A few years ago, cheating in a remote interview usually meant a friend off camera or a second browser tab. Today a candidate can install an app that listens to the call, reads the shared screen and shows a finished answer within seconds. Some of these apps are designed to stay hidden when the candidate shares their screen.
How the tools work
These tools combine two technologies. Speech recognition turns the interviewer's question into text as it is asked, and a large language model writes an answer. The candidate can read the answer from their screen while the interviewer is still finishing the question.
The tools are sold openly. In March 2025, two Columbia University students were suspended after building Interview Coder, a tool that gave AI-written answers during technical interviews. A few weeks later they launched Cluely, a desktop app that watches the screen and listens to meetings, with an overlay designed to be invisible during screen sharing. By June 2025 the company had raised $20.3 million, including a $15 million round led by Andreessen Horowitz.
Fake candidates
In June 2022 the FBI warned that it had seen more complaints about deepfake video and stolen identities being used to apply for remote jobs, most of them in IT and software. In June 2025 the Justice Department announced coordinated actions against North Korean remote IT worker schemes, which had used the identities of more than 80 Americans to get jobs at more than 100 US companies.
In July 2025 Gartner predicted that by 2028, 1 in 4 candidate profiles will be fake. In the same survey of 3,000 job candidates, 6% said they had taken part in interview fraud.
How employers are responding
Some large employers now hold at least one interview round in person. In June 2025, Google's CEO Sundar Pichai said the company was reintroducing at least one in-person round, and McKinsey asks hiring managers to meet candidates in person before making an offer.
In-person rounds work well for companies with offices near their candidates. For other teams they make hiring slower and more expensive, and they remove one of the main benefits of hiring remotely.
What you can do
Remote interviews can still work well. It helps to show questions in a way that AI tools have trouble reading, and to know the signs that a candidate is reading an answer. We cover both in how AI interview assistants work and signs a candidate is using AI.
