Your applicant pool is not a source anymore; it is a set of claims.
The résumé used to be evidence
For decades, an application was weak evidence, but evidence: producing a plausible résumé cost effort, and the document was usually anchored to a real person with a real history.
Those economics have inverted. A polished application can now be produced in an afternoon — by a model writing fluent accounts of work the applicant may never have done, by a broker assembling submissions at volume, or by an operator working under a borrowed name.
The inbound pool for a senior engineering posting is no longer a sample of the market. In our search work this year, an estimated 70% of online applicants for engineering roles were fake or misrepresented. That figure is our field estimate from live searches in 2026 — not a published study, and we present it as nothing more. But it is the reason this firm stopped treating inbound applications as a source at all.
Get the full paper
The complete paper — the rest of the argument, the working detail, and the record — as a PDF.
Hiring for a role like the ones in this paper?
Start with the question we open every search with: if we're successful a year from now, what are we talking about that really worked out well — with the candidate we place?