You hire someone for an engineering role at $150,000 a year. On day 15, they can't deploy code without help. By week 12, they're gone. You've now spent $200,000 to $900,000 on that single hire-across recruiting, onboarding, time, and the chaos that follows.
How much does interview fraud cost companies?
Recruiting costs eat $2,000 to $5,000 per hire. Job boards, recruiter commissions, LinkedIn ads. If a fraudulent candidate makes it through, that money's sunk.
Onboarding and training runs $3,000 to $5,000 in labor alone.
Salary during underperformance, a bad hire stays bad for 2-3 months. For a $150K role, that's $25,000 to $37,000 in salary for someone not delivering.
Severance and backfill recruiting costs another $10,000 to $20,000.
That's the baseline: $45,000 to $225,000 per fraudulent hire. Some research puts the total at 30% to 150% of first-year salary.
What about time?
The average time to hire someone is 42 days. A fraudulent hire typically flames out in 60 to 90 days. Then you restart recruiting from scratch. You're back to zero after 100+ days of elapsed time.
Team morale crashes differently.
People don't leave because one hire was bad. They leave because they watched the company bring in the bad hire, take months to admit it was a mistake, and made the team carry the weight. One fraudulent hire can trigger cascading turnover.
Security risk is real.
The FBI put out a warning about state-sponsored actors using interview fraud to insert operatives into tech companies. Access to proprietary code. Customer data. Financial systems. The cost of a security breach dwarfs the hiring cost.
What's the total exposure?
Say you hire 100 people a year. Even if just 10% are actual fraud-4 people-and each costs between $50,000 and $225,000, that's $200,000 to $900,000 annually. Scale it to a large company hiring 1,000 people annually: $10 million a year gone.
How do you stop this?
A detection tool that costs $50 per interview stops 4-10 bad hires per 100 candidates. At a $100K average cost per bad hire, you break even by stopping two people. The ROI is obvious.