasing issue. So for us specifically, we're a fully remote company. I think fully remote companies definitely have to keep a better eye out. There's no kind of physical stop before hiring anyone, but I think in general, just being able to save time, save the integrity of your company and the security of your company, I think this is a huge issue all around. I also think that interviewing takes time for the whole team and we try to protect that as best we can at Quora and I'm sure other companies as well. So whatever we can do to protect interviewer time and save their time for the real candidates. I think it also is just important to understand how you can partner with other teams. Recruiting always touches every single department and I think this is just another dimension of how we're touching other departments is how we can prevent fraud from happening.

Shannon Ogborn (04:09):

Absolutely, and like you said, the increase of fraudulent candidates is costing, especially recruiting teams, a lot of time. It's less common I feel like for it to bleed into the interviewer's time, but guess what? Recruiters are interviewers and recruiters are doing recruiting screens and teams are already so lean as of late. That's what I've been hearing a lot from our customers in the community and so anything that can give talent teams time back I think is absolutely hugely important. And one of the biggest things that you just touched on was about the partnership piece and recruiting is bridging the gap between all of these different directions. I know that Quora has worked really hard on building the right partnerships to address candidate fraud, so I'd love to hear more about who you're partnering with and how you've managed those conversations to get the whole team into the right place to detect candidate fraud more easily.

Ari Garcia (05:18):

Definitely, yeah, I mean one of the obvious partnerships I'll say is leadership, getting them on board with why this is a problem, especially if you have a recruiting team where they're held to metrics, time to fill or time to hire, candidate experience, whatever it might be, having your time wasted on sifting through hundreds of applications and then some of them might be fraudulent or even hopping on recruiter screen calls, like you said, recruiters are interviewers just the same. So how does that bleed into overall team goals that lead into overall company goals? So I would say leadership is kind of an easy one to partner with quickly of we want to hit our goals as a team, we want to help other teams hit goals by hiring for them and they can continue whatever they're working on. So that was a big one for us is to get leadership on board of the recruiting aspect of it, of why we want to improve our processes.

(06:09):

Another huge one for us, which has been a huge win is partnering with security. Like I said before, recruiting touches every department and in a way security does too. So this is kind of a new angle, a new level for them to be focusing on as well. And it's a mutual thing that we're both working towards is making sure we're not wasting time and we're not letting anyone fraudulent get even close in the hiring process. So being able to team up with security and share why this is really important and why this should be a company-wide initiative should be number one priority. We feel really lucky to have aligned on our end with that and I think it's really important to be able to align with security teams on why this is important.

Shannon Ogborn (06:53):

Absolutely. And then there's the internal piece and then there's also the external piece partners tools. I think we all know that probably the best way to look at things is you try to solve the fundamental problem or you think about what the fundamental problem is and then you layer on tools. But tell me about that collaboration with trusted external partners as well.

Ari Garcia (07:19):

Definitely. I think that's a huge part of it. Like you said, a lot of teams are lean right now. I think that's a big wave happening of how can we work smarter, not harder, but with more lean teams and maybe utilizing tools a little bit more instead of filling more seats. So one has been the Ashby fraudulent feature, the fraudulent signals. It's very, very helpful for us and it's something we work on with our security team. Our security team has been pretty impressed with the feature as well. We were able to get early access to it to help shape it a little bit, get feedback, and that's another thing as a side note that we love about Ashby is partnering on upcoming features. And it's great to give feedback and hear that it's similar feedback other early adopters have also been mentioning too. So it's really great to hear that.

(08:10):

I think being able to use a tool is huge and fraud detection is going to look different for every single organization and I really appreciate that about Ashby. The way that they're putting the feature together is not to be a decision maker, but to give you all the data that you need to make an informed decision for your org and what your org might detect as fraudulent. So we really appreciate that. We really like that it's worked really well for us and the way that we are using the tool is working with our security team to understand for us what feels like a strong signal, what doesn't, and putting some criteria together for ourselves based on the tool. Again, at the end of the day, it is a tool and a tool is not going to be an end all be all, but I would say this one seems pretty strong in helping us to put together some more I would say informed educated decisions, whereas beforehand without it, we were really trying to guess of this looks a little off, that looks a little off, combine it together, maybe this might not be a real person, but now we feel a lot more confident in making those calls because you have to be really careful, you want to make sure that you are giving every candidate a fair chance.

Shannon Ogborn (09:23):

Absolutely. And we'll get to that candidate experience part of fraud here in a second, but first I'll say security people are not so easy to impress, so that's really great. But I think this goes fundamentally back to what we were just talking about, which is you have to really think and decide what it is. You as a company are saying this is the signals that we are looking for because this is what we're seeing for our roles or our team, especially as a global remote company and then you input it into something else, but that part of the human still making the decision and not necessarily counting people out or in based on technology or tool alone. I mean there's bias kind of everywhere you look as a human and technology. And so I think having that overlap is amazing to see a full picture to make that choice because that candidate experience part is super important and I know that you all have worked really hard to protect the candidate experience in this. I would love to hear more on that and specifically around thinking about how you prepare interviewers to protect the candidate experience while trying to maintain that gray area of, I don't know, not hiring a fraudulent candidate, which is pretty important.

Ari Garcia (10:46):

And that is a huge, huge initiative for us. Candidate experience is really top of mind for us. We have every single interviewer go through training before they even go take an interview with a candidate. So it's really important to us. We have a huge philosophy around it. Interviewing should always be a positive experience no matter what is happening, what's going on, what the outcome might be. People taking interviews, they sometimes are nervous and it could be a huge life change to switch jobs. So we really try to make sure we prep everyone on that and it's always a two-way street of course. So it's really important to us. Candidate experience has always been really important to us in that preparing interviews, especially for this new fraudulent side that we are seeing a little bit more and more. Of course as a team, we're trying to take the brunt of it as much as we can before a candidate or fraudulent, potentially fraudulent candidate would even get to anyone else.

(11:41):

But for us, the way that we want to prepare them is almost viewing this as an extension of what we ask them to look for. If a candidate might be cheating, this is a little bit different, but similar cues of still make sure it's a positive experience. If there's anything that you're suspecting, make sure to take note of it. We also give a lot of training on writing feedback and what to note, what not to note, how to note it, but we really try to have the recruiting team take the brunt of it. So having the interviewers still create a positive experience and then coming to the recruiter afterward to share what's going on. I think the recruiters are the subject matter experts with candidate experience cheating versus not cheating, and now a new one is fraudulent candidates. So we really want to make sure that the interviewers stay as objective as possible and if they suspect anything, especially now with potentially suspicious fraudulent activity, we ask them to share that with us. So at the end of the day, recruiting is still really heavily involved even if they're not in the actual interview. So that's how we try to prepare our interviewers is making sure that they still keep candidate experience top of mind, but note everything down that's happening.

Shannon Ogborn (12:54):

A hundred percent because my personal nightmare as a recruiter, whether it would be me talking to somebody or an interviewer talking to someone is them accusing them in the moment of even cheating or fraud. It's like, but what if it's not? You cannot have false positives in that scenario and then start going down a rabbit hole and trying to figure it out as the interviewer. I think it's so much more reasonable for them to stay focused on the evaluation piece and then you all are able to step in if they think something is off and look into it further because if they're not coached in that way, I mean I'm kind of a nosy person, I'd be like, I want to know if this candidate's cheating or fraud. And so if I wasn't specifically coached, I might get fixated on uncovering it and it's kind of satisfying if you do and you're like, I got it, I caught it. But it's a distraction to evaluation. So if it's the case that the candidate's not a fraudulent candidate, then now they've just had a terrible experience and it really impacts your brand anytime someone has a negative experience. We know that social is really accessible these days and so I think that's definitely a consideration.

Ari Garcia (14:09):

Definitely. And I think a lot of people are being burned right now with recruiting and interviewing and not hearing back, getting ghosted to whatever the situation might be and just thinking of people as humans in general. We definitely don't want to contribute to that as much as we can. So I think for us, of course, a forefront of it is going to be we don't want to hurt the brand, but also everyone's human. We want to make sure that we're respecting their time and they respect our time and we just don't want to add to that. I know it's been a little bit rough the last few years in terms of finding a job, especially in certain industries. I think we like to take a really human approach to it too, and I completely agree with what you said. I mean if it's a false positive, that's the worst experience ever.

Shannon Ogborn (14:49):

I'm sure it's going to come up, especially as technology gets better and the ability to pretend to be someone else gets easier. And so I think getting ahead of it is super important. But I am curious on this sort of evolution standpoint. Obviously what's happening today might not be happening tomorrow, but I would love to think a little bit about if you were starting the process of reducing candidate fraud today and you hadn't done all this work yet, what would that look like and what actions would you take? What are your biggest learnings of things you might think about or do differently, especially when it comes to working with the internal teams and trying to position this as a priority for the whole company?

Ari Garcia (15:35):

If I were kind of at the beginning again, I think I would want to know that you're not alone. It's okay to not know. Utilize your team, utilize other folks. It's okay to ask just because you are a recruiter and you're a subject matter expert in resume reviewing your role really well. This is something that's new and it's okay not to know, so it's okay to ask and it's better to ask than to make a judgment call that you're not confident in, especially with these false positives being a thing. That would be my suggestion. My recommendation would be just ask, work with your team, bounce ideas off each other, bounce applications off each other. It's okay to not know, and it's okay to take the time to be trained on something new, not just identifying resumes that look good in however many seconds that recruiters look at resumes, but this is something that will take time to learn and that's okay, and it's okay if you have to slow down a little bit. I think there's a lot of speed that goes into recruiting, so it's okay to slow down and do some gut checks with your team and other folks.

Shannon Ogborn (16:38):

I love that advice because I think especially as teams are operating super lean right now, they feel under immense amounts of pressure. Even our talent trends reports show wild upticks in applications. Some of them now are a lot of fraudulent candidates. So the job market as it is today, hopefully won't last forever, and there'll be a lot of people who have found a role and maybe you'll have less applications from that economic perspective. Then there's the layer of fraudulent candidates. So I think talent teams are just experiencing so much right now and they have less resources, and then it's like, oh my gosh, how do I review all these candidates? And now I don't want to hire a fraudulent candidate, but I want everyone to have a good experience like everyone's human except maybe the fraudulent candidates, maybe they're not, and you're like, ah, yeah, it's a lot.

Ari Garcia (17:34):

It's a lot. Yes, we're at the forefront of it. We are feeling it. It's definitely a lot.

Shannon Ogborn (17:39):

Yeah. How do you think about evolving this over time then? You alluded to this a little bit earlier, but you have this foundation set right now. How does that look as you move forward? What changes, I guess, what programmatically are you thinking about, especially from a ops perspective, right? That's very efficiency, programmatic base. What are you thinking about that helps your team evolve this over time and continuous improvement instead of just staying stuck in where you're at now because things will change and things will evolve?

Ari Garcia (18:14):

Yes, yes. I'm having this conversation a lot with our security team right now. I think there are some things where the change, there's always going to be change, but some change is a little bit slower and a little bit easier to stay ahead of. I think with fraudulent candidates, there's going to be a lot of unknowns all the time, and this is going to be an ever-changing process. So I've had that conversation with our security team of if these are parameters, if this is criteria we're looking at, if someone's fraudulent, that's not going to last forever. So how do we continue this partnership? It's not going to be a set and forget it situation for here. So I think it's important to have that mutual understanding with your security team, your recruiting team, whoever you're partnering with. Even having that little pep talk with yourself of this is going to continue changing and that's okay.

(19:02):

You might understand it now and you might understand how to find those fraudulent applications or candidates or resumes now, but that's going to look different two days from now, two months from now, hopefully more so two months from now or a year from now, but it's going to change. So I think it's important to build those partnerships with other teams in your organization if you're able to have that mutual understanding of the now is not going to always look like what it looks like now and just keep evolving it and keep working together and making sure that this stays a priority. I think once you kind of use that lens of this is going to become a company security issue, if we ever do hire someone fraudulent, especially for more vulnerable companies that are super remote, completely remote, I think you can come up with an action plan together. And recruiters are recruiters for a reason. We're not security experts. It's okay to lean on other teams and build out those partnerships and work with them.

Shannon Ogborn (20:00):

Absolutely. Maybe this is a follow-up question on something we talked about way earlier, but what are the steps to get that fundamental buy-in that this is a priority for every single person at the company. If you were a talent team today, they listen to this and they're like, I got to get my whole team bought in on this. What steps should they take to do that?

Ari Garcia (20:24):

Yeah, that's a really great question. The steps might look a little bit different depending on the organization, but I think a great first step is what are the company goals that we have? What are some security measures that we already have in place and why do we have them in place? And then seeing how hiring someone fraudulent might mess with any of those things. And I think building a case, and that's going to look different for each company, but these are goals that we have and this is why we can't share this or that there are already security measures in place to make sure that company data stays private, financial data stays, private code base stays private, so what are the implications of hiring a fraudulent candidate? And I would put those together and then bring that to the team. And then if you are seeing an uptick of fraudulent applications or you're not sure, or you're getting feedback from other recruiters or even interviewers that this candidate might seem fake, I would bring those stats as well. I think data speaks for itself sometimes and just share how much time is being put into fraudulent candidates and how much time might be put into trying to reverse that. I think it would be very, very hard to reverse hiring a fraudulent candidate versus putting some stops up at the beginning of the process. So that's what I would say is just do some research into your own company and what's important and why, and then how fighting against fraudulent candidates fits into all of that.

Shannon Ogborn (21:52):

I always love people who can take it from the business perspective, like yes, it's something that's important to us, it's going to save us time, but also we have OKRs that are based on what OKRs, KPIs, whatever a company uses that are based on filling these roles with the quality of candidate that we need. It's almost like the position of similar to if you make just a bad hire, a bad match for the role, someone who's not performing and you have to terminate someone for whatever reason, mismatch performance related, that impacts the business, but so does hiring a fraudulent candidate because they're also not going to provide you what you need for the role, and that could significantly hinder you to being successful and hitting your company wide goals, revenue goals, everything like that, because the person can't actually do the job.

Ari Garcia (22:50):

Yeah, a hundred percent. Exactly. That's exactly it. I agree. I think making the wrong hire, costing more dollars, time, all of that than making the right hire or just not making the hire.

Shannon Ogborn (23:03):

It's costly no matter the reason. So I think that's a good vantage point for talent teams to bring. It's is it costly for us to make a bad hire in terms of a mismatch? Yes. Is it costly for us to hire a fraudulent candidate? I mean, probably more yes, because you're not getting anything out of it, and they might be trying to get information, and then there's a lot of companies out there that have a lot of I or a lot of intellectual property. I mean, just so many things could go sideways that I would like to believe that executive teams, once you brought this to 'em, would be like, yes, we really, really need to focus on this.

Ari Garcia (23:38):

Yeah, I would be very surprised to hear if executive teams have trouble being bought in, and I would probably want to look deeper into that, into why and what's going on there. There's probably valid reasons for every decision and any thought, so I'd probably dig into the why there and understand that a little bit better.

Shannon Ogborn (23:59):

I love that. That's such a wreck ops, like curious mind perspective, which is awesome. Well, any last thoughts on candidate fraud for executives, for security teams, for recruiters, for anybody?

Ari Garcia (24:14):

I would say you're not alone, so don't think you are. Lean on your teams, utilize your teams, lean on your network, and there are great arguments for why this should be a company priority, so I would find those for your company and push for it and get the other teams bought in. I think you guys are going to be stronger if you work together. You have the recruiting expertise, your leadership has the leadership expertise, your security team has, your security team expertise. Just bring all the heads together and move forward from there and find what works best for your team. That would be my advice. I think this is something that recruiting alone will be very hard to do, so work with your teams that you have.

Shannon Ogborn (24:52):

Love it. Love it. Amazing. Well, if you all are curious to hear about Ari's take on hiring excellence, her recruiting hot take, and one thing she could tell her early career self, that will be on our extended version on YouTube and also on YouTube Shorts. So go check that out. Subscribe to our LinkedIn newsletter. There'll be in there as well. But we are coming up on our time, so where should people go to learn more about you and your work, Ari?

Ari Garcia (25:22):

Yeah, definitely. They can go to my LinkedIn, they can go to Quora, they can see what jobs we have. People can reach out to me anytime on LinkedIn as well. I'm happy to meet up with anyone, chat with anyone, hop on a meeting, whatever works. I'm always happy to chat through fraudulent candidates, tooling, recruiting in general, people team. I'm always happy to chat and just bounce ideas off each other. I think RecOps is a little bit of a growing field, so happy to meet anyone in RecOps or outside of it.

Shannon Ogborn (25:54):

I love this community. For that reason, people are so willing to jump in and help. Part of the mission of this podcast is to sort of unlock this black box of things that teams are really successful in. Not every team is successful in everything, and not every team has a focus on everything. And so when we do these episodes and people bring their individual brilliance of what their team's doing really well, it's so great because people can learn and then apply what applies to their organization because every organization is super different. Well, Ari, cannot thank you enough for joining us on Offer Accepted. Candidate fraud is such a huge conversation right now, and I am excited for people to hear more about Quora and how you're partnering with your exec and security teams and interviewing teams and Ashby, of course, to solve this. So really appreciate you spending some time to us today.

Ari Garcia (26:45):

Yeah, thank you so much for having me. This was really exciting and I'm happy to continue chatting about this offline and online.

Shannon Ogborn (26:52):

Amazing. This episode was brought to you by Ashby. What an ATS should be: a scalable all-in-one tool that combines powerful analytics with your ATS, scheduling, sourcing, and CRM. To never miss an episode, subscribe to our newsletter at www.ashbyhq.com/podcast. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.