Minimizing Candidate Fraud in Hiring with Internal Partnerships
About this Episode
In this episode of Offer Accepted, Ari Garcia, Head of Recruiting Operations at Quora, breaks down how her team is tackling the rise of candidate fraud. With nearly six years at Quora in roles spanning coordination, sourcing, and full-cycle recruiting, Ari now leads RecOps for a fully remote, global company.\
She shares how recruiting partnered with leadership, security, and external vendors to create an adaptable fraud detection framework, while preparing interviewers to maintain a professional candidate experience. Ari explains why recruiters should not try to address fraud in isolation and how cross-functional partnerships create stronger, more sustainable processes.
Topics
This Episode's Guest
Ari Garcia
Global Recruiting Operations Lead @ Quora
Ari Garcia leads Recruiting Operations at Quora, where she has built systems to support fully remote, global hiring. With experience across recruiting coordination, sourcing, and full-cycle recruiting, she now focuses on creating processes that balance security with humanity, protecting both company integrity and candidate trust.
Takeaway 1
Get exec buy-in to make candidate fraud a company priority 📢
Ari’s team secured leadership support by showing how fraud directly threatened not only the talent team’s ability to do their role effectively, but also the company’s ability to achieve important business goals.
Why It Matters:
Hiring a fraudulent candidate can be just as costly as a bad hire, and in many cases, even more damaging. Executive alignment turns fraud prevention into a shared business priority. And if there is anything we know about what gets done, it is what has scaffolding for accountability surrounding it.
Quick Tips
- Tie fraud prevention directly to business objectives. Don’t just talk about fraudulent resumes. Map how they slow time-to-fill, derail hiring managers, and risk company OKRs. Showing that fraud jeopardizes business outcomes makes executives pay attention.
- Quantify the wasted effort. Track how many recruiter hours are spent reviewing or screening fraudulent candidates. Present that lost capacity as missed opportunities to advance real candidates.
- Position fraud alongside existing security priorities. Executives already invest to protect intellectual property and financial data. Frame fraud prevention as protecting another core asset: the integrity of the hiring process.
Takeaway 2
Partner with security to create adaptable fraud detection 🔐
Recruiters are not typically security experts, and that is okay. Ari emphasized that fraud detection is not something recruiting can or should try to solve alone. By teaming up with security and layering in tools, Quora created a system that adapts as fraud tactics evolve.
Why It Matters:
Fraud evolves quickly, and no single team has all the answers. Security brings expertise, tools provide scale, and recruiting ensures fairness. The real progress comes from working together to create a framework that is flexible and agile enough to adapt as fraud tactics change.
Quick Tips
- Define fraud “signals” together. Partner with security to determine what qualifies as a strong signal of fraud at your organization. Use recruiting’s knowledge of the hiring process and security’s expertise in risk to align on criteria that fit your company’s roles, regions, and hiring model.
- Let tools surface patterns, not make calls. Use detection software to flag anomalies, then work with security and recruiting partners to decide what warrants action.
- Revisit signals often. Set quarterly reviews with security to update fraud criteria and incorporate recruiter observations on new patterns.
Takeaway 3
Protect candidate experience while screening for fraud 🛡️
Fraud prevention cannot come at the expense of candidate experience. Ari’s team treats suspected fraud the same way they treat suspected cheating by an otherwise legitimate candidate. Interviewers stay focused on evaluation, keep the conversation positive, and share observations privately with recruiting after the call. Recruiting reviews the evidence, loops in security when needed, and determines the next step.
Why It Matters:
False positives can damage trust, spread quickly online, and harm your employer brand. Protecting candidate experience while investigating fraud keeps the process fair, preserves trust, and ensures suspicions are handled by the right people with the right context.
Quick Tips
- Train interviewers to stay objective. Have them document what they observe and stick to the interview rubric, rather than improvising confrontation in real time.
- Escalate through recruiting for review. All suspicions should go to recruiters, who can evaluate patterns across stages and involve security if needed.
- Keep communications respectful. Regardless of suspicion, every candidate should leave the process with a professional and positive impression.
What Hiring Excellence Means to Ari
For Ari, Hiring Excellence means building an efficient, end-to-end process that serves every stakeholder: recruiters, hiring managers, interviewers, leadership, candidates, and new hire teams. It is a balance between delivering a great candidate experience and protecting internal resources. Recruiting does not stop when the offer is signed, since the impact of a hire carries through a new hire’s tenure.
Ari's Recruiting Hot Take 🔥
It is okay to close a role and reset. The wrong hire creates too many downstream effects to justify pushing forward without alignment. If a role has been open too long, shows high candidate drop off, or feels like a moving target, the smarter move is to pause, re-evaluate, and get back on the same page.
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
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