The CBS sitcom, Ghosts (adapted from a British series) follows the lives of Sam (played by Rose McIver) and Jay (played by Utkarsh Ambudkar), who inherit a beautiful New York country house only to find that it is inhabited by the ghosts of those who have perished on the property over the centuries. While Sam is able to see and communicate with the ghosts after she has a near-death experience, Jay has to rely on Sam to translate for him. This normally might not be the setting for an employment issue, but these ghosts are full of surprises.
The numerous ghostly co-habitants range from a 1,000-year-old Viking to Trevor (a.k.a. “T-Money,” played by Asher Grodman), a more recently deceased stockbroker who died in 2000 of a heart attack after kindly lending his pants to a more junior associate during a hazing incident. That same junior associate went on to found his own firm, banning hazing and celebrating Trevor’s legacy as a hero.
Longing for connection and able to manipulate physical objects with much effort, Trevor manages to catfish his way from beyond the grave into a remote worker role with the new firm. Trevor procures a fake identity and adopts the name Michael Jackson. Things are going quite well for Trevor professionally until he is required to attend an in-person work-retreat, leaving Jay to adopt the Michael Jackson persona in his stead.
This may sound like a ridiculously wild scenario, but an increasing number of employers are falling prey to “Career Catfishing” with the rise of remote work post-COVID. Often, these deceptive candidates use false identities, fraudulent resumes, AI and deep-fake technologies, VPNs or proxies to electronically fake their location, or even paid stand-ins and accomplices to pass the recruitment, background check, and onboarding processes.
Red flags include:
- Avoidance: the employee frequently makes excuses for being unable to join meetings on camera or in person (e.g., connectivity issues, faulty equipment, travel issues, etc.);
- Performance discrepancies: the employee’s work performance is not up to par and is inconsistent with the employee’s resume and alleged work experience;
- Audio/visual discrepancies: when the person does join virtual meetings, the speaker’s image does not match the speaker’s voice (e.g., as with AI or deep-fake technologies); and
- Distractions: whenever the employee fields telephone calls or joins virtual meetings, the employee is in a noisy and distracting setting (e.g., a busy coffee shop or public forum) making it difficult to determine their actual location.
To combat this increasingly prevalent phenomenon, employers are taking action in the following ways, as examples:
- Requiring remote employees to have cameras on during all meetings;
- Requiring a certain amount of in-person work responsibilities;
- Controlling company-managed devices more strictly to prevent remote employees from using electronic methods for disguising their actual location;
- Utilizing stricter live interview, onboarding, and background processes to filter out these catfishers;
- Implementing skill-based assessments to verify the individual is actually qualified for the role; and
- Incentivizing current employees to refer candidates and increase word-of-mouth for recruitment purposes.
While Trevor’s intentions were essentially good and he was certainly qualified for the role, that is not always the case in the real world. Thankfully, Trevor’s storline has a happy ending (at least until the IRS comes knocking) as he realizes that his seemingly small act of kindness towards a junior associate had a lasting and positive impact. Maybe that’s the silver lining here—even in a world full of artificiality and duplicity, one simple good deed can still be transformative and leave an enduring legacy.
Kristin Gray is a partner in the Spartanburg office of FordHarrison. She represents employers in litigation and counseling across industries on issues like discrimination, harassment, wage-hour disputes, leaves/accommodations, employment policies, and HIPAA compliance.
