LinkedIn is the most popular source of hiring and all recruiters are using it for hiring purposes. According to LinkedIn, its platform has over 875 million members in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide. Out of these, over 57 million businesses are using the platform to improve their businesses and many recruiters are using LinkedIn for hiring.

And, most candidates are creating LinkedIn profiles to get noticed by recruiters. But, all the profiles are created by the candidates themselves, and they can edit the profiles anytime according to the job requirement.

But, are you sure that those profiles are authentic?

Even though LinkedIn is a great platform to hire talent, the truth is that you don’t see the whole person as it is. Candidates make profiles on their own, and they show you what they want you to see. And candidates can edit the profile anytime and can change the way the job requires.

There are many ways by which a candidate can fake their profile. A candidate can fake their:

Job Skills: Nowadays, candidates faking their skills to get a job is trending. But with social media platforms like LinkedIn, it has become easier for candidates to make their profile look original according to the job needs.

“Most people have mentioned skills on LinkedIn which are not true”

A survey says that 1,252 respondents were posed the following question: “What is the biggest lie on your LinkedIn profile?” 55% of people said that “skills” is the biggest lie on their LinkedIn profiles.

And such candidates are more likely to continue faking their skills during their employment.

And if somehow, they get hired, it can hurt any business in many ways. A candidate with fake skills will never be able to perform the job completely. Also, they will never bring the expected results. Such candidates can cause you a loss of revenue and unnecessary frustration.

In addition to that, hiring a candidate with false skills can make you overlook or reject the truly deserving candidate.

Work Experience: LinkedIn has made it easy for the candidate to mention false work experience and no matter what, just by looking at the LinkedIn profile you can not tell if the experience is fake or real.

Even though there can be many reasons why candidates do that, no matter the reason it is illegal. And hiring a candidate who commits such an offense can be highly dangerous to your organization. Such candidates are most likely to fake their experience throughout their careers. And it can affect your organization in many ways, as they will never be able to help any junior or any other team member. Also, due to a lack of experience, they might not be able to handle critical situations, which can put your organization at a great loss.

Using Fake Identity: When we talk to someone over LinkedIn, we consciously think that we are talking to the exact person who we see on the profile. But little did we know, LinkedIn has made it quite easy for candidates to fake their original identity, and it has become the biggest problem, especially for the companies that conduct telephonic interviews.

“You might have heard that LinkedIn is the new resume, but it is not”

Sometimes, recruiters can blindly trust the person they're talking to on LinkedIn. There is a high chance that the person you are interviewing will not be the person who joins your company. 

Does LinkedIn care?

A study says that when 1,252 respondents were asked to answer the following question: “How accurately does your LinkedIn profile portray your work experience?” 34% of respondents said that they lie to some degree on their LinkedIn profiles."

But how much does LinkedIn care? Can LinkedIn ever control this?

Even though LinkedIn is a professional platform that was created to connect people, nowadays, it’s nothing more than a deceptive platform that candidates are using to get jobs by deceiving recruiters. And these numbers are increasing day by day.

Also, with the rise in AI, candidates are creating fake profiles by using AI generators to generate fake profiles; the irony is that these profiles appear extremely realistic, and it is hard for recruiters to identify between the fake and the real ones.

An investigation done by the Stanford Internet Observatory, says that more than 1,000 LinkedIn profiles with display pictures, which appears to be quite realistic, are generated by AI. Not that, these AI-generated profiles are capable of sending messages and responding to recruiters as if they are real people.

The future of technology is exciting, but with that challenges will keep on increasing too. Nowadays, it’s difficult for LinkedIn to identify people with fake profiles, and remove them. Even if they remove some, twice of that will be generated again, and such challenges make it tough for recruiters to trust a candidate’s LinkedIn profile. Hence, neither skills nor experience can be trusted only by looking at someone’s LinkedIn profile.

Is there any reliable solution for background checks?

Every business wants to onboard the right talent who can help them grow by using their skills. But hiring skilled candidates can be a challenging process that includes background verification checks.

We, at EmployeePast, help recruiters hire the right talent by proving instant, reliable, and FREE verification background check services. Try it now.