I Created a Fake Perfect Job Candidate. Here's What Happened.

It Gets Late Early

Host Maureen Wiley-Clough interviews career expert Emily Durham about a recent experiment where she created a perfectly crafted fake LinkedIn profile named Stephanie and applied to 40 jobs. The results

Key takeaways

• Emily Durham's fake candidate Stephanie received a 44% response rate on Indeed but zero replies from companies on LinkedIn within two weeks, highlighting platform-specific hiring realities.
• Pre-qualifying application questions often function as instant AI disqualifiers, forcing candidates to strategically answer them even if it means bending the truth about salary or availability.

Main topics

• Fake perfect candidate experiment results
• AI in applicant tracking systems and ATS myths

Notable quotes

Recruiters don't really read resumes. They scan them.

Conclusion

The episode provides actionable, reality-grounded strategies for job seekers to navigate an increasingly opaque hiring

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) There's this huge narrative, largely using this study as backing, that essentially any company using AI in their applicant tracking system is automatically disadvantaging your resume for X, Y, or Z. That's like the very, very, very high level. The reality is... Speaker 2 (0:18) You are listening to It Gets Late Early, the show where we get real about getting older in the workplace. Whether you want to find a new job, keep the one you have, or make a career pivot, we've got you covered. I'm your host, Maureen Wiley-Clough, and we're not getting any younger, so let's dive in. Speaker 2 (0:37) Emily Durham, better known as Emily the Recruiter. She's known to what, 3 million plus people as Emily the Recruiter. And she was a corporate recruiter turned content creator turned bestselling author of the new book, which is called Clock In. Same name as her podcast. And we're going to talk all about the. really wonderful hot trash job market that we're seeing today. Emily's specialty is like really just real talk kind of career advice and the anti sort of, I would say probably like the anti girl boss mentality and just like really giving you the tough love about what's going on. So welcome, Emily. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so Speaker 1 (1:15) stinking excited to be here. Speaker 2 (1:16) I'm so glad you're here. And I want to kick off with a very, very cool thing that you recently did that I think is going to cut. so deep for so many of the people in my audience. You decided recently on social media that you were going to run this experiment. And the experiment was essentially you were going to create the perfect candidate on paper and on LinkedIn and see what happened. Tell us, tell us what did you find out about the state of 2026 with this experiment? Speaker 1 (1:45) You know things are bad when I'm having to become like the mad scientist and just figuring out what the hell is going on. So I decided a few weeks back to create an entirely made up LinkedIn profile and resume. And when I tell you made up, I'm talking like this is a perfectly crafted, the experience couldn't be better type of candidate. I was even like customizing the application for every single role that I applied to. And essentially the goal was... to see if just applying is enough these days. And if so, do different platforms behave differently than others? So my wonderful gal, her name is Stephanie, my made up girl. Don't waste your time looking her up on LinkedIn because spoiler alert, she's been reported, but we will get there. it got a little salacious. So essentially, I decided to apply to 40 positions on a variety of different job platforms, everything from direct on the company's job application to Indeed, as well as LinkedIn, and just saw what happened. The crazy thing was within the first 30 seconds of applying, I did get several automatic declines, which my suspicion is actually because I was applying to jobs where I met all of the qualifications, but I actually intentionally answered some of the pre-qualifying questions slightly off from what they were looking for. So if the salary band was like $60,000 to $70,000, I put $72,000. Get an instant decline from companies like that. So there were some interesting learnings, one of which being those pre-qualifier questions. You kind of got to lie your way through because those are those automatic disqualifiers more than any other AI screening. But what was really interesting was the lack of responses. So within the first two weeks, I had only received between, I think, six and eight responses. Speaker 1 (3:34) from companies. And most of those were actually declines. Keep in mind, this is like a suspiciously perfect profile. So if this is what she's getting, girl, what's happening for the rest of us? We're in big trouble. We're in big trouble. So as time passed, a couple of really interesting kind of learnings popped out from this. I actually did get a really decent response rate from one platform and a really crummy response rate from another. On LinkedIn, I heard back from a total of zero companies. Get out. Not Speaker 2 (4:03) one Speaker 1 (4:03) company. Now, I did end up getting, I got a couple declines, which is fine. I take that as a win. There's nothing wrong with, you know, at least if I know where I'm in in the process, that's fine. So I did get a couple of declines from LinkedIn, but majority of them I did not hear back from. And I will never know if I heard back because I believe someone either reported the profile or perhaps, you know, a recruiter from a company was like, oh. I think I've seen this viral post. Let's report this account. So my Speaker 2 (4:30) girl, Stephanie, rest in paradise. Found out, huh? Spotted. She got Speaker 1 (4:34) got. It got real sad for her. But I will focus on a couple of the positives. I had a 44 % response rate on Indeed within the first two and a half weeks of applying for jobs. And we're not talking like lifetime. That's two and a half weeks. Pretty quick, the recruitment cycle can naturally take longer than that. And all of the interview invitations that I got were from Indeed. And this entire experiment is not sponsored in any capacity. But I did find a very, very stark difference between Indeed and other job application platforms in the responses. But the TLDR is, I saw a lot of that. I saw a lot of fake job postings on certain sites. So many of those. And Speaker 2 (5:14) a lot of ghosting, like a shit ton of ghosting. Speaker 1 (5:18) Isn't that crazy? Speaker 2 (5:19) That is wild. That is wild. I mean, I know ghost jobs are just an absolutely massive problem. I know that there are states like New York who actually have some initiatives that are sitting to be signed on their governor's desks about eradicating ghost jobs and making there be penalties to companies who actually put them out there into the ether. And in some cases, I would imagine even just like data farm this stuff, like just so gross and so awful. But the fact that you didn't, I mean, the LinkedIn versus Indeed. sort of aspect to this is really striking. Like I'm kind of shook from that. Speaker 1 (5:51) So am I. And I will say like, this is a 40 job sample over the course of an isolated period in one city. There are a lot of variables and I've actually had great success with LinkedIn in my own career. So it's not, I try to think of it as it's not actually as much of a reflection on the platforms themselves as it is the jobs. So it really is about the company, whether it's LinkedIn or Indeed or, you know. I was going to say Workopolis. What year is it? Good God. Like, hello. That's terrifying. But it really is more about the company that you're applying to. But I will say, like, there were some product benefits on the Indeed side, including you get a page where you see the step status of each of the jobs you've applied to in one place, including application reviewed, moving to next steps. You don't get that on other platforms. So there were some other things where I was like, OK. I see the use case. It was pretty harrowing. It was a pretty harrowing experience. So I would say that the takeaway shouldn't be overscrewed. The takeaway is we have to be super strategic with the companies we are applying to. And this just reconfirmed what many of us know. It's applying and networking, not one or the other. And Speaker 2 (7:00) as long as you know that, that's okay. Right? It's just a different ballgame now. It's always, and I feel like it's always been networking is the way to go. Like I think about... My career history in corporate and almost every single job I got was through some sort of connection, whether that was me finding a job I was interested in online and being like, who let me sleuth here. Let me figure out who I know who knows someone else and like maybe kind of like back into who the hiring manager was. Right. And then get the intro like that. That worked so much more frequently than just like a blind application into the void. Right. So that that totally strikes true for me. But the other aspect of what you did that I really want to dig into is. like the concept of the perfect candidate. Like you have sat on the other side of the table. So you have a sense of like who is going to make it through these various levels of interviewing and actually secure the job at the end of the day. So talk to us about like, how did you come up with the concept of the Speaker 1 (7:52) perfect candidate? Oh my gosh. And what a thought this is. It felt like plastic surgery, but for careers. It was kind of nuts, Speaker 2 (8:00) right? Speaker 1 (8:01) Like it was just funky and freaky and weird. So I think my big thing is like, I wasn't going to spend 100 hours customizing every single piece of this person or having six different LinkedIn profiles. So what I did is what I recommend people do at home in their job search. Look at the types of jobs you're applying to and really look at that job description. What are the requirements they are actually looking for? And the ones that are consistent themes across all of the jobs that you're targeting, those are the things that need to show up on your resume and on your LinkedIn. So that's really where I came up with the bones of this. I knew Stephanie was, may she rest, like a mid-level marketing analyst. She needed to be great with data, great on the creative side, and have a little bit of out-of-home and digital marketing campaign management. Because that's what came up. in her job descriptions. So that's where I kind of reverse engineered the resume to make sure all of those keywords were there. So if you're listening to this thinking, how the hell do I do this for myself? What's the dream job? Okay, let's look at that job description. What are the requirements for that position? And how do you make sure you're showcasing clearly examples of how you have that? And so that was really like the work back plan. And some of the other things I did were like entirely unethical. I got like a stock image. of a person and put that like, it got freaky, freaky, freaky. And one of the big comments that I got from people was, Speaker 2 (9:22) okay, well, we made Stephanie a white woman. How do the results vary if she's not white? How does the results vary if Speaker 1 (9:29) she's a man? Like, Speaker 2 (9:30) so Speaker 1 (9:31) there's all of these different layers that we'll definitely be running more experiments on. Yes. But it was fascinating. Speaker 2 (9:38) I can only imagine. And yes, I would be super keen to hear, you know, how do these other sort of perfect candidates fare in this sort of a similar process that you're doing, right? Because you're really learning from the job descriptions themselves, which is, I think, always the best way to back into how do you present yourself in the best light? Like, it's pretty much like just common sense and basic, right? It's like, how do you look through all this, parse what is important to this company, and then... take whatever it is you've done and speak about what you can bring to the company, right? So that all totally tracks for me. And I wonder too, because I mean, obviously the people that we speak to in this audience particularly are usually mid to late career. And many of them are actually over the ripe old age of 40, which in the United States of America is a protected class, meaning we are quote. older workers. So yeah, millennials, I'm talking to you. I know it's like very strange to consider ourselves as older, but we are in the eyes of the law older. So I wonder also what it would look like if you were to shift the years of experience with this candidate and whether there would be a difference between the younger Stephanie and the over 40 Stephanie on that alone, right? If it's the graduation date that just kind of like gives it away because most college graduates are probably like what average 22, 23, something like that. Speaker 1 (10:50) One hundred percent. And then you also wonder with that additional experience that folks who are over 40 have, does the compensation change with it? Because here's what I will say. The salary ranges I saw were messed Speaker 2 (11:02) up. Speaker 1 (11:03) I was looking at jobs requesting and this is like breaking news. The sky is blue. But jobs that were looking at, you know, seven, eight, nine years of experience. Why was the base salary fifty one thousand dollars in a city? I based it out of where I am, which is Toronto, where average cost of living is 90K and above. Yep. Make that make sense. Make it make sense. Yeah. And I think Speaker 2 (11:25) there's absolutely that sort of bias or even the assumption of like, oh, you're older and more experienced. You're probably going to cost more. Well, yeah, you freaking deserve it. But there's not that sort of math being done on the other side of the table often. Right. And they have the amount of budget that they have available. And I imagine and in fact, you should tell us it's like when you're on the other side of the table. As a recruiter, like there's so many things that you're privy to, you understand sort of the process for what it is and the type of candidate who's going to sail through versus who isn't. Like what are some of the things that happen on that other side of the table that we might not be thinking about in the right way? And how can we tweak the way we approach job searching to make it more likely that we actually, A, get an at-bat and get our foot in the door enough for at least the initial interview, and B, make it all the way through to the offer point? Speaker 1 (12:10) What a good question. I would say the first thing is actually a mindset adjustment. Recruiters are experts in recruiting. I recruited for executive level finance all the way to entry level software engineering. None of those jobs are jobs I have personally occupied. So how a recruiter is assessing your resume in your interview is either based off of what they've done on their own research, off of the job description, or off of what the manager has told them. What that means for how you write your resume and how you show up in interviews is focus less on the technical and more on being a great storyteller. So even if your role is highly technical, coming in and saying, oh, the ABCD for the EFG was blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That might not mean anything to someone who hasn't done that work. But if you focus on telling a story, my team identified a problem where our revenue was below 30 % of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. In order to break even, we needed to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you tell a story