ROTR - Stacy Zapar
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Colleen Gallagher: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome everyone to another episode of Recruiters on the Rise. I am so excited about today's guest. Um, she, if, if you don't know her and you've been in recruiting a long time, you need to stop whatever you're doing and go follow her on LinkedIn immediately. She is the OG TA influencer, content creator, and just an all around recruiting legend.
Um, many of you may know something about her as it, as it pertains to Fireball, but we'll talk about that at the end if you don't. Um, you know, i- in her career, she, uh, is also known for she designed the Zappos Insider program that killed job postings. She's spoken at LinkedIn Talent Connect eight times and been rated the number one speaker twice.
She's trained recruiters at companies like Amazon, Netflix, Walmart, TripAdvisor, so a lot of the technologies or applications that, um, you know, our listeners might be using on a day-to-day basis. She stepped away from the [00:01:00] spotlight for a few years, and now she's back with a totally new mission, helping recruiters fight candidate fraud, which she says is about to be every recruiter's biggest problem, whether they know it yet or not.
And we know that it is, uh, a problem for a lot of folks already, and so that's why I'm excited to have her here with us. She founded Tenfold and Fraud Squad. Stacey Zapar, welcome to the show.
Stacy Zapar: Hi. Thanks Colleen for having me. I'm excited to be here
Colleen Gallagher: okay. So you've spent almost 30 years teaching recruiters how to find great talent
Stacy Zapar: We're not supposed to talk about that part. I'm just kidding. It's
Colleen Gallagher: Yes, that's right. I know I heard somebody say yesterday, they were like, "I've been doing this show for..." I think it was an SNL person. She's like, "I've been doing this, I'm 18." Yeah. Um, all right. So you've spent, you've spent some time teaching recruiters how to find great talent, and now you're saying, you know, none of that matters if we don't fix fraud first.
So what's going on?
Stacy Zapar: Yeah. I think it's a, it's a multifaceted issue. I think [00:02:00] fraud is definitely part of it. That's certainly a passion project of mine. But if you have fraud, you probably also have volume. If you have volume, you probably also have fraud. Um, there's also bots, auto apply, easy apply, every resume looks alike. We've got cheating, resume embellishment. We've got over-employment. We've got deepfakes, proxies, synthetics, catfish, you name it. We've got a lot of noise in our funnels. And so in my mind, how can we talk about recruiting bex- best practices when we've got all this stuff cluttering and polluting our pipelines? We can kind of clear that away, then we can do what we do best. And so that's sort of my mission, is to help eradicate that. And yes, fraud is a big part of it, but that's not the only part that's kind of cluttering up our funnels right now. My job is to help real candidates shine through, restore trust, kind of let us do what we do best
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah. Well, it's interesting because I've, you know, I think if you're not in the TA space on a [00:03:00] day-to-day basis, um, and I've even talked to folks who are not, and they're like, "Are you-- What do you mean fraud is an issue? Like, I don't get it. Why are, why is that even a thing people are doing?" And so for... How would you help give some broader recognition to this to, like, really help folks maybe outside the day-to-day to understand, like, w- what's the genesis behind this?
Like, why are people doing this? Like, how real is it? Because, you know, I was talking to somebody today, and they were like, "Uh, this can't be that pervasive." And I'm like, "I'm hearing from everyone that it is incredibly pervasive." So like, h-how do you, what do you respond to that with, like, for the naysayers around this?
Stacy Zapar: Yeah, you know, I, it, it's one of those things that, yes, anecdotally I'm hearing it all over the place. The CEO of Zapier a couple weeks ago did a post where he said, you know, "We did this posting and 80% of the applicants were fraudulent or fake." They weren't just even fraudulent, they were just not real people.
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah
Stacy Zapar: there was a huge volume that they're dealing with as [00:04:00] well. And you are dealing with volume and you're dealing with fakes and like, what's going on and why is it happening? And I see a lot of people commenting like, "What's the end game?" Like, I don't get it. So there's, there's six different personas that I've kind of written out as sort of the different types of job seeker.
Everything from the real good, you know, well-intentioned actual job seeker, all the way through to the deep fake, kind of fake candidates and organized crime and organized fraud rather, uh, and everything in between. So when it comes to getting the word out, I think, you know, awareness is the first step in any of this.
We have to drive awareness. Um, the CTO of Google Cloud, which is called Mandiant, he recently said that he had talked to the CISOs, the chief information security offers- officers of almost every single Fortune 500, and they had confessed to him that each of them said they had hired at least one, if not a dozen, if not several dozen North Koreans specifically. And these are all people who are using a false [00:05:00] identity. Sometimes you can tell who they are right away. Sometimes it takes six months to find out who the person is. You know you have someone who's not telling the truth. So it's, it's a very pervasive issue, and his coworker at that same event, I forget his name, you'll have to forgive me, I can send it later.
But he said, um, "It's not a matter of whether or not it's happening to you, it's just whether or not you s- if you don't see it, it doesn't mean it's not happening." It's you are-- And he didn't mean fraudulent applicant, applicants. He meant you're actually hiring fraudulent candidates.
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah
Stacy Zapar: And it isn't just the Fortune 500.
I talk to people with 17 employees, startups, and they are seeing 50%, 70% of the applicants are not who they say they are. it's just wild times. It's wild times. So awareness is the first step, and after we get awareness, then it's a matter of how do we, how do we deal with it and address it? And in my opinion, it takes a whole new process. It takes training and upskilling, and it takes tools. I think those things together is, is how we kinda get ahead of this. And my mission is to help teams be more proactive and preventative rather than dealing with it once it's already [00:06:00] in and like, okay, how do we detect it and how do we stop it? And I have 1,500 applicants, what do I
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah
Stacy Zapar: Susie?
I'm like, "You don't have 1,500 applicants. You do something on the front end to make the noise not be as bad." So I hope that answered your question. It was kind of a roundabout a-
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah. Yeah. Well, y- I mean, you've talked about how, you know, these, some of the people committing the fraud are organized and recruiters are not. So like what do you mean by that?
Stacy Zapar: Absolutely. So the, uh, not every single person that's involved in cheating or fraud is organized with other people, although a lot of times it is, even if they have a proxy that kind of stands in for them and does the technical interview, or they're giving them the answers in their ear, or they are using a ChatGPT, kind of open another window to look up the right answers. Um, but a lot of the real true fraud-fraud is, is organized. There are fraud rings in, in North Korea. It's called the North Korea IT worker. If you Google that exact phrase, that's sort of what everyone is using, whether they're IT or not, they're kind of calling it that.
Colleen Gallagher: Mm-hmm.
Stacy Zapar: recent investigation by the [00:07:00] FBI investigated a fraud, one fraud ring that had 20 individuals, and those 20 individuals had applied in that three-month period to 160,000 jobs, those 20 people.
And each of those 20 people have multiple personas, and they have multiple jobs at multiple companies already, and their job is just to get more and get more and get more. It's crazy. And what happens is, is once they get hired, they give an address in the US where one of their facilitators is now hosting a laptop farm.
I know I sound like I have a crazy tinfoil hat on right now, but I promise. Sabina Chapman, you will see. I'm not lying. She had like 70 something laptops in her garage. She just got sentenced to jail for several years, uh, for being a facilitator, and she didn't even know she was working for North Korea.
That's the, that's the crazy thing.
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah
Stacy Zapar: was the US face of an international company. But each laptop had a, had a Post-it note on it to say which person, which persona, which alias, and which company, and meanwhile, they're remoting in, so it looks like they're here in the US, but they're not. So as far as, [00:08:00] um...
Yes, candidate fraud is often organized. As a TA industry, though, we are not. We're sort of dispersed. We're having little pockets of conversation here. We're having Slack conversations. We're DM-ing. We're complaining about it. We're like, "What do we do?" Um, in my opinion, we all need to be kind of organized and kind of rally together as an industry.
And a rising tide raises all ships. Yes, all those nice things. But if we don't all come together, we're always gonna be behind the eight ball and playing catch up, and they're gonna always be two or three steps ahead. I just wanna have them be one step ahead. That would be progress at this point. So,
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah
Stacy Zapar: um, yeah, I don't know if anyone's-- I have not announced it yet, but I guess I'll announce it on, uh, on this podcast.
But yeah, I'm launching officially Fraud Squad next week. Uh, it's gonna be live. I'm very excited. Fraud Squad is a free community for talent acquisition practitioners. Each person is verified for identity as well as credentials to make sure that they meet the criteria for membership. They're not a vendor, a job seeker, a hiring manager, a deepfake, whatever. No proxies,
Colleen Gallagher: [00:09:00] Yeah.
Stacy Zapar: Here. Um, and it's a place for us to have conversations, discussion board, events. Um, we're gonna have, you know, a central repository of resources. We are going to have meetups at some of the, some of the big conferences that are coming up. Uh, I'm starting something called the Angel Network, which I'll tease out right now.
I won't keep going on and on. I'll take a breath. So, uh, all kinds of ways that we can support each other and rally together The most important part of Fraud Squad is that it is a place where we're having conversations in sort of this, this safe place where we're not having it and broadcasting it to the bad
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah.
Stacy Zapar: So all of our tactics, all of our conversations, our strategies, our game plan is not being broadcasted. So we're, we're kinda keeping it under wraps a little bit and able to have more impact and not always have the, you know, our-- be circumvented ahead of time before we even have a chance to
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah.
Stacy Zapar: New thing that we wanna try out,
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah.
Stacy Zapar: It's 100% free. It's a talent community. It's people talking to people. It's member-driven. If anyone wants to be part of it, you can go to [00:10:00] joinfraudsquad.com and, uh, and submit an application. I review each application manually right now. I do have some, uh, automation kinda helping me out a little bit, but each person gets manually approved by re- me, a real person.
I do practice what I preach. Um, I don't have any automated decision-making in my own process even
Colleen Gallagher: You have a ton of experience in, in doing this, so
so all, so, um, but yeah. Other than that though, yeah, I just wanna bring people together and give them a safe place. It's almost like hosting a, a dinner party or h- hosting an event, a game night or something at my house, and everyone's kinda talking.
Stacy Zapar: I just wanna provide the forum and kinda stand back and see what happens. And sure, we're gonna have polls and stats and video of the week. I'm gonna be sharing little, little mini video snippets with some of my best tips and tricks, things that I've been wanting and dying to share online, but I have not because I wanna keep it and save it and put it in the vault where everyone else can, can, can, um, can try it out, but not have it become immediately worthless because they already are ahead of us on all these things.
So
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah
Stacy Zapar: a little taste test of what it's all about. I hope we get a lot of m-membership, and I hope it really takes off.
Colleen Gallagher: I'm sure you're gonna
Stacy Zapar: a [00:11:00] lot-- You know, this is a pa- a passion project for me. I'm, you
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah
Stacy Zapar: know, I'm-- This is, this is a mission. I wanna stop the bad guys and stop the scammers. I've been being impersonated for over a year.
There are six emails floating around of people pretending to be me. They're scamming job seekers. Um, it's, it's pervasive. I got two more today. A whole new email just popped up yesterday. So, um, I'm tired of the scammers and the bad guys winning. So let's...
Colleen Gallagher: yeah
Stacy Zapar: Pollyanna-ish, but I, I really do.
I wanna, I wanna, wanna have it make a dent and make their job just a little bit harder.
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah. Um, well, I, I appreciate it, and I think I'm sure everyone in this community does. And, um, you know, having known you for a sh- a shorter amount of time now, but a, um, a good amount you and I have had some quality time together, I... You know, you bring a lot of energy around this, and for me, it just stems from your passion for, for recruiting in general and, um, you know, candidates and recruiters alike.
So I'm sure you'll [00:12:00] get really good traction with that community 'cause there's a huge need for it right now.
Stacy Zapar: Thank you. I think if you don't mind, I think that brings up another good point is that in the land of candidate fraud, it's not just hard for recruiters and hiring teams and companies, it's also making it 10 times, 100 times harder for job seekers. And it's-- we all know it has never been a worse time to be a job seeker.
I don't care if it was 2001 or 2008. I think now is the worst time to be a job seeker. Um, people go to apply online at a job and they see that there's already 1,000 people who've applied. They think, "Why bother?" But meanwhile, they don't realize that there's very few viable candidates in that pipeline. A lot of them are fake or just auto overnight. Um, so anything that we can do, every-everything that we do to stop fraud, stop volume, kind of cut through the noise, it's helping the real candidate sort of shine through. And for me, I think that that's, you know, that's really fulfilling if we can, if we can do that. And that ultimately gets us to our end goal, which is hiring great people.
All this other stuff is just a distraction. So
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah. Well, I mean, you, you bring up a g- a good point though, and I think [00:13:00] that this is a very hot topic right now because, um You know, we, we do see there-- it is so-- I agree with you. It, it feels like one of the ha-hardest, um, markets to be in, in terms of being a, a job seeker. Um, and I've, you know, I've been around for the 2001, 2008,
Stacy Zapar: We're all shaking a little bit of our backs
Colleen Gallagher: as well.
Um,
Stacy Zapar: We've
Colleen Gallagher: yeah.
Stacy Zapar: It, it's
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah, I had a fr- I had a friend who, um, I ran into. Sh- I knew she was supposed to be starting with like... 'cause Arthur Andersen was still around at the time. She was supposed to be starting with them in the fall of 2001, and I went to the mall and, you know, was shopping, and she was working at Banana Republic.
Like,
Stacy Zapar: Yes, ma'am
Colleen Gallagher: know, I, I, I've been through it. But yes, uh, I, I digress, but I think the, um, it is a challenging time, but I think what we're hearing from a lot of candidates is AI is bl- is being blamed for why we're, why it is so challenging. So I'm, I'm curious to get your take there, like, um, how would you frame it [00:14:00] to a candidate and in a positive way?
Um, because I do think there's a lot of positive things about using AI, um, and again, not to make a decision or make a hiring choice, but to bring them to the forefront. So would love to get your, your perspective on that.
Stacy Zapar: Yeah. I think AI has got us... I love AI, and I-- everyone has a love-hate, I guess, with AI, right?
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah
Stacy Zapar: I think without AI, we wouldn't be in the situation we're in now. I don't think we'd have the volume. I don't think we'd have the auto apply, right? I don't think the level of fraud. In the, in the age of AI, anything can be faked, whether it's written, it's spoken, it's an ID, it's a photo. There's-- it's so easy to, to generate fakeness at scale, uh, at no cost in seconds. So, um, it is, it has contributed to all the things that I'm hoping to combat. However, I do think, um, you know, I do think AI can be a wonderful tool, and it can be leveraged in really smart ways. I just want to make sure that in my view, I think, and I'm not saying anything novel here, but I firmly and strongly [00:15:00] believe that AI should be used, uh, to... Or humans, rather I should say, are, should be, should be thinking, writing, creating, deciding, and the AI should be refining, editing, coordinating, pattern matching. Like really, um, kind of keep those things. And, and when it comes to being a job seeker, yes, you can use AI to zhuzh up your resume a little bit, but I highly recommend you write your resume, you put a little flavor in it, you put a little you into it, you know, that kind of thing.
Um, and then you can kind of do an AI. But if you have AI writing your resume and the, you have it, the job posting smushed together, stick it in AI and pop it out, you are going to look like every other candidate, every other applicant in there. And when they all look the same, suddenly have no signal.
The resume, all resumes are suddenly noise, and we have to decide other ways. So we s- then we-- I-- that's why we see teams going out and just doing sourcing or, you know, they've turned off job postings or, you know, there's a time and place for all these things, or they're just doing referrals. None of which are fraud-proof necessarily.
There's still
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah
Stacy Zapar: that can be sourced who are fraud [00:16:00] or, um, and there's still referrals. It's very well known, speaking of organized, the r- the, the fraud rings, they all refer their buddies for jobs, of course. Like, why wouldn't they? But to answer your question, I think AI is kind of a blessing and a curse.
It's gotten us where we are. My main thing for the recruiting side is if we take our 2019 hiring funnel and our normal processes and we just layer AI on top of it, we take a, a, a funnel and a process that's broken, and we just make it break faster. And that's how we've ended up where we are with 1,500 applicants overnight, and it's all like nonsense.
So if we kind of first take our process, look at it, reevaluate it, kind of redesign it for today's age, train our teams and give them the upskilling they need, um, and I can talk about that in a little bit, of course, kind of the things that I think we need to be doing differently. Then we apply AI on top.
All of a sudden, we've got a well-oiled machine that's running super efficiently versus a broken thing that's just running all over the place out,
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah.
Stacy Zapar: So that's my... I don't know if that answered your question exactly, but,
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah, no, I
Stacy Zapar: [00:17:00] both around AI and fr- as a job seeker, as a recruiting team, you know, there's, there's, there's good and bad.
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah. Yeah, I think it's, it's, it's also that, um, you know, recruiters are not bringing AI into the mix, um, because they're looking to, uh, detach themselves from a decision-making process. They're using it to help combat some of the things that you're talking about. I think like, um, you know, it, it... I feel a lot for both candidates and recruiters in this market because I think recruiters are, have, you know, we know that the, you know, the number of recs that recruiters are being asked to manage now relative to a couple of years ago has gone up almost, you know, two X.
And so when you have that situation happening and you also have a lot of applications coming in that are fake and resumes that are being homogenized to just look like the job description, it is very difficult. And so I think, you know, recruiters are looking to use AI in a [00:18:00] way that, um, will help them get the, the real people into the process and, um, you know, make sure that they're still getting, um, people that are the right fit.
Stacy Zapar: Absolutely. And yeah, to, to your point, I think y- hiring team or recruiting teams have al- also been slashed. That's another layer. So we have ha- the teams are half as big as what's, what they were. They're handling ... I've heard there's 4X the number of applications today than there were two years ago. So already we've got each recruiter with half the number of teams, 4X, that means each individual recruiter is dealing with 8X the volume.
Colleen Gallagher: Mm-hmm.
Stacy Zapar: And it's not just volume, it's volume with a whole bunch of like, you know,
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah.
Stacy Zapar: Bombs waiting to go off. The candidates aren't all really candidates. So how are recruiters able to keep up? And we've never, as recruiters, we've never been trained how to do authentication. We're all winging it. We're trying to do our best job, and no one
Everyone's just kind of figuring it out as they go, and I think that's really dangerous. It's really risky. I think it's introducing a lot of bias. [00:19:00] Um, I think a lot of candidates are getting very bad experiences. They're being asked to hold up their ID and their passport up to the camera so it could be screenshotted and passed around the team and stored who knows where on some recruiter's desktop. All kinds of shenanigans. Again, I'm not pointing the finger at recruiters. I have a lot of empathy. I've been there myself. I was, you know, recruiting for roles, um, you know, not very long ago. And so far as, um, as far as that goes, I think we need to have a little kind of pause and think what, what are we doing to empower our recruiters to deal with the situation they're in today?
And I think it's an, an impossible task to do it really well, and anyone who is is a, is a superhuman, in my opinion, and
Colleen Gallagher: Well, you j- you just mentioned your, your, um, sort of like the three s- the three different, um, items, and you talked about reskilling. What d- what does that mean to you?
Stacy Zapar: Yeah. So I think, and I, you know, I hope this doesn't sound like it's like a pitch or whatever, but I really believe this. I'm calling it candidate curation. It's, I kind of equate the process of developing a short list of candidates today similar to what an [00:20:00] art curator has to do in a museum. And it's not about getting as many as you can or flicking whatever up there that sticks and hoping for the best.
You don't assume every single, you know, art of wor- piece of art is, you know, a fake. And you have to really be kind of intentional and thoughtful and treat each piece like it is priceless. And I do think this candidate experience thing kind of weaves in. So candidate curation is what I'm calling it, and it is a very simple concept.
It is instead of doing talent attraction at the top of the funnel, assessment in the middle, and authentication at the bottom, which is 2019 and before, it's how we've always done it. Now, I think every single point through the whole funnel continuously, we have to be doing all three at the same time.
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah.
Stacy Zapar: Talent attraction plus assessment plus authentication each time there's a candidate touch point from the very beginning all the way to the very end. I can give examples of what that might look like, but talent attraction at the top of the funnel, of course, has always been important. But in the age of auto apply, when people aren't... You don't even-- [00:21:00] the candidate may not even know they applied to your job. So, so suppose they make it through, now they're meeting with the hiring manager, and they may not even have read the job description in any great detail. They may not have heard of your company, but they made it that far, and so they're, they're going with it. I, I just think that intent and interest is really important to gauge more than ever. Talent attraction has always been about repelling the wrong person, who may not be successful or happy at your company or in that role or on that team, and attracting the right person. Certainly in the age of fraud, that's very important as well. Um, so I think that needs to be baked in the whole process. Assessment in the age of AI is completely different. Uh, we have to think about it differently. All AI use should not be cheating. We should AI-- have AI usage policies that are transparent on both ends, so candidates and, and recruiters kind of know how it's being used and when it's okay and when it's not. Um, we should be assessing for AI ability. We should be doing prompt audits to see are you using AI to think for you, or are you using it in a really kind of, you know, smart way and you're getting really [00:22:00] great results in a
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah
Stacy Zapar: of time? you know, authentication, obviously from the very beginning, we have to be kind of looking at things through that lens of is this person real?
Is it who they say they are, et cetera. Um, you know, all kinds of... I can give a million examples. I could go on and on.
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah.
Stacy Zapar: This is what I think about day and night,
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah.
Stacy Zapar: A little obsessive. I could just go on and on.
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think, I think you-- the, the way you frame this where it's not like a funnel that, you know, moves along and gets smaller, and you, and you do the a-assessment and authentication towards the end brings up another thing, is because I think a lot of people when they hear candidate fraud, they think about fake applicants at the top of the funnel.
But it goes a lot deeper than that. So talk a little bit more about how that shows up throughout the hiring process.
Stacy Zapar: kinds of fraud. There's resume fraud, which is on paper or in the application or on their LinkedIn or on their resume. These are things that are, they're lying or they've stolen someone else's whole profile and stuck their name on it or a fake name on it. They might have [00:23:00] a Frankenprofile where it's partly this person, partly that person, partly them, and it's some kind of amalgamation. They-- there are people who are real people, and they're just using AI innocent way, but it ends up looking generic and flat, and that's makes it just have no signal whatsoever, and you can't really evaluate them. Um, I wouldn't call that fraud necessarily, but it is certainly lessening the signal.
You're not really getting a true read on them if they just, you know, paste in the job description in their resume and say, "Spit something out," and it may or may not very-- be very reflective of their actual experience and their skills. there's cheating that's happening. So that-- all that is resume fraud.
Then we've got interview fraud and, you know, fraud's a hard word. Tim Sackett, I think, says it best. I think he calls it little fraud and big fraud. I call it baby fraud, little fraud, big fraud. I think there's a little bit of nuance here, and I don't want to label everything capital F fraud, you
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah
Stacy Zapar: But, know, anytime we're not telling the complete truth, you know, it-it's, it's, it's misleading, and that's making the recruiter have less signal to work with in an already trying time where their lim- resources are limited.
So if you [00:24:00] just kind of fudged up your resume a little and you got a 30-minute interview because of it, in my mind, you just stole 30 minutes of that person's time unwarranted, and somebody who really deserved it is sitting there wondering why they're not getting a call. So I still... You know, I think there's a little bit of, um, over-reliance on AI, on AI on both sides that's making this a little, um, a little bit messy, and I don't want to point fingers.
It seems judgmental. But
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah
Stacy Zapar: you know, until we address it, we can't fix it. And so, even going down the funnel, there are proxy interviews. There's people that are swapping out in for in-person interviews or to do the take-home assessment. Um, there's, there's re-reference fraud. That's very common now. You might be calling someone who is not a real person.
They're just some other person in the fraud ring. it might be their best friend. I read... If you, if you read Reddit, there's a lot of good subreddits. There's one called Overemployment, and it talks a little bit about how they have just set up, you know, the, their girlfriend, and they have a fake company set up and a fake Google Voice account, and they just check references for them, and they just keep getting more and more jobs with their fake reference with those who's their [00:25:00] girlfriend. The whole thing, um, it just, it just goes on and on. So it's, it's wild how it can kind of creep in, and there's places that it's happening that b- if you've never heard of it before, you would never think t-to look there as like a possible source of funny business. And you know, it i- it's there. So the more we can educate people, the more we can open eyes, the more we can look.
'Cause in hindsight is I didn't know everything that e- people I was interviewing late last year, I didn't even realize. Looking back, I'm like, "That was that..." I can still remember the exact conver- I'm like, "I did not even know what I was dealing with." So we're all, we're all in the same place until we know about it. Who would ever guess that this is where we would be? So, um, what it is. But, yeah. I, I did say to, um, I did say to some appl- I did a little thing to this for job seekers a couple days ago, and I told them to embrace a little friction. If you're asked to jump through a little hoop or provide and upload something, or answer a few pre-screening questions, or do something that feels like, "Ugh, why do I have to do that?" I told them to view [00:26:00] that as sort of a friendly environment where it's-- that means the recruiter is rooting for you. They are hoping to sift out some of the noise so that you can shine through. So don't walk away when you see that. You're walking away with all the, the bad actors who don't have time to deal with it. And, you know, for them, it's a numbers game and ROI of time versus investment versus out. Go ahead and e- embrace it. And even if that means talking to an AI interviewer, a lot of people I see they're digging in their heels, and I, "I'm never gonna talk to a bot." And, you know, I think we need to be-- You know, you do you. I'm not gonna say I'm gonna every time be super stoked if I had to, but it does mean that they are dealing with volume, they're dealing-- they have capacity issues, and this is their way of having real people like you shine through, and they're looking out for you. Whenever you see something that feels a little friction-y or a hurdle or a speed bump of any kind, um, I think those are the teams that are actually... They're not creating a worse candidate experience. They're actually looking out for the candidate, and
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah
Stacy Zapar: to, vocalize that to the can- the job seeker market that, hey, this is actually a good thing. Friction is your friend, and I keep saying [00:27:00] that.
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah, friction is your friend
Stacy Zapar: intentional friction, invisible friction.
There's all kinds of good friction. There's also bad friction, so we need to be really in, in, you know, uh, intentional about where we apply it and what kind, so.
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah. I mean, you, you sort of alluded to this or you said this a bit, a bit ago, but what we're seeing now because of all the, the top of funnel fraud is that, you know, some companies are just abandoning inbound entirely. You know, no more job postings, fully outbound, only sourcing candidates you find.
A- and you've done this before when you-- at Zappos. Like, do you think that's the right move now? Or like, uh, you know, h- uh
Stacy Zapar: I think it really depends on the circumstance and the, and the company and kind of their-- Every company has a different sort of threshold for what they're willing to, to do and, and, and, and what they can, what they can handle and what they can afford to do. A lot of companies are now flying every single person in for a final round.
Not every company can afford to do that. Um, we see-- I see some companies that have gone dark and they're not posting anything anymore, and it's purely sourcing. I have some companies that it's [00:28:00] referral only. None of these are, are fail-safe. But, you know, in, in Zappos' case, what we did is we had the average person, 'cause we only recruited in Las Vegas,
Colleen Gallagher: Mm-hmm.
Stacy Zapar: Was-- and it was all in person, and there was no exception and, you know.
So we had a limited, very limited finite talent pool, and the average person was applying 8.6 times a year for our company. I say our, but, you know. and we were sending them 8.6 rejection letters every
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah.
Stacy Zapar: And it was the same role over and over. And so we had these evergreen kind of roles, but every time...
And so it just became this cycle of, of, of a bad candidate experience,
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah
Stacy Zapar: So what we did is we kind of created a front porch called the Zappos Insider program of, "Hey, if you wanna come work for Zappos, raise your hand, be an insider. We're gonna have events and this," and it's like a... So it's, it was sort of this thing where they could raise their hand and they're always applying.
They've indicated that they're interested, then we can reach out. So we didn't only source
Colleen Gallagher: Right
Stacy Zapar: we didn't have it, and we didn't pull down job postings for tech roles because we didn't have that issue in tech. We didn't have 8.6 applicants. We didn't have enough applicants [00:29:00] for that ex- Las Vegas is not a tech hub.
So it really depends on the circumstance. I think everyone has to make their own decisions. But in my mind, a best case scenario is, of course, we wanna invite applicants, especially in this day and age where people are looking for work and there's really great talent out there in the market, and they're just sitting there waiting, you know? Um, they're, they're ready to be found. So I, I'm not gonna tell anyone do or don't.
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah
Stacy Zapar: you do you. But really think about it all together. Some companies have to post, and that's the law and for what they, what-- for what their company does, and they can't even make that choice. So, um, yeah, I think there's a lot of options out there, but the best thing that I think teams can do right now is to take preventative, proactive actions In their careers page, in their job postings, in their application, in their pre-screen questions, in their initial recruiter screen.
There are lots of things that we can do that are friction-y, but they are friction for the bad guys. Real people are like, "Oh, no big deal." Or they may not even see it. It may be literally [00:30:00] invisible to the good guys. It's that, um ... There's a lot of things, and I don't mean to vague book. I hate when people vague book.
But at the same time, I'm like, I wanna talk about them, but I'm like, "Oh, join
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah.
Stacy Zapar: You
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah
Stacy Zapar: it." I wanna put it all out there because then it ... You know. But for instance, one thing that you can say is, you know, this is not, you know, s- s- top secret. Um, there are deterrents, right? I have deterrents and I have tripwires.
Deterrents are things that you announce broadly to your audience and s- and they're transparent, and they're just, "Hey, this is what's gonna happen. We use tools that may detect cheating or, you know, AI usage. We have an in-person process for the final round of all interviews. Uh, you may be asked to come on site for onboarding before your first day, or as a pre-onboarding."
Colleen Gallagher: Mm-hmm.
Stacy Zapar: Anything that you say that might make a bad actor who's not in the US and pretending to be like, "Well, I can't apply to that one. They've got an in-person
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah.
Stacy Zapar: To the interview," that's a great deterrent and it's transparent. But it's also transparent to the real job seeker, like, "Oh, I'm gonna need to think about childcare or pet, getting my pet boarded," or, "Okay, this is something I need to be aware."
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah
Stacy Zapar: always, in my mind, it's good for real [00:31:00] candidates and it's bad for the bad guys. The more we can be, um, the better. And so there's all kinds of things we can bake in. I l- I'm a big fan of a little pre-screen task, not just a pre-screen question.
Colleen Gallagher: Mm-hmm.
Stacy Zapar: Um, it doesn't have to be a big ask. It doesn't have to be busy work and nonsense. But, um, yeah, there's little ways that you can show your, you know, proof of life and show that you're actually interested. And these are, these are, I think, smart ways that we can make it so that we don't have 1,500 applicants overnight. We might just have 300, which is still a lot.
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah. Yeah. Um
Stacy Zapar: that answered
Colleen Gallagher: I
Stacy Zapar: I get going on my little spiel and then I forget the question sometimes. So I'm not gonna lie.
Colleen Gallagher: I We're having a great conversation, so that's all that matters.
Stacy Zapar: At times too, right?
Colleen Gallagher: Um, I, I, I feel this in you in terms of like how you talk and, and your passion for recruiting, and y- you've shared with me that you love recruiting so much that sometimes you secretly wish you could just go back to doing, um, you know, a regular recruiter job and, and do that all day.
Like, w-what about this work still has that for [00:32:00] you after, after all this time?
Stacy Zapar: that's that's a good question. I used to joke last year, I'm like, "I just wish I could cha- change my name to, like, Tanya Jones and just go get a job at, like, my old company that I worked here in San Diego way back when, and just recruit all day or do executive recruiting or source." Like, I just-- I do. I love it.
I miss it sometimes. I miss working with hiring managers. I did, I did do an embedded recruiting role last year, and so I was recruiting again, and it was good to get... You know, ev- I've never gone more than a year without recruiting th- my whole career, even since starting Tenfold back in 2016. I mean, 2012, I lied. Um, so I, I always will go back to it. If I ever win the lottery, I'll probably just, you know, do a little bit of that and a little bit of
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah
Stacy Zapar: Broad Squad just for funsies. But, um, but yeah, so why do I love it? I love the... I'm a problem solver. I like puzzles. I like logic puzzles. I like the, I like the whole solve it, like, can I find it?
I like to cyber sleuth. I love to stalk. Like, things that I'm like, "I
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah
Stacy Zapar: I can find that." I, gonna confess something really embarrassing [00:33:00] to you, but this is perfect for the, like, end of the call,
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah
Stacy Zapar: how crazy is Stacey. I like watching old game shows on the Game Show Network or whatever.
That's, like, my comfort thing,
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah
Stacy Zapar: second screen when I'm working, and I just like to have it on in the back. Michael Landon and whoever, you know, is, is
Colleen Gallagher: Love it
Stacy Zapar: Betty White when she was, like, young and, you know, all kinds of... Anyway, but on-- back in the day, in the '70s, they would have the f- they would give a little bio of each contestant.
Like, "This is Sarah, Sarah, like, Wolfsmith,"
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah. Yeah
Stacy Zapar: " She's in, she's in, uh, she's in her graduate program at Stanford, and she's studying da, da, da, da." I'm like, "Okay, Sarah Wolfs-" I'm like, I look her up on LinkedIn. Did she make it? How did she
Colleen Gallagher: Oh my God, I love this
Stacy Zapar: gosh, that's so great. Look at her. She's running her own company.
Go girl. Like, I, I know, I'm a... This is why I'm so embarrassing. I'm such a But I-- There's people that I've connected to, and now it's just like... But-- And then I found out there's a whole website where they list each contestant, and then you can look up their name. I'm not the only one who thought of this,
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah.
Stacy Zapar: I- sizing ability to like, [00:34:00] how did they turn out? Like, oh, look at them. Like, go girl. Um, a lot of the women obviously change their name and get married, so it's a little harder on
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah
Stacy Zapar: but, um, but yeah, I don't know. It's-- I, I think it's fun to sort of investigate and, and it, it... This is embarrassing to say too, but if I, you know, if I could, I would probably just shut all this down and just interview known, uh, North Koreans.
Like, I have a list of-- On my website, I have a list of 2,400 email addresses, I think it is. I've lost count of how many. I have, um, I have a whole resource where I have videos, all these videos of North Koreans and other fraud deepfakes being interviewed. I have 60 some of those. 2,400 IP addresses. I have, I think it's 1,400 emails. Um, all these are known indicators of compromise. It's called IOC or a fraud signal, basically. It's an email, a phone number, a LinkedIn profile, a passport, a deepfake, an alias, a domain, a GitHub. It's a, um, you know, a profile of a known, [00:35:00] according to the government or network security company or cybersecurity company, this person, this email is 100% tied to fraud.
I would go out and I would reach out to all those candidates. You probably have to-- I'd only have to reach out to one or two 'cause they all get back to you in like 10 minutes, evidently. They all are like, "Yes, let's set up an interview." And I would love to interview and then hire these people and, you know, send them a laptop, find out the address, and then like, you know, help shut it down.
I would--
Colleen Gallagher: Um, well, I would just say the reason there's a whole game show network is that there are a lot of people who think it's fun to watch game shows. So, so you don't have to be embarrassed by that. And I think like
Stacy Zapar: I love "Love, Sidney." I was too young to watch them when they aired,
Colleen Gallagher: N-
no, I love it. Um, w- you know, one, one of the things I talked about in your intro, you, you know, were one of the most in demand, uh, speakers in recruiting. You know, you, I think you shared with me, like, you were in 50 cities in five months, number one rated at LinkedIn Talent Connect.
Like, what had you stepping away from that and, and what's bringing you back now?
Stacy Zapar: [00:36:00] Yeah. Um, that's fair. I was definitely speaking a lot. I was traveling a lot. Um, 2016, the last, you know, from like July until November, I was in 50 cities in five months, like I said. And, and home in between, I didn't even count that as a, as a city. So it was a lot, and I had little ones at the time, and my, my youngest was only five years old, and he needed a mom more.
And so that's when I pulled back and I started the talent agency, which is sort of the search arm of, of, of Tenfold. kept Tenfold going. I still would do training and stuff, but I was not out there as much certainly. And, um, but now my, my daughter's in-- She's a-- Yeah, someone asked me, "How old are your kids now?"
I'm like, "Okay," I goes, "I've been away for a while." But, uh, yeah, she's a junior in college and my son's a- about to be a sophomore in, um, high school. So I think my kids are, you know, at a place where mom can get back out there a little bit. And um, nothing has made me wanna like roll up, like up. I see recruiter shenanigans and all these things that are happening because of fraud, and I see the [00:37:00] fraud. Like this is ti-
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah
Stacy Zapar: go out there and help solve for this. And so it, it wasn't the easiest thing to come back onto LinkedIn after being away for a while. And I-- my social media hiatus felt good, and it just kind of kept going for a long time. But, you know, it's, it's good to be back. I've missed a lot of people in this industry, and it's really been rewarding to
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah. Yeah. Um, okay, tell us about the fireball. What's the story there?
Stacy Zapar: That was a Zappos thing. My very first day, they took me to Gold Spike, this little bar across the street. We all had Fireball. I'd never had it before, so it was kind of this thing that it was a tradition. Stacy comes, we're gonna go have Fireball shots at Gold Spike and play darts. so, um, when Mike and I spoke on stage together at Talent Connect that year, we both had a little Fireball in the back, and we had a little mini bottle like, "Hey, cheers."
This was like our little kind of memory lane thing. And so evidently a lot of people saw it. They took pictures. They were like, "Oh, look at their drinking right before their talk at LinkedIn. Who does that? You're gonna get in trouble." You know? I was like, "Yeah." And then, um, you know, the next year after that, I brought... [00:38:00] It kind of stuck. At Glassdoor, same thing. I was like, "I'm a little nervous. I'm gonna have a little nip here." I don't normally day drink or drink very much at all, but I was doing that at the time to cut my nerves. So anyway, it just kind of became a thing. And, um, the following year at LinkedIn, I just leaned into it.
I'm like, "Here's my Fireball mini bottle, you guys," and I'm drinking it right on the stage. They still had me back, so it worked out. But, um, yeah, after a while I would go to events and local events and big events, and it didn't matter. Out in the audience right in front, they'd all be standing out there holding up the little mini bottles.
It was a Fireball thing, so. then there was a Fireball incident in Vegas. I don't like it anymore and I don't drink it, so nobody send me Fireball
Colleen Gallagher: done with the fireball, just to be very clear. Yeah.
Stacy Zapar: a fun time while it lasted. Fireball used to follow me on Twitter and, you know, online and we'd talk. It
Colleen Gallagher: Oh my God. Hilarious. Now it's more of
Stacy Zapar: we get bubble water
Colleen Gallagher: what's the like... Yeah, or like what probiotic or some matcha or something
Stacy Zapar: Spritz girl these days
Colleen Gallagher: yeah, that sounds amazing. Um, okay, one, one question I like to ask [00:39:00] is, um, as, as we wrap up here is if you, if you met yourself a day or two after graduation, what advice would you give yourself, you know, knowing what you know now?
Stacy Zapar: I would say These kind of go together. But I would say take more risks. You're gonna regret the things you didn't do way more than the things that you did do. didn't launch my business until I was 40, 39, 40 years old. Um, now I'm telling you my age exactly 'cause it was 2012. But anyway, but... that everything has been so great, but up until then, it never even occurred to me to go off on my own and do my thing and kind of believe in myself and kind of chart my own path.
And so, um, I don't know. If I had to look back, I might have tried it a little sooner and taken a few more risks and not always played it safe and, But you know, I've, I've taken plenty of risks along the way. I moved to San Diego, sight unseen, you know, with a guy I've been dating six months, who was a cute surfer dude, and now we're married 30 years later with two kids.
So it all works out and, um, you know, I think the risks are, if [00:40:00] they're calculated, I think they're not, they're, they're not to be kind of, um, shied away from necessarily automatically. Go ahead and, you
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah
Stacy Zapar: you know, especially when you're young, you can afford to mess up,
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah. Yeah
Stacy Zapar: are so much less than when you're at a certain age and you have a mortgage and you have kids and everything else.
Like, go for it.
Colleen Gallagher: that's a great answer. I love that. Um, all right, last question, hopefully easy. What do you do for fun outside of work?
Stacy Zapar: That's a good question. I like to, um, I like to-- This is so nerdy. I'm a gamer. I'm not an outside person, I'm an inside person. I like gaming, I like logic puzzles, I like Sudoku, I playing card games like Spades. I know this is all ridiculous. Um, I like to do yoga. I love to travel. I hope to retire in Europe, uh, not, you know, too far in the future.
I'd love to live in Spain or Portugal or France. Um, I have to live somewhere where you can surf, so there are very limited options in Europe.
Colleen Gallagher: ugh, my gosh, Stacy, I feel like I could talk to you forever. This was so much fun. Um, [00:41:00] so much good stuff to learn. So I think this will, will probably air the week that you're launching. Um,
Stacy Zapar: Awesome
Colleen Gallagher: so tell folks more about like how they can find you, how they can find and apply to the Fraud Squad.
Um, where can people find you?
Stacy Zapar: Yeah, absolutely. You can find me certainly on LinkedIn. I'm not back on any of the other social channels yet, although I did create accounts on each one for Fraud Squad. They have no followers yet. Um, LinkedIn's a good way to f- follow, to, to connect. Also, um, join Fran's Fraud Squad, obviously. It's joinfraudsquad.com. Um, you can, you know, learn more about what I do. I'm about to revamp my whole website, so don't look at it, um, you know, for a day or two. I have all these-- I woke up with this epiphany and- Yeah ... have all these great ideas. But, um, yeah, thisistentfold.com. Sorry, I hate to be all like promotional, but yeah, I'm, I'm around.
You guys can, can, uh, can
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah.
Stacy Zapar: Probably. So I'm excited to, to see what happens. I hope it really takes off, and I hope it really helps a lot of people,
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah
Stacy Zapar: the answers that they need and kind of work [00:42:00] together to, to, to stop it and, and let the good guys win, you
Colleen Gallagher: Yeah. Well, it's such a, it's, it's been so great having you on because I think there's so much valuable stuff that you know. Like, I can... You know, you talk about a lot of how you spend your free time solving, you know, puzzles and problem-solving, and, like, that obviously is very much coming through with this.
And so I can see that it's bringing you, um, you know, you're getting a lot of out of it and, and you feel very passionate about it. So we really appreciate you coming on and sharing those insights and, and, um, you know, just the learnings with, with our audience.
Stacy Zapar: Thank you for having me. I'm very flattered that you, that you, that you sought me out and found me. That's, that's very flattering. So thank you. I'm excited. This is my first real podcast since being back, my first speaking thing or anything,
Colleen Gallagher: Well, we're, I, I'm honored to have you on and, um, yeah, thank you again, uh, for joining.
Stacy Zapar: Thank you
Colleen Gallagher: All right. Thanks everyone to lis- who's listening. If you learned something or laughed today, please share this with your friends, [00:43:00] um, and colleagues, and thank you again for listening. Have a great one