I can’t believe it’s not a real applicant!

Nick the Intern here.

As the name suggests, I’m the hypothetically-employed 23 year old that Boostie allows to be silly on the internet.

I realized I opened my last blog post talking about career advancements and uh… I think I’m getting better? IDK, they trusted me with confidential information to write this one, so even though I’m yet to get paid for anything I’ve done, it’s comforting to know they can now sue me for breaching my NDA, thanks Chris and Travis!

But alright, let’s get into this tightrope walk I’m about to do. If you’re reading this, I’m assuming you’re either a recruiter, or somehow connected to the staffing industry.

Here’s some fast facts for ya. Quick disclaimer: my headline number is from late 2025, which in AI-time is roughly the Stone Age. But stick with me, because this is not a “it’s probably fine now” situation.

CNBC reported that applications on LinkedIn jumped more than 45% in a single year — about 9,500 a minute. One recruiter in that same piece said going through them felt like drinking from a fire hose. And 70% of hirers said fewer than half the applications they get even meet the basic criteria for the role.

Now — that was months ago. Take a wild guess whether the number of AI tools helping people fire off résumés by the hundred has gone DOWN since. Right. So treat those as the floor, not the ceiling.

Effectively, it’s bananas out there. We’re all familiar with most of it, auto-apply bots, one-click AI tools that let some dude vomit hundreds of applications into the void, no clue what he’s applying too, just trying to screw someone over and take their doubloons or something. But that’s just what we see every day.

It’s literally like the Terminator movies, everyday it’s harder to tell the difference between humans and machines (our’s just doesn’t have real muscles and say cool stuff in spanish…yet). You know to remove all the ones with all the typos and gibberish. But like, AI is getting nuts these days, it really looks like Will Smith is eating that spaghetti now. How can you expect to constantly beat the bots being built specifically to beat you?

This is just the start too. Gartner estimates by 2028, 1 in 4 candidate profiles are gonna be fake. We currently already have synthetic identities, deepfaked interviews and recruiters catching fakes mid-video-call, an actual Black Mirror episode.

I think my team puts it best, here’s the Boostie take:

“Applicant fraud stopped looking like fraud. Real names, plausible résumés, relevant experience. The giveaway isn’t the application — it’s the pattern behind it.”

Ya know what we mean? Old fraud was basically IP wearing a fake mustache (junk email domains, unvalidated phone numbers, etc.). Standard checks did a great job catching that, but well-made fakes are gonna slip right on through. The people building these know exactly what’s being checked, the secret is out.

It’s not the kind of fakes you catch one application at a time, you gotta see the pattern it’s a part of, the big picture if I may say (we do). Our detection is looking across hundreds of thousands of applications, the kinda scale you gotta sit down before observing.

Here’s some true Boostie spooky stories for ya:

-One resume came in under 9 different identities… 9 names, 9 email addresses, same piece of digital paper. That’s just the scariest highlight of a window showing 124 résumés tied to more than one identity.

-1,378 phone numbers came back shared by 2 or more separate applicant identities. They did all that scam work and forgot to swap the digits. As my High School history teacher would say, “SAD!” (I told him I skipped homework because my dog died, he called my bluff)

-There was one single coordinated operation behind 399 unique applicant identities, spread across 124 different job postings, that’s a whollllle lotta piss in one pipeline if you ask me.

None of these stories are huge news on its own (that’s our whole point). Any one of em could have an innocent explanation, you gotta put the puzzle together before you see the big picture. Which is uh… kinda our whole purpose for existing.

Which is why I was granted to gaze upon our secret sauce for this post, that’s right, this isn’t just an examination piece, dear reader, you’ve walked directly into a text-based reveal party.

INTRODUCING BOOSTIE’S “Fraud 2.0”!

Everything I just talked about up there, that’s what our detection could already do, the news is what it can see now.

Basically we rebuilt our fraud detection from the pattern layer up (idk what that means, but I was told to say it like that, Brian was reallllll excited about it).

What I can wrap my head around are the results. In its first 5 days, our new detection flagged 14 applicants who passed every conventional check, standard tools would’ve failed, and the scammers only need to get lucky once to win.

Let me reiterate that for dramatic effect: 14 applications with valid email, working phone numbers, a clean IP, normally a green light. We flagged them because the behavior didn’t match the story. This is exactly what Fraud 2.0 is built for, not the fakes that look like it, for the perfect ones.

“However did you crack the case?!” I hear some of you asking. Well I’m not gonna tell ya, kinda defeats the whole purpose of secret sauce. What I can tell you is that we’re smart. Well, our team is, I just saw a bunch of numbers. I’m starting to think they just showed me it because they knew it’d mean nothing to me. Kinda like that one time I tried to make my dog watch Interstellar and well, nothing happened.

Anyways, the important part: We flag, you decide.

We don’t auto-reject anyone, we don’t block people, and we’re not dropping people from your pipeline based on our own hunch. We give you context and conditions, and you, an actual human, makes the call. That’s how it should be, automated hiring decisions come with some real legal scaries, building a robot-that-says-no-no machine was never the point. The point is to put handfuls of applications that deserve a second look right in front of the judges with all necessary information for a decision.

And I’m not gonna tell you we’re perfect and catch everything, nobody honest can do that. Fraud adapts, but we do too. That’s kinda the whole fun of agile companies like us, we don’t need 3 weeks of board room meetings before we change the fonts on our websites.

The whole time we’re adapting, we’re gonna continue to take that real chunk of deliberate noise off your plate, and keep that energy geared towards the people that’re worth it.

It’s easy to mentally file us as a fraud solution, but we’re a time solution baby

These fake applicants in the stack can be converted into time a recruiter wasted not talking to a real human. If you read my last blog, you’d know lost time leads to lost candidates (worth a read if you’re looking to educate yourself while procrastinating something else). That guy you really wanted waiting one day too long to hear back and got his role elsewhere, because your team was busy looking at nearly 400 identities from the same damn source.

I know I got a lil passionate at the end there, but like can you really blame me? I get to watch me and all my hard-working, intelligent, recent-graduate friends struggle to find jobs because of this. It sucks and nothing changes if no one does anything…

But alright, I’ve told you pretty much all I know. The best way to learn more is to just actually watch it do its thing and talk to some of our pros. You should book a demo.

-Nick the Intern out (for now… hopefully…)