Why do paid mentors selling fake experience exist at all?

Because the demand exists. Companies require X years before a junior role; ATS enforces it; candidates with no other path buy the workaround.

How do I spot fake experience in a 30-minute interview?

Specifics. Ask: what was the deployment frequency, what monitoring did you use, what was the most painful bug, what did the team do on Fridays. Fakes do not have answers.

Should we drop the 'years of experience' requirement entirely?

Drop it as a hard filter on the ATS. Keep it as a guideline. Replace with: 'has shipped at least one feature end-to-end in production.'

Are ATS systems the real villain here?

Partially. ATS is a tool — the villain is the unthinking application of keyword filters. A thoughtful ATS configuration can avoid the worst of it.

Does this only affect junior hiring or also mid-level?

Mostly junior and lower-mid. Senior fakes get caught faster on technical depth. But mid-level is increasingly affected too.

The experience-faking surge: how ATS broke entry-level hiring

Ask any recruiter what is worst right now about hiring early-to-mid level engineers. The answer is obvious: mass-scale experience faking. The market is flooded with candidates who, with help from paid mentors, draw themselves two to three years of commercial experience in non-existent agencies or 'confidential' freelance.

Why did this shadow market appear? Because companies broke the system themselves.

The mechanism — how businesses provoked the lie

By demanding "confident 3+ years of experience" for the most basic position, business provoked this wave of dishonesty. Crude CV-filtering algorithms (ATS) on job boards reject honest candidates with real pet projects and bright eyes, leaving in the funnel only those who learned to virtuosically fake numbers in their employment history.

The keyword filter is a blunt instrument. It does not see initiative, side projects, depth of understanding, or capacity to learn. It sees only a string match against the requirement list. Candidates who learn to game that string match — by inventing fictional companies or freelance contracts — make it through. Candidates who do not, drop out.

The result: your funnel optimises for the candidates best at impressing the filter, not the candidates best at the work.

The strategic damage

We chase ready-made "unicorn seniors" for a junior budget, forgetting one truth: the most loyal, dedicated, effective employees grow from the honest people you once believed in. By optimising for filtered-resume 'experience', business cuts off exactly the people with real motivation and huge upside.

Three predictable consequences:

You hire fakes who collapse in month one on production code.
You over-pay for "experience" that turns out to be inflated.
You build no junior pipeline — so in three years you have no mid-level engineers grown internally.

What to do as a business

Chasing "ready stars" with polished resumes often delivers people who oversell their experience and get exposed in the first month on prod. Our agency's job is to see through inflated experience.

We do not trust the lines on a CV — we see the actual potential. We test candidates on real work, judge their reasoning, and bring you people who work hard for your result, not just simulate being busy.

Concrete tactics that work:

Take-home with paid review — small, scoped, and you pay senior time to evaluate properly.
Live conversation about a previous project — specific questions about decisions, trade-offs, what broke. Fakes do not survive 15 minutes of specificity.
Reference call with the previous lead — not HR. The lead can tell you in five minutes whether the person actually did the work.

If you remember nothing else

Stop spec-ing 'X years of experience' as a hard filter. Spec the work. You will see honest candidates with real potential — and you will stop paying premium for fictional history.

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Get in touch

Tired of fake-experience CVs?

Email [email protected] with the current role and where you are sourcing — we will help redesign the screen to catch the lies and surface the real talent.

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