Last week Amandi Naicker applied for a Systems Analyst job in Bangalore. During the interview at the SystemsSana offices, she realized that she was literally competing against… herself! The top two candidates’ CVs contained almost exactly the same information with only a twist here and there. It turns out her competition, Fauxmandi, is just another résumé fraudster.

Career credibility across the globe is taking a huge knock as desperate job seekers are trying old and new tricks in order to get employed. Jobless youths are either applying as themselves, their fake selves, or someone else is applying with their credentials!

Web security expert, Vladimir Skarenko, says that fraud due to a mismatch between an applicant’s real CV and supposedly real CV is affecting a quarter of businesses in the West; even in India it’s over 20%. LinkedIn Endorsements, which enable you to vouch for someone’s skills with just one click, is one of the biggest enablers of this new fraudulent trend.

Rent-a-Recommendation was infiltrated in the early hours of this morning. RaR is a network of fake ‘friends’ who have accepted each other as LinkedIn connections and endorsed each other’s skills. It is estimated that RaR has been operating this network successfully for more than a year. How did they manage this, you ask? On LinkedIn there simply is no way of telling the nature or strength of the relationship to the endorser.

Some say that data is the new oil, but ratings agency Standard & Poor’s thinks that ‘data’ should be replaced with ‘trust.’ For a small fee, S&P’s corporate spin-off ‘RealMe’ verifies your whole online CV (including video) and then they give you a credibility rating. The interesting part is that RealMe accepts full financial responsibility if the employer finds anything that undermines the issued rating.

To recruiters a RealMe rating signifies that an applicant is serious about their integrity. As for RealMe – they haven’t been sued… yet.