Candidate Fraud Stops Here with Etan Bernstein

Is the resume dying — or is it just lying and on life support while AI agents pump out 11,000 fake-looking apps a minute. On this episode of The Chad & Cheese Podcast, Joel and Chad sit down with Etan Bernstein of the Velocity Network Foundation, an HR lifer who wants to stop the whack-a-mole and put a chip in the talent system the way banks killed mag-stripe fraud. Self-reported CVs, ghost jobs, North Korean bots, and vendors who get paid for the chaos all get roasted. Etan’s pitch: one open protocol, worker-owned credentials, and trust at the source instead of another detector. If you’re still screening slop with more slop, this one’s going to sting. Chapters 00:00 - Introduction to the industry's trust issues 02:23 - The shift from traditional resumes to AI-generated profiles 04:11 - The impact of AI on fraud and exaggeration in resumes 06:10 - The problem with fragmented HR data systems 08:33 - Building trust through verifiable data 10:48 - The economic impact of chaos in HR tech 15:36 - The flood of resumes and legal compliance challenges 19:38 - The vision of an open, shared protocol for HR data 21:27 - The role of LinkedIn and other platforms in verification 24:24 - The digital footprint and future of verification

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:25Speaker 02

  Now we return you to our regular scheduled program in progress.

• 1:29Speaker 03

  Hides your kids, lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Soash and Joel Cheeseman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up, boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast.

• 1:51Speaker 00

  Ah, yeah. It's the podcast your dog sitter warns you about. You may know us as the Chad and Cheese Podcast. I'm your co-host Joel Cheeseman. Joined as always, Chad Soash is riding shotgun as we welcome Eaton Bernstein to the show. Eaton is the co-founder of the Velocity Network Foundation. Eaton, welcome to HR's most dangerous podcast.

• 2:13Speaker 04

  Thanks. Great to be here.

• 2:14Speaker 00

  Good to have you. Good to have you. So a lot of our listeners, viewers, probably aren't familiar with you. Give us the elevator pitch on you, the person, and then we'll get into the business stuff.

• 2:23Speaker 04

  Perfect. So I'm an HR guy. Been an HR guy for 35 years. Love the profession. Spent many years in large organizations like Intel and Applied Materials, and then moved on to be a consultant, working with companies all around the world. And through that, really discovered how much friction and fraud there is in the talent acquisition world, which is what caused me to, a few years ago, to get some of my friends together and say, let's try to solve this really big hairy problem together. I live in Israel, but my work's really been global for my entire life. I have three marvelous children and a wonderful wife.

• 2:55Speaker 00

  Are the kids still around? Are they, are you an empty nester?

• 2:58Speaker 04

  Uh, no, close to an empty nester. Last, my 14-year-old baby is still around.

• 3:03Speaker 00

  Oh. Chad's got tips for the almost empty nesters. So if you need some side notes, just give him a call.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  Send him to the school and don't tell him where you move.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  So friction and fraud. I mean, my big hairy problem is Joel Cheeseman, but everybody else is. Friction and fraud. I mean, it's an AI dumpster fire out there, man.

• 3:26Speaker 00

  Oh, man.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  You've been floating through this industry for about 20, 25 years. You've seen the shift from paper to PDFs to LinkedIn, and now this absolute dumpster fire of 11,000 fake applications a minute. Did you hear that, kids? A minute that recruiters have to play around with, or they have to at least try to sift through, or try to figure out what's fraud, what's real. Is the resume finally dead? Is this what's going to kill the resume? We've been talking about this for years, Eaton. Please tell me, oh, God, this is what's going to kill the resume.

• 4:00Speaker 00

  Can we finally blame North Korea for the, for the resume? That would be a great story, wouldn't it?

• 4:05Speaker 04

  They are a player with this issue, yes. Well, I, I, I hope so, but I think it's going to be a longer process than that. And I don't think it's about the resume being dead or not. I think it's about changing the way we approach this. And what I mean by that is, you said, you know, in our generation, and yes, I'm old enough to remember, I started my first application, actually sending, even before faxes, I actually put a stamp on a letter, and then faxes, and then emails with attachments, and then a LinkedIn profile, right? And then PDF files, right? We've gone through, it's not that the industry is stagnant. The industry's gone through these generations, right?

• 4:38Speaker 01

  Get off my line, you no-good punk kids.

• 4:42Speaker 04

  But, you know, but through that process, what's, what's really interesting, we still have only self-reported data, right? What's the problem with the CV? It's whatever, it's a marketing document. You write whatever the fuck you want. Sorry for my language.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  No, have it.

• 4:55Speaker 04

  And, and that was fine, you know, when you had to invest in writing this revenue all over again in a cover letter. But now with AI, it's just become impossible. And that's what's really changed this. Self-reported data that had to be verified has always been around, and people exaggerating and lying and actually being fraudulent has always existed. But the AI challenge has really blown that all apart. I mean, everything's falling apart, right? In terms of our ability to deal with the slop and shit we're all getting through these processes. And something has to change.

• 5:25Speaker 00

  So who was it that said by 2028, one in four candidates will be, was that Robert Half that had the one in four by 2028? We obviously know it's a problem from the job seeker. Software's popping up, agents are popping up. Give us the other side of the ledger from your perspective. The employers who are playing a game of whack-a-mole, and they're going just as robotic and automated as the job seekers are. So talk about that side of the table a little bit.

• 5:49Speaker 04

  So I think it's, it's this, it's this real bad war to the bottom, right? It's a battle to, to who knows what horrible situation where individuals have learned that they have no choice, right? They're using agents not because they all think it's wonderful, but because they know that unless it's a numbers game, unless they're using agents to apply on their behalf more and more, they're, they're, they're no chance, right? And with the economy being what it is, and with young people have struggling so hard to find jobs anyway, I have nothing to lose by having an agent take my resume, adopt it to every job description, just send it out. Worst comes to worst, I'll say no, but I have nothing to lose. And that's what's causing a lot of this slop. When they say one to four candidates are, are fraudulent, I don't think that's even the big problem. The problem is good candidates, real good

• 6:33Speaker 04

  people who are finding no choice but to use tools to try to get their, their ability out there and present, represent themselves. And they don't really check whether an AI is changing some of the information in their resume, or exaggerating on their experience, or writing a degree that they don't have, because they just want the opportunity to get in front of an employer and, and, and represent themselves, right? So I can understand the candidates completely. On the other side, you have the employers. What are they going to do if they're getting 10x the number of resumes they got beforehand, and they all look perfect? What choice do they have but to try to use more and more automation and AI to try to shift through that? But that is creating, both sides are losing out of that to a degree that even some of the analysts are saying, maybe we need to go back to face-to-face

• 7:18Speaker 04

  and paper. Of course, we don't need to do that. But, but there is something fundamentally broken in where we're going right now on this path, which is where we believe that something needs to change.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. We try to paint this broad brush for a lot of organizations where they shouldn't go back to face-to-face interviews. In some cases, they do. I mean, there are some roles in some organizations that are smaller organizations that might have smaller departments, and that might actually fit very well, especially with their culture. And then you have high scaled organizations that there's no way in hell that a human or their human department's going to scale fast enough to be able to, to understand all of this. Now Joel, he talks about whack-a-mole a lot with regard to, literally, it's just what tech does, and you're literally just trying to fight the tech with the tech. But your whole thought process, instead of like blacklisting, it's more like whitelisting. It's around trust.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  And everybody loves the word trust, even though it's dying on the vine, for God's sakes. What does that actually mean in the network? How does velocity and how does this, this whole structure and concept work around trust? What does that even mean?

• 8:27Speaker 04

  So as I mentioned, right now, all we're relying on is self-reported information, right? You can write anything you want in your resume.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  It's bullshit, yes.

• 8:34Speaker 04

  And as a result of that, an employer recruiter needs to look at that, hope that most of it is true. And then throughout the sourcing process, the recruiting process, and so on, try to rule out who's lying, who's exaggerating, and so on, right? So you have to be checking those things. And what a lot of the staffing companies are doing now is try to identify fraud early on in the process. For example, by adding an IDV, an identity verification process early on, so that we rule out when it's a bot from North Korea, right? Or do some form of verification, whether the application happened within two seconds, probably a bot filled out the application. Or if someone is inconsistent between their resume and their LinkedIn profile, although AI does consistently

• 9:17Speaker 04

  great, that's a sign that things are not good. So everyone's looking for fraud signals. But AI is going to get so much better that you won't even be able to find those very quickly. So what we need to do is, instead of looking for fraud signals, we need to embed trust at the source. What does that look like? It actually means that I, as an individual, have verifiable information that I can trust from the beginning, when I present myself, not everything that'll be in my resume, but the fact that I am a human being, and that I'm a citizen and can work in this country, and that I have this education, that I've worked at these companies, that I may have passed these assessments, and so on, real facts that anchor my CV, so that the employer can rule out that at least these things are true. Then there's always the marketing and exaggeration and

• 10:02Speaker 04

  storytelling, which will continue to be important, but I don't have to start from scratch. A really good example of that, Chad, we were talking about that, is what the credit card industry has done. So for those of us who remember when we had credit cards with a magnetic strip on them, there was incredible amount of fraud in the credit card industry, right? Because it was very easy to pick up the credit card information and reuse it. And then the credit card companies got together and say, let's solve this with the chip that everyone recognizes on their credit card, right? That's a global standard that has basically limited, it builds trust into the process. There is no way to cheat with a credit card in a physical interaction. There's still web-based problems, but that's

• 10:43Speaker 04

  really solved fundamentally, built trust into the payment system. And that's what we're doing with the resume, basically.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Eden, when you talk about that, that was actually burning billions of dollars of their own cash from the banks, right? So the banks were losing money. In the case of HR tech, vendors actually profit off of all this chaos. There's more useless AI detectors and extra screening. We've got this Indeed creates their own, you know, easy apply, which then today loads resumes. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And you're allowed to have more than one resume. So, I mean, they're creating the chaos, and that is just more money in their pocket, because it makes it harder for them to actually find qualified

• 11:32Speaker 01

  people, even though they're saying, oh, we want you to find qualified people. So what is going to force this industry, much like the banking industry, to actually feel it in their pocket, so they make the change?

• 11:42Speaker 04

  So I think you're hearing it at every conference you're at, and with every forum you're meeting recruiters, the employers, the employers are suffering. They're saying, okay, it's great that we get 10,000 resumes, but we can't do anything with them, right? And so the pain is there. The pain of being able to hire high-quality people quickly and effectively and fairly is basically not working. And so we're hearing employers everywhere demanding a better system. We have to change this. Yes, there are forces to keep going in the direction we're going, but there are also forces to say enough is enough. This is not working for us. We want to do something different. And that's an environment where innovation comes out, where the incumbents may not, you know, they may have an interest in keeping the world the way it is, but there are enough people

• 12:26Speaker 04

  who have an interest in helping make it a better world.

• 12:28Speaker 00

  So your credit card example, although a good one, you know, there aren't a lot of credit card companies. There's a great amount of disparate systems in employment. We just talked about the job board, the ATS. How many ATSSs are there? How many job boards are there? There's just so many moving parts in that. Thoughts on that? And then also, what percent do you think of job seekers really are lying? And what percent are really just saying, hey, this is a new technology. I can be more efficient. I can apply to more places. They're not necessarily lying, but they are using automation to get into more companies and apply to more jobs. So curious about the disparate question. And then also, how many are really lying versus how many are just using the technology and being truthful?

• 13:11Speaker 04

  So I'll start with the latter question. I don't have statistics. I don't think anyone really, really knows. But I think a majority of people are just trying to get in, right? And they're using technology. And by the way, I think that a candidate that uses AI to apply is a good indication that they feel comfortable using AI. If I'm an employer...

• 13:30Speaker 00

  I think most employers want AI to be used to some degree.

• 13:33Speaker 04

  Exactly. I want to know that this candidate knows how to use an LLM to write a good resume, knows how to use a bot, or use an agent to apply for jobs. That's an indication that they live in the modern world, right? Those are skills that show that there's value. So I think most people who are using these tools are not, they're not bad players. I think that they're not sensitive enough to the fact that many of these tools exaggerate. The tool is built to match the person's resume to the job description. What is the tool promising? Watch the videos of any of the AI agents. They're all promising to pass the initial screening. What does the initial screening do? It compares the resume to the job description and sees whether there's a good match. So the AI tool is basically

• 14:15Speaker 04

  taking your resume and adopting, as much as it can possibly tweak it, to try to fit the job description. And individuals are not taking the personal responsibility to understand that in that, it's actually creating fraudulent resumes that are not representing them correctly. Many times, they don't even read them. Some of the AI tools, you can see the application for every time and make a decision about it. But most people are putting them on autopilot and just asking them to send out as many resumes as you can. They're not even making the effort to try to understand whether there's anything wrong there. And that's where I think most of the, yes, there are North Korean fraudulent, and there are bad players that are utilizing these technologies. I'll bet those are very few percentage. And the majority is good people, just trying to get jobs.

• 15:00Speaker 01

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• 15:21Speaker 01

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• 15:53Speaker 01

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• 17:06Speaker 00

  Is this starting to slow the hiring process? I mean, when Chatbox, for example, came out, it created such efficiency and speed. And people were talking about getting hired in hours versus weeks and being interviewed instantly. Is the reverse starting to happen? Are we creating so much complexity that it's slowing the process down?

• 17:26Speaker 04

  Absolutely, and creating confusion on even how to act. So I'll give you a good example. I just came back from a conference in Germany. In Germany, many of the public companies, banks, government, have to review every candidate who meets the job descriptions for good purposes, right? For purposes of ensuring that there's no, that the people of different ethnicities and genders and so on are not discriminated against. And historically, if you published a job for a bank, you'd get 70, 80 applications. 20 of them would pass the job requirements. So you'd have to bring 20 people in to interview them. That is something you can handle. Now they're getting 300 or 400 applications because agents are doing it.

• 18:07Speaker 04

  And 280 of them, or 350 of them are passing the job requirements. The companies are like, what do I do now? How do I even start addressing this flood of resumes if I want to be compliant to the legal requirements? I really want to give people an equal chance of be able to get through my screening process. I'm stuck. And that's a real problem. It's slowing down these processes.

• 18:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  So a couple of different things. We talked about, we know that there's a problem out there. The biggest issue we've seen over the years has been adoption. We saw Taleo create a universal resume back in the mid- to late aughts, right? We saw Alliance Q actually had, it was an association of organizations, huge organizations that shared candidates and validated, verified those candidates. And we also here just recently saw a couple of industry veterans in Richard and Beverly Collins with CV Wallet. That network went down as well. So from an adoption standpoint, we have the employers and they just haven't adopted yet. But then also, as we talked about with applicant tracking system and job boards, these guys

• 19:16Speaker 01

  make a killing locking in customers to proprietary moats. And what you're talking about is a more open system where there's one candidate, I mean, one candidate profile, correct?

• 19:26Speaker 04

  Individual has their, owns their profile, correct?

• 19:29Speaker 01

  Right. So they have like their verified work history, their certifications, where they went to school, all of these different things. It's owned by them. When that happens, Eaton, I think this has always been a problem. When that happens, all of these companies who are making money off of that candidate and keeping that candidate profile to themselves, they lose that moat. So from an adoption standpoint, I can see where employers want to move that way. But from an HR vendor standpoint, how are we going to be able to monetize? Because that's going to be the real key to get these guys moving. How are we going to be able to show them a new revenue model that helps them get away from this old revenue model where they're making money now?

• 20:12Speaker 04

  Right. So I don't think that the revenue model even today is just based on the quality of the data. They're making money off giving bad data about incorrect people just selling it. So I think, I think the more, more people have verifiable information, the more the industry will adopt processes where a candidate that's more verifiable is worth more. If they're still sourcing, they're still screening, they're still finding the right people. I mean, the industry is not, will change to some degree, but it's not that the only, the only source is making up fake data about people, right? The industry is more complicated than that.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  But don't these companies want to own this though? Instead of saying, we want to do this in a bit? Because I remember ISAM saying they want to create Passport. I mean, all of these different companies, Indeed's trying to do some, some version of this, some weak ass version of this. But I mean, it seems like they're all trying to do this. How do you get them together in one room and say, okay, can't we all just fucking get along? Rodney King this shit. Let's do this.

• 21:13Speaker 04

  And that's exactly connected to what Joel was saying about when we have such a fragmented ecosystem, it just doesn't work.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:20Speaker 04

  Right? And it goes back to, it goes back to the days of the early internet, right? Think about the days of CompuServe and America Online. Everyone had their own small ecosystems. Everyone wanted to control their world. Everyone was like, but I want my, I want to monetize the small, if you have to bring your friend into my ecosystem, you can only communicate to them. And there's great information, you know, they were really thinking, what do we do with this world wide web? What do we do with this internet? Should we open up to it or not? Now clearly, the same way that the internet created incredible prosperity for everyone, including the companies who realize how to take advantage of it, right? The opportunity for ubiquitous infrastructure for trust will do the same thing.

• 22:01Speaker 04

  It will generate incredible opportunities, but you have to stop protecting your moat and think about what an open ecosystem actually creates for everyone. And we believe that that creates a great opportunity. That's exactly why we founded the Velocity Network Foundation the way we did. Instead of every one of these private companies trying to build their own closed ecosystem, what happens if as an industry, we build one protocol, one shared infrastructure, which nobody owns, nobody controls, like the internet? And everyone can use in a way that's a public infrastructure, right? So you can move from one staffing from another, from one platform to another. You own your data. You share it with whoever you want to share it with, but it's all interoperable.

• 22:44Speaker 04

  In the same way, I can send an email from every email system to any other email system in the world. I don't care if you're on Gmail or on Microsoft or something else. It all works, right? That's because there's a trusted protocol that everyone adopts. And that's what we hope will really make this, to solve Joel's question, really will help this work is break down these silos, have everyone join and utilize one open protocol.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  Well, and that sounds like, like the best of both worlds when you're talking about like AOL, they whitelisted things. And I mean, there was obviously some monetization behind that, but they monetized and you didn't get the whole internet when you were using AOL, right? You got what they whitelisted. It sounds like you guys are trying to whitelist all the verified trusted sources and you're making it open. Where before AOL was closed network, but this is an open network, but it's only open for verified trusted sources.

• 23:35Speaker 04

  So we've created an open infrastructure? Think about like the internet. The internet has no application. The internet is TCP IP and DNS servers, all these technical things that nobody actually sees. What do you see? You see browsers, you see websites, you see applications. Those are not the internet. Those are vendors building things on top of a shared protocol. What Velocity Network provides is the shared protocol that enables anyone who wants to participate. We're not whitelisting them. We're letting them use a shared protocol. So instead of having a website in America Online, you have a website on the world wide web and anyone all around the world can see your website. Instead of being a candidate in one platform, if you want to, you can share your data with any other platform and it's verifiable to anyone who wants to see that.

• 24:20Speaker 00

  I think part of the problem, and Chad mentioned some of the ones that have come and gone and sort of dabbled or dipped their feet in it, is the economies of scale. And I think Velocity Network has that problem as well. And when I look at someone like LinkedIn, to me, that should be where the problem is at least largely solved. A couple billion people on the network. They partnered with Clear, where you can go in and verify that I'm a human being. Now that could be, hey, I'm a, I'm a real person. You're saying there's also the issue of, am I lying? But if I push back and say, hey, if LinkedIn tackles this and they partner with Clear, like, isn't that a big step forward? Or is that, am I misguided on that?

• 24:58Speaker 04

  No, no. We were in touch with LinkedIn and I believe LinkedIn is the perfect wallet for individuals to hold their data. And they're already maintaining self-reported data. LinkedIn would be in an ideal position to encourage, just like they encourage their users to verify their identity. And now they use Entra to verify that you actually work at the employer that you claim, right? You can verify, you can't verify your actual title, but you can verify that you actually have access to your latest employer. Then wouldn't it be great if I went into LinkedIn and I saw every profile that it has certain percent of the credentials or information there is actually trusted verifiable data? So LinkedIn is a perfect participant in this kind of, in this kind of ecosystem.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  Well, and you would know, and correct me if I'm wrong. So as Joel's talking about Clear, Clear just says that you're a human being. That's, that's, that's baseline, right? You're a human being. We know this is not a bot. That's awesome. But there's so much data that is actually in your profile that's not verified. You can go through that process of going to the universities, verifying that they actually went there and that they've, you know, they've graduated or what have you, going through some of the assessments, maybe even, you know, adding background checks and those types of things. I mean, all the way through. So I mean, this is, this is a much deeper profile, verified, validated profile than just Clear at the top saying, hey, this is a human being.

• 26:22Speaker 04

  Exactly, exactly. Think about a child getting born today. You would expect that in the digital age, everything I do, I have digital footprint, right? Why shouldn't I have that control of that digital footprint, be able to prove all these things? Why do I need to go through a background screen every time? Why do I need to go through an assessment every time? Why do I need to wait a few weeks for my screening process to approve me so I can work in a bank or a healthcare system, right? All that friction is unneeded. Again, when I'm a good player, the employers obviously want to rule out the bad players or the people who are exaggerating on their skills and capabilities and really get the best candidates. So everyone wins, in our view, maybe except a few vendors. Everyone wins when the world is based on trust.

• 27:06Speaker 00

  Wouldn't that be a happy world? We all trusted each other.

• 27:10Speaker 05

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• 27:40Speaker 01

  Good luck with that one. That would be beautiful. So what's your, what's your biggest hurdle so far? I mean, because obviously I would say probably this whole scenario, like you just said, many of these background check, let's say vendors, they get Chad Sewash goes for, you know, three or four different jobs and I've got to get three or four different background checks for different companies. In this case, I get one because it sticks with me. That's a monetizing model kind of problem, let's say. What's your biggest issue in trying to help these companies just say, look, we've got to get past this. You've got to change models. You have to evolve because we need something like this. What's your biggest obstacle right now?

• 28:22Speaker 04

  You hit it on the head. This is a chicken, egg, and rooster problem. So it's a multi-sided network problem and it's tough. The issue is adoption. You've both pointed that out very clearly and you're absolutely right. The way to deal with adoption is by, by building ecosystems, small ecosystems where you can actually reach a critical mass within a logical timeframe, right? So find an industry and a geography where you have the issuers, the individuals and the employers all working together. So we do that, for instance, in healthcare in the U.S., specifically in a few of the states. And we're now doing that in staffing, the staffing industry in the U.K., then some exercises on banking in the Netherlands.

• 29:02Speaker 04

  So how do you, how do you build out an ecosystem that creates enough weight, enough adoption within a relatively short amount of time? So everyone gets value. And that's the challenge of building out these, these micro ecosystems, basically. You mentioned Chad, a question about the background screeners. The background screeners are very interesting because yes, they could be cannibalizing their business. But what many of the background screeners have told us, and we have some of them, the leading background screeners in the world as part of our membership, is they don't actually make any money on verifying static past employment. Chasing down an education institution for a nurse who graduated in Manila is just a pain. It costs more than it's worth. And paying with a work number, Equifax, a hundred dollars to get the records is not,

• 29:47Speaker 04

  no one's winning out of that. They make their money by doing investigative, high-quality work, now using AI for intelligent verification. All, just checking another person, again, a person's education or employment 20 years ago is just, is not a value-added step. And so even many of them are saying, we wish we could get this clicked in a second and then move on to the more value-added things of checking things that really put people at risk.

• 30:14Speaker 00

  Chad, did he say rooster?

• 30:16Speaker 06

  Oh, I love checking cock.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  Ah, yes.

• 30:20Speaker 00

  Another, maybe number two and the most timely issues today are the ghost jobs. And on one hand, you have companies, I know this is an issue, they, they post a job, they get the mass amounts of people apply, and then they close the job down, which is also another reason why real people are getting screwed is they're not fast enough as the bots to apply to these jobs. But then on the other side of the aisle, you have companies that keep jobs posted infinitum. So they're obviously getting mass applications, like what? Help me, help me understand why companies would have ghost jobs when you have the problem of so many automated applicants?

• 30:57Speaker 04

  Beats me. So first of all, so, so in that, just like with the candidates, there's bad, there are really bad players and there are just people doing things that they think are good. So I do think historically companies had regular open positions relevant in order to build talent pools. And that's not a bad idea, right?

• 31:14Speaker 01

  Evergreen, yeah.

• 31:16Speaker 04

  Right, if I have an evergreen position that I know that I'm constantly needing to hire for, it's, and today with today's systems, it's great to build out a talent pool of relevant people and tomorrow I may need to hire one of those and it's good to already have that. So that in itself is not a bad, in my view, a bad, a bad behavior.

• 31:32Speaker 00

  If they're real people, but if you're just flooding it with fake applicants, I just...

• 31:37Speaker 04

  Right. But, but that, by the way, today, one of the, one of the major issues on the internet is using fake jobs, ghosting jobs in order to get personal identifiable information. People are, when they think that they're, they're being hired for a job, they're willing to give very, very sensitive information. And that's being used by very bad players. So that there's a real issue there of individuals now being worried about, can I, is this the real employer? Can I share my data with them?

• 32:02Speaker 01

  Ah, so when it comes down to all of this, who is the perfect, other than a LinkedIn, we heard you talk about LinkedIn, who's the perfect partner for you to get involved with? Are they applicant tracking systems? Are they job boards? Are they, I mean, who, who would actually help you get to that point of no return where everybody has to, has to actually utilize the standard?

• 32:26Speaker 04

  Anyone dealing with a lot of human capital data or HR data is, is a great candidate. So that's obviously the HR tech systems, right? The applicant tracking, the first, and learning management systems, HR tech systems, student information systems. Anyone who's dealing with a lot of data is a great candidate, either they're, they're outputting data to the individual or they're receiving data to the individuals, right? Aggregate data, so the National Student Clearinghouse in the United States is an example, right? They hold all this data of all the graduates in the, in the United States or a majority of them. So aggregators of trusted data, not just, not just data like LinkedIn. Anyone who's dealing with data is a great candidate to help build out this ecosystem.

• 33:08Speaker 00

  Going back to ghost jobs a little bit, we're starting to see actual state governments try to tackle this problem. And in your mind, does government play any role in policing all of these automated and company screening tools? Like, does government have any role? I can't imagine, but you live this every day.

• 33:23Speaker 04

  I don't know. Government's always years behind chasing, you know, chasing the speed that these things are changing. By the time most governments pick up on this, it'll be irrelevant, it'll be the next problem. You do see, like in Europe with the AI regulations, that there are governments in the world who are attempting to reduce the big problems, not necessarily just relating to recruiting or HR, but that relate to trust and identity and use of AI, right? And I think that those laws need to impact the work in our space as well, not just be specific regulations for our world.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, it would be a very progressive, very progressive and smart, I think, government that would actually come in and embed a standard. I mean, we have standards for plugs, for electricity, for things that, I mean, for infrastructure, right? We have these things. This should be, could be basic infrastructure, but guess what, kids? It's gonna be, it's gonna take a minute.

• 34:20Speaker 00

  It's complicated. It's complicated.

• 34:22Speaker 01

  It's gonna take a minute. It's complicated and it's orange. Okay, so you heard it from Eaton, man. Stop hunting fraud, start embedding trust. That's Eaton Bernstein from the Velocity Networks. Eaton, if somebody wants to connect with you, wants to maybe have a conversation, maybe they want to join the network, how do they get ahold of you?

• 34:40Speaker 04

  Just check us out on www.velocitynetwork.foundation or search for Velocity Network Foundation on any of your favorite LLMs or, or search engines.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 34:51Speaker 00

  Chad, it figures you would schedule a guy named Eaton right around lunchtime. That is so you, man. And that's another one in the can, too.

• 34:58Speaker 01

  I do what I can.

• 34:58Speaker 00

  We out.

• 34:59Speaker 01

  We out.

• 35:00Speaker 06

  Thank you for listening to, what's it called? A podcast. The Chad, the cheese. Brilliant. They talk about recruiting, they talk about technology, but most of all, they talk about nothing. Just a lot of shout-outs of people you don't even know, and yet you're listening. It's incredible. And not one word about cheese. Not one. Cheddar, blue, nacho, pepper jack, Swiss. So many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Anywho, be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. That way you won't miss an episode.

• 35:44Speaker 06

  And while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com. Just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. It's so weird. We out.