Ropes - The trust layer for staffing

Earlier this year, Ropes founder and CEO Ken Schumacher joined SIA's Brian Wallens for a live webinar on candidate fraud in the Fortune 500. He was joined by Mike Brach, Contingent Workforce Program Manager for the Americas at PayPal, and Nick DiZoglio, Procurement Manager and Global External Workforce Compliance Lead at Biogen. The conversation covered three themes: the new normal of fraud, what fraud actually costs enterprises, and what a modern supplier checklist looks like in 2026.

The panel's message was direct: this is no longer a staffing firm problem. It's an industry problem, and the enterprises funding contingent programs are increasingly the ones driving the urgency.

The Numbers Are Moving in the Wrong Direction

SIA shared data from its Workforce Solutions Buyer Survey showing that 41% of contingent workforce program leaders reported challenges with candidate validation and fraud. The number rises sharply with company size: roughly a third of smaller firms flagged it as a concern, compared to 60% at the largest enterprises.

When the live audience was polled on how often candidate fraud comes up in their own conversations, more than 80% said it had come up in the last quarter. Half of those said it was coming up monthly or more. No one voted "never."

Ken's take: "You both have the real issue and the perception of it. More and more of the Fortune 500 are having conversations about this. It's ending up on RFPs."

Why Now? The Perfect Storm

Candidate fraud isn't new. Mike Brach noted that as far back as 2013, the person who showed up for a recorded video interview wasn't always the same person who had done the phone screen. But the scale and sophistication of what's happening today is different.

Three forces are converging:

AI tools are cheap and effective. Tools like Interview Coder and Cluely function as invisible teleprompters during live interviews, listening to questions and generating real-time scripted responses. These tools cost around $10 a month and are widely available. The bar to run a convincing proxy interview has never been lower.

Fraud networks are organized. Ken described active Facebook groups with tens of thousands of members openly advertising proxy interview services and discussing which staffing firms are easiest to penetrate.

"They're talking about which suppliers are the easiest to target to kind of break into these companies. It's bad stuff and it's wide open on the internet," says Schumacher

Remote work removed the last natural checkpoint.

Nick DiZoglio put it plainly: "I would love to know how many people do in-person interviews today still."

The shift to video conferencing eliminated one of the few fraud-resistant steps in the traditional hiring process.

The result, Ken noted, is baseline candidate fraud rates at the submission level that can reach 25% at some firms.

What Fraud Actually Costs

The panel broke costs into three buckets: operational drag (delayed projects, extended time-to-fill), core enterprise impact (data security risk, lost revenue), and trust and program erosion (deal loss, supplier consolidation).

Nick described the highest-stakes risk at Biogen: "It takes one person here to give an active directory to one of these bad actors pretending to be someone's IT group." A fraudulent worker who passes the interview process doesn't just waste hiring manager time. They become a potential insider threat with access to proprietary data and systems.

Mike added that enterprises are tracking this across every dimension: cyber exposure, financial risk, physical safety, and hiring manager satisfaction.

Nick also noted a pattern his team has caught: workers moonlighting at two or three companies simultaneously while submitting identical timecards.

"We're spending money for a guy or girl doing a 40-hour-a-week job, but they're also putting in the same timecard across town in a different company," says DiZoglio

On the supplier side, the cost is existential. Ken shared that enterprise programs are consolidating their supplier lists and using fraud posture as a selection criterion. A contingent leader from a Mag 7 company approached him at SIA's Collaboration X event and asked: "Are the staffing firms aware of this stuff? We are freaking out about this." That consolidation trend means the firms not investing in fraud prevention are increasingly the ones getting cut.

Nick put it bluntly: "I've suspended suppliers because of this, in the present and in the past, and I know I will in the future."

What the New Supplier Checklist Looks Like

The panel worked through a maturity spectrum from reactive to compliant to proactive.

Mike's assessment of where most suppliers currently sit: "Right now, reactive."

Ken described what the proactive approach looks like in practice with Ropes:

"From the moment a candidate's resume and profile hits the applicant tracking system, the work begins. And it doesn't finish even after onboarding," says Schumacher

This means automated pre-screening that does what good recruiters already do manually (LinkedIn consistency checks, AI-generated profile detection, connection count signals) but does it consistently and at scale. Prior to submittal, candidates are asked to prove their location, verify their identity, and pass 30 to 40 behavioral and technical signals. After onboarding, ongoing monitoring checks for consistency over time to catch bait-and-switch and moonlighting.

Nick's framing for what enterprises actually want from suppliers: "If the supplier says, 'Nick, we vetted these people down to the T, and this is what we do to all our candidates,' that's enough for me. I'm building that partnership."

The data bears it out on the supplier side too. Ken shared that firms using Ropes have seen interview pass rates jump by 20 to 25 points. When hiring managers see that candidates are consistently prepared and authentic, they request more candidates from those suppliers. The sub-to-interview ratio climbs with it.

On Legal Compliance and Candidate Experience

One of the more nuanced parts of the discussion touched on how verification technology has to balance security with fairness and privacy.

Ken was direct: "We are not in the business of stomping out fraudulent candidates. We're in the business of rewarding authentic ones."

Laws around AI-assisted screening are evolving fast, particularly in states like California and Colorado, and Ropes treats staying current on those regulations as a core product responsibility rather than a client obligation.

On the candidate experience question, Ken made a point that often gets lost in the fraud conversation: authentic candidates benefit from this technology. AI-generated resumes currently rank highest on Boolean VMS searches, which means legitimate candidates are being screened out before a human ever sees their profile. Verification creates a path for real candidates to differentiate themselves. Some of Ropes' largest customers are actively building candidate assessment histories as a form of loyalty and sourcing advantage.

Nick added a simple framing: "If you don't want it done as a candidate, you have the option of opting out. But if it's a trustworthy partner you've been building a relationship with over years, they're gonna buy into it."

The Optimistic Take

Despite the scope of the problem, the panel closed on a note of genuine optimism.

Ken: "If everybody was running these checks today, there would be way less fraud in staffing. Interview pass across the entire industry would be way up. And as a result, more hiring managers would turn to contingent as a place to go for talent."

The technology is deployable in weeks, not months. The firms leaning into it early are already seeing measurable competitive advantage on RFPs, in program consolidation decisions, and in hiring manager confidence.

The first step Ken recommended for any mid-market firm watching: just run the diagnostics. Find out what your baseline fraud rate actually is.

"A lot of the tools, one of the nice things is you can turn them on and very quickly realize whether 10%, 20%, or 40% of your submissions are showing areas of fraud. Knowing your baseline numbers helps you know how big of an issue you're dealing with," says Schumacher