Google, McKinsey, and Cisco Bring Back In-Person Interviews as Hiring Fraud Surges

Google brought it back. So did McKinsey and Cisco. After a decade of telling candidates the video screen was just as good, some of the most sophisticated employers in the world are once again flying people in, putting them in a conference room, and watching them answer questions in the flesh.

The official reason is fraud. According to industry survey data, 72 percent of recruiting leaders now run in-person interviews specifically to weed out fake candidates, a category that barely existed three years ago. Deepfake video, cloned voices, and real-time answer generators have made the remote interview easy to game, and hiring teams know it.

Nobody should mistake this for progress. It's a retreat.

What the conference room actually verifies

The in-person mandate buys one thing: confirmation that the person in the room has a pulse and matches their photo. That's identity verification, and it matters. It just doesn't tell you whether that person can do the job. The unstructured interview, in person or on Zoom, is a weak predictor of performance. Decades of selection research say so. Moving it back into a conference room doesn't fix the instrument. It just makes it more expensive.

The bill comes due in the funnel

The costs are real. Travel budgets come back. Time to hire stretches. Candidates in smaller markets, people with caregiving obligations, anyone who can't take a day off to fly across the country, all quietly fall out of the pipeline. Companies spent years widening their talent pools through remote hiring, and now the fraud panic is shrinking those pools again, one boarding pass at a time.

Then there's what this signals to candidates. The honest majority now absorbs the suspicion earned by the fraudulent few. Applicants are asked to reposition cameras, submit to extra verification rounds, and travel, sometimes on their own dime, to prove they exist. The squeeze is set to tighten. Gartner projects that deepfake attacks will leave 30 percent of enterprises unable to trust identity verification tools on their own this year. More layers are coming, not fewer. Each layer adds friction for people who did nothing wrong. In a market where strong candidates still hold options, the companies with the most cumbersome verification gauntlets will watch their best applicants finish someone else's process first.

Verification and prediction are two different jobs

There's a better answer, and it isn't a new one. Verified, proctored assessment does what the in-person interview is being asked to do, at scale, without the airfare. A candidate who completes a monitored, validated evaluation proves two things at once: that they are who they say they are, and that they can actually perform. The interview confirms the first and guesses at the second. Assessment does both, and the second part is the one that predicts a good hire.

The companies reverting to in-person rounds are responding to a real problem with an old tool. The problem is that the artifacts of hiring, the resume, the video call, the polished answer, can now all be manufactured. Bringing everyone back into the room just moves the theater to a live venue. The fix is to stop relying on theater.