There is a delicious absurdity at the heart of modern corporate life, and it deserves to be named with the unembarrassed candour of a man who has wasted too many evenings on it. When I began building superscaled.com, I carried the standard-issue conviction of every founder loitering in the recruitment-AI bazaar: that hiring is fundamentally a search problem. Somewhere, one is assured, lurks a top-one-percent engineer buried beneath ninety-nine pretenders; and if one merely constructs a sufficiently clever ranking function — embeddings here, agents there, a soupçon of LLM garnish for the investors — the needle shall rise obediently from the haystack. It is a comforting belief. It is also, I regret to report, a load of old cobblers.
The disillusionment arrived by instalments, as the better class of catastrophe prefers to do. With thecohort.ai, we built deep-research agents to vet candidates properly — trawling GitHub, LinkedIn, publications, career histories — expecting them to answer the rather wholesome question is this person any good? Instead, with lugubrious regularity, they kept answering an older and more anxious one: is this person real, and is this work actually theirs?
Repositories that were forks wearing false moustaches — stars and commits cloned wholesale, READMEs rewritten overnight, contribution graphs that resembled a cardiogram of genius until five minutes of git archaeology revealed the patient had been dead for years. Employment histories with the structural integrity of a soufflé: titles that never existed at companies that did, tenures overlapping in physically impossible ways, “references” who turned out to be the candidate under a different LinkedIn epidermis. Profiles so pristine they could only have been assembled in a laboratory — the uncanny valley of a career, every bullet polished, every skill endorsed, nothing that smells faintly of a human life. The moment you build hiring software with even a modicum of honesty, you discover that recruitment is not a talent-scarcity problem at all. It is a trust problem wearing a talent-scarcity costume and hoping nobody asks for papers.
I keep saying this to people who still wish to discuss embeddings as though embeddings were the point. Matching is frightfully easy once you believe the inputs. The hard part — the part that ate our roadmap, our evals, and any remaining claim I had to a social life — was learning to distrust the inputs without becoming so cynically constipated that the product refused to hire anyone at all.
Down the rabbit hole, and rather further than Alice
Once your own pipeline shows you the rot, you cannot unsee it — rather like discovering that the champagne has been watered, except the champagne is your entire industry. So I went spelunking through the category. Juicebox, Mercor, Gem, Ashby — the whole gleaming shelf of AI recruitment tooling, ours included — is engaged in an arms race to build faster, cleverer matching engines. But matching is only as good as the substrate, and the substrate, dear reader, is curdling.
Gartner projects that by 2028, one in four candidate profiles worldwide will be fake — a projection, mind you, not a census, and one must treat vendor forecasts with the same scepticism one reserves for wedding toasts, but the direction of travel is scarcely in dispute. In its 2025 survey of 3,000 candidates, 6% cheerfully admitted to interview fraud, either impersonating someone or deploying a proxy — and if six per cent will confess to a survey, one shudders to imagine what the remaining ninety-four are up to. Pindrop reports deepfake fraud attempts rose more than 1,300% in 2024 — from roughly one a month to seven a day. At that velocity, the deepfake will soon require its own LinkedIn Premium tier.
Consider what this does to the category. Garbage in, exquisitely ranked garbage out — the computational equivalent of arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic alphabetically. The biggest dent in these companies is not a competitor with a shinier model; it is the quiet epistemic collapse of the data they rank. Every recruitment-AI firm believes its moat is retrieval quality. The actual moat — the only one that matters — is a trust layer. Nobody put that in the pitch deck. Pitch decks, as a rule, prefer adjectives to plumbing.
The penny drops, somewhere around the fourth espresso
And then the connection assembled itself with the sudden clarity of a man who has finally understood a joke told against him. If fraud is what breaks recruitment software, what does it do to the psyche of a board that employs three hundred thousand strangers it has never once clapped eyes on in person?
It terrifies them. And that terror, I submit, is the true engine of the great return-to-office fiasco — that lugubrious morality play presently being staged across the fluorescent prairies of corporate America and, with rather less subtlety, the Outer Ring Road. The RTO mandate is not a productivity strategy. It is a lie detector with a cafeteria and a foosball table.
The paradox, stated properly
Let us be fair to the numbers first, for I am not a coward and the numbers are inconveniently hostile to my thesis. Working from home is, by every dry actuarial measure a chief financial officer holds sacred, cheaper. Nicholas Bloom of Stanford — the discipline's patron saint, its Newton, its rather more cheerful Cassandra — ran a randomised trial at Trip.com, published in Nature in 2024: across 1,612 employees, hybrid work cut attrition by a third (4.7% versus 7.2%) with no measurable impact on performance reviews, promotions, or lines of code. Employees value the arrangement at roughly 8% of salary. Remote work has stabilised at about a quarter of American paid workdays — “flat as a pancake,” in Bloom's memorable phrase — and some four-fifths of the Fortune 500 have settled into a three-two hybrid, that most unromantic of peace treaties.
The pièce de résistance: Ding and Ma at the University of Pittsburgh examined all 137 S&P 500 firms that announced RTO mandates and found declining employee satisfaction but “no significant changes in financial performance or firm values.” Mandates clustered, deliciously, among firms with poor prior stock performance helmed by assertive male chief executives fond of reasserting control — a finding so on-the-nose one suspects the data of having read the room. The share price does not move. The employees merely suffer. One is tempted to call this a policy. One should call it a tantrum with a PowerPoint.
So if RTO doesn't pay, and WFH is cheaper, why the perfidious insistence on the commute? Ah. Here the plot thickens, and the official explanations begin to smell faintly of something left too long in the corporate fridge.
The official liturgy
Andy Jassy gave us the canonical scripture in September 2024, summoning Amazonians back five days a week from January 2025: being together makes it “easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture.” Culture. Collaboration. Serendipity. The holy trinity of every RTO press release ever drafted by a communications department at gunpoint. One is tempted to believe them. One should resist, as one resists complimentary mints at a restaurant that has just overcharged you.
The congregation was unmoved. A Blind survey of 2,585 verified Amazon staff found 91% dissatisfied and 73% considering departure; a leaked internal poll reportedly scored the policy 1.4 out of 5 — which, for those keeping score at home, is the sort of rating usually reserved for airline food and parliamentary question hour. Jassy was obliged to deny, at an all-hands, that the mandate was a backdoor layoff — a denial that tells you precisely what everyone suspected — while his cloud chief assured us that “nine out of ten” people were rather excited, a statistic apparently sourced from the same aquifer as most executive optimism and the annual rainfall forecasts of the Meteorological Department.
Then there is the property angle, at least honest in its naked self-interest. Jamie Dimon erected a $3 billion tower on Park Avenue and, not coincidentally, wishes it populated. Economists fret about the “urban doom loop”: empty offices, collapsing commercial real estate, eroding municipal tax bases, regional banks marinating in CRE exposure like pickles in brine. When the largest commercial tenant in New York insists young people belong at their desks, one may be forgiven for wondering whether he worries about their mentorship or his mortgage. Mentorship, one notices, is rarely mentioned when the bond covenants come due.
The Bengaluru wrinkle
Here at home the story wears different clothing but shares the same rather bony skeleton. Bengaluru's 2025 office leasing hit an all-time record of 24.1 million square feet per JLL, with technology firms leading demand — a triumph of square footage over common sense, if one may be ungentle. Companies sit atop enormous leases and SEZ commitments whose tax advantages presume physical occupancy; empty SEZ floors are not merely melancholy, they are fiscally awkward, which in Indian corporate life is a far more persuasive emotion. And so the majors marched in lockstep — Infosys mandating ten office days a month with app-based attendance, TCS lashing variable pay to turnstile data, HCLTech nodding along with the solemnity of a wedding guest who has forgotten the couple's names — while an unspoken macroeconomic argument hums beneath: tens of thousands of returned commuters prop up the micro-economies of rents, metro fares, and the noble lunch-thali vendor. All true. All real. And all, I submit, downstream of something older and more primal than any SEZ circular.
The unspeakable thesis: it was never about culture
Here is what leadership actually fears, whispered after the synergy slides are put away and the last consultant has been paid to say “synergy” aloud: they no longer trust that the person on the payroll is doing the work, is qualified for the work, or is even the person they hired. Trust, not talent scarcity, is the real bottleneck of modern hiring. The last three years furnished a parade of horrors so extravagant that a Victorian novelist would have rejected them as overegged. Permit me a brief rogues' gallery.
Soham Parekh, patron saint of the overemployed
In July 2025, Suhail Doshi of Playground AI posted the tweet heard round Silicon Valley, warning founders about an engineer “preying on YC companies” by working three or four startups simultaneously — a feat of calendrical gymnastics that makes the average Indian auntie's wedding season look leisurely. The post detonated past twenty million views; founders from Lindy, Antimetal and Fleet AI confessed they too had hired and fired the man, rather in the manner of diners discovering they have all been served the same undercooked chicken. A tracker documented at least 19 jobs since 2021. Parekh went on a podcast and admitted the lot, pleading dire finances and claiming — with a straight face that deserves its own Emmy — 140-hour weeks. Doshi alleged roughly 90% of his CV was fabricated; Georgia Tech confirmed no record of his claimed master's. The r/overemployed subreddit crowned him king. The lesson boards drew was not “we are bad at management,” that being an admission no board has ever voluntarily issued. It was: he passed every screen we had, and still we were fooled.
The North Koreans at the next desk
If Parekh was farce, this is tragedy — and of a particularly geopolitical flavour. Since 2022 the FBI and DOJ have unravelled schemes in which thousands of North Korean IT workers, using stolen American identities, secured remote jobs at hundreds of US firms — Fortune 100 included — with wages funnelled to Pyongyang's weapons programme. The mechanism is a marvel of perfidy: “laptop farms,” wherein a complicit American receives the company laptop and lets an operative log in from overseas while appearing to toil from Tennessee. Even KnowBe4 — a security-awareness training company, one notes, with the grim comedy of a locksmith whose own door has been jemmied — hired one such actor as a principal engineer in 2024 after four video interviews; he used an AI-altered photograph and attempted to install malware on day one. Facilitators have since drawn federal sentences of nine-plus years for farms exploiting the identities of over eighty Americans across more than a hundred companies. The State Department offers up to $5 million for tips. If your CEO seems twitchy about who is behind the webcam, this — and not the sacred mystery of “culture” — is why.
The interview is now theatre
The gate itself is compromised. Roy Lee, suspended from Columbia for building a tool to cheat technical interviews, promptly raised millions for Cluely, an “undetectable” assistant whose manifesto urges users to “cheat on everything” — a mission statement of such refreshing honesty that one almost respects it, rather as one respects a pickpocket who tips his hat. Proxy interviewing — one person interviews, another shows up — has graduated from rumour to business model, industrialised by the H-1B body shops and bench-sales consultancies that coach fresh graduates into claiming eight years of experience, and which have drawn DOJ prosecutions for fabricating jobs outright. Meanwhile the onboarding gap yawns like a plot hole in a bad thriller: one human aces the interview, a different human with a matching ID collects the shipped laptop, and the company builds a perfectly normal employee record around the wrong person. Kafka would have found it overdetermined.
The Indian reckoning
In 2022 Wipro fired 300 employees for moonlighting; Rishad Premji called the practice “cheating, plain and simple” — a phrase of such bracing directness that one almost forgot one was reading corporate India. Infosys circulated stern warnings against two-timing. And the verification data is genuinely alarming: AuthBridge's 2025 fraud files found a 9.46% discrepancy rate in IT/ITES hiring, 18.8% résumé misrepresentation, and one in twenty candidates caught moonlighting — atop a cottage industry selling fabricated experience letters from companies that conveniently no longer exist, having dissolved with the discretion of a bad house guest. Fake experience certificates remain, in this republic, one of our more durable cottage crafts.
And the classic
None of this is new; it is merely faster, cheaper, and available as a SaaS. In 2013 Verizon's security team immortalised “Bob,” a developer at a US critical-infrastructure firm rated “the best developer in the building” — until VPN logs showed his credentials dialling in from Shenyang. Bob had FedExed his RSA token to a Chinese consultancy, paid them a fifth of his salary to do his job, and spent his days on cat videos. A one-man r/overemployed, a decade early, and proof that the only thing modern fraud has innovated is the shipping method.
The office as an exceedingly expensive lie detector
Once you see the pattern, the mandate stops resembling strategy and starts resembling biometric verification by other means. If the body is in the building, it is probably the body you hired, probably not servicing three other employers, and cannot easily FedEx its identity to Shenyang. The office solves the trust problem the way a sledgehammer solves a walnut: expensively, indiscriminately, and with considerable collateral damage to everyone who did nothing wrong — which is to say, most people, who are now punished for the ingenuity of a few.
The alternative firms reach for is worse. Bossware — keystroke logging, screenshot harvesting, webcam phrenology of a sort that would have embarrassed a Victorian phrenologist — corrodes the very trust it polices. Surveyed employees overwhelmingly report it improves nothing, damages morale, and hastens their departure. Surveillance is not verification. It is the anxiety of verification, performed daily, at scale, and billed as productivity software. One may as well install a bathroom attendant to improve code quality.
In fairness: the case for the office
I promised balance, and I shall keep the promise even if it pains me. The office does things Slack cannot. Onboarding a graduate — the tacit, over-the-shoulder apprenticeship of a first job — is genuinely harder remotely. Weak ties, mentorship, the serendipitous corridor collision that occasionally produces an idea rather than a coffee stain: real, and their absence compounds slowly, like interest on a loan one forgot to mention. Data security is easier inside a controlled perimeter, and for genuinely fraud-prone or safety-critical work, physical presence is a control. Even Bloom concedes coordinated in-person days help. The office is not stupid. It is merely a blunt instrument being sold to us as a scalpel by people who have never held either.
The case against — and it is the stronger one
But the mandate is losing on the merits, which is awkward for those who prefer merits not to interfere with policy. Amazon's own aftermath is the cautionary tale: surveys found nearly half of employees applying elsewhere, with senior and principal engineers — the hardest to replace, the ones who actually know where the bodies are buried in the codebase — departing at disproportionate rates, while roughly a quarter of executives elsewhere have quietly admitted RTO was designed to make people quit. That is not culture-building; it is attrition with a press release and a free bagel. And looming over it all, the Pittsburgh finding stands like a tombstone in a field of PowerPoints: you inflict the pain, lose the women and senior talent who most prize flexibility, and the share price does not so much as twitch. Control, it turns out, is its own reward — and rather an expensive one.
The grown-ups: firms that solved trust without a lobby
Here is the part that should embarrass every executive hiding behind “collaboration” like a schoolboy behind a prefect's blazer. Some companies simply solved the trust problem and never needed the building. They did not issue memos. They built systems.
GitLab has been all-remote since 2014 — 1,500-plus people across sixty-odd countries, zero offices, not so much as a complimentary foosball table — governed by a public handbook of over two thousand pages and a manifesto prioritising “writing down and recording knowledge over verbal explanations.” When everything is written, output is legible; and legible output is its own verification, which is a good deal cheaper than a Park Avenue atrium. Automattic runs some 1,300 people across seventy-seven countries on Matt Mullenweg's creed of assuming positive intent; Zapier has been distributed since 2011 on ferocious async discipline — as Wade Foster puts it, with the bluntness of a man who has earned the right, “you have to commit to writing things down.”
The common thread: they manage outputs, not attendance, and they hire on demonstrated work rather than vibes — which the selection-research literature has said for decades predicts performance far better than an unstructured chat, and is vastly harder to fake than a CV padded with the tears of imaginary managers. The classic Schmidt & Hunter meta-analysis pegged work-sample tests among the most predictive tools; later revisions (Roth, Sackett) have dialled the coefficients down, but the point survives the statistical quibbling: watching someone actually do the work beats an unstructured chat, and it is much harder to fake than a résumé composed at three in the morning with ChatGPT's assistance and a prayer.
What these firms share is not a vibe of “trust everyone,” that being the managerial equivalent of leaving the vault open and calling it culture. It is infrastructure that makes trust checkable. A public handbook is not culture theatre; it is an audit log of how decisions get made. Async writing is not a lifestyle brand; it is a verification surface. Work samples are not a cute take-home; they are a fraud-resistant signal. The remote natives did not abolish accountability. They moved it from the badge swipe to the artefact — which is where, if one is being honest, it always belonged.
The actual solution: verify the human, then trust them
This is where my two startups and the world's RTO tantrum converge on the same unglamorous answer. Trust, unlike office leases, is a solvable engineering problem — which is to say it requires engineers, not sermons. The emerging stack, for those who prefer substance to liturgy:
- Identity bound across the funnel — document authentication plus liveness detection, so the interviewee and the onboardee are provably one person. The laptop-farm and proxy-interview tricks both exploit the gap between these two moments, rather as a stage magician exploits the gap between what you watch and what you assume.
- Continuous verification rather than a one-time onboarding ritual — moonlighting and credential-sharing are ongoing risks, not day-one events, and treating them as a checkbox at hiring is rather like checking the locks once and declaring the burglars defeated.
- Work-sample and structured assessment over credential theatre — harder to fake, better predictors of performance, and mercifully less dependent on the candidate's gift for narrative fiction.
- Deepfake detection inside the interview itself — tools like Truely and BrightHire's fraud detection now wired into Zoom. Video KYC, once a banking chore inflicted on people opening savings accounts, is coming for hiring, because it must — the alternative being to continue interviewing ghosts.
This is precisely the conclusion the rabbit hole forced upon us at superscaled and The Cohort, after rather more coffee than was medically advisable: the winning recruitment product is not a better ranking function. It is a trust layer with a ranking function attached, rather as a good restaurant is a kitchen with a dining room attached, and not the other way round.
The future of office work, as philosophy
So what becomes of the office? Not death — Bloom's pancake will not flip to zero, and the property lobby will not permit it in any case — but demotion. The office ceases to be where work is done and becomes where trust is renewed: onboarding weeks, quarterly gatherings, the deliberate cultivation of apprenticeship and weak ties that genuinely require flesh. Hybrid stabilises, as it already has, at two or three coordinated days — not a grand philosophy but the treaty line where the war of attrition reached equilibrium, rather like the Korean peninsula, only with better coffee.
The firms that thrive will be those that stop confusing presence with proof. The office was never a productivity tool; it was a trust prosthesis — a fantastically expensive, real-estate-intensive way of being reasonably sure that the person drawing the salary was the person doing the job. Once you can verify identity, verify skill, and measure output directly, the prosthesis becomes optional. You keep it for the human warmth, not the surveillance. One does not, after all, keep a wheelchair for the aesthetic once one can walk.
Looking ahead, the stack gets sharper, not softer. Continuous identity — cryptographic binding of a human to every credential, device, and session — will become table stakes, the way MFA did, after sufficient public humiliation. Hiring pipelines will treat fraud detection as a first-class subsystem rather than an HR afterthought: liveness at application, again at offer, again at device issuance, with the same biometric and document graph binding all three. Deepfake detection will move from a vendor checkbox into the interview platform itself, the way spam filters moved into email. Background verification will stop being a post-offer ritual that arrives three weeks late — like a wedding gift from a relative who never liked you — and start being a live signal in the funnel.
For recruitment products specifically, the category will bifurcate with the Darwinian clarity of a Victorian novel. Matching engines without a trust layer will keep ranking forgeries with exquisite precision and wonder why customers churn — rather like a sommelier who can rank vinegar by vineyard. The survivors will look less like search and more like KYC married to talent intelligence: identity, provenance of work, continuous employment integrity, then ranking. That is the product I now believe we should have been building from day one. Matching is the garnish. Trust is the meal. I spent rather too long polishing the garnish.
Output-based management will spread beyond the remote natives, because it is the only management style that scales past the walls of a building. And the office, freed of its detective duties, can finally do the job it is good at: making strangers into colleagues. Two or three coordinated days for apprenticeship, conflict, and the weak ties that Slack never quite invents. The rest of the week belonging to whoever can prove they shipped — a criterion of such shocking simplicity that one wonders why it required a pandemic, a fraud epidemic, and several billion dollars of wasted real estate to rediscover.
For leaders deciding RTO right now, the practical version is blunt, and I shall not sugar it. Stop using the office as a lie detector — if your fear is fraud or moonlighting, name it and solve it, rather than dressing it up as culture and hoping the juniors do not notice. Invest in a verification stack before a real-estate one. Hire on work samples. Avoid bossware; it is the anxiety of verification, performed daily, and it accelerates attrition among the people you can least afford to lose. Adopt structured hybrid as the compromise the market has already reached, and treat senior-talent attrition after a mandate as the alarm it is — not as a culture-building victory, and certainly not as evidence that the remaining souls are “aligned.”
Mr Jassy may march his hundreds of thousands back to their assigned desks, and gaze across the repopulated floor with the reassuring certainty that everyone is who they claim to be. But he will have paid for that certainty in talent, morale and cash — when the same certainty was available cheaper, kinder, and infinitely more scalable to anyone willing to do the unglamorous work of building trust into the system itself. One may buy reassurance. One need not buy an entire skyline to obtain it.
I know, because I fell into that rabbit hole trying to build a recruiting product, and found the future of the office waiting at the bottom — smirking, I rather suspect, at how long it took us to notice.
The office was never a productivity tool. It was a trust prosthesis. Once you can verify the human, the prosthesis becomes optional — and rather expensive to keep for the furniture.
References
Hybrid work & RTO evidence
- Bloom, Han & Liang — Hybrid working from home improves retention without damaging performance (Nature, 2024); see also Stanford Report
- Ding & Ma — Return-to-Office Mandates (SSRN); summary via Pitt Business
- Andy Jassy — Amazon RTO memo (September 2024); Blind survey coverage via Ars Technica
Candidate fraud & deepfakes
- Gartner — by 2028, 1 in 4 candidate profiles fake; 6% admit interview fraud — Gartner newsroom; HR Dive
- Pindrop — 2025 Voice Intelligence & Security Report (+1,300% deepfake fraud attempts in 2024)
- AuthBridge — Workforce Fraud Files 2025 (IT/ITES 9.46% discrepancy; 18.8% résumé misrepresentation; ~5% moonlighting) — newsroom summary
Exhibits
- Soham Parekh — TechCrunch; Fast Company
- KnowBe4 / North Korean IT workers — KnowBe4 incident report; Ars Technica; CNN interactive
- “Bob” / Verizon — classic 2013 case of a developer outsourcing himself to China (widely cited in infosec literature; see Verizon DBIR-era case studies and subsequent retellings)
Bengaluru & Indian RTO
- JLL — Bengaluru 2025 gross office leasing 24.1M sq ft (Q4 9.3M) — JLL India newsroom; Real Estate Asia
- Wipro / Infosys moonlighting crackdowns (2022) — contemporary Business Standard / Economic Times coverage of Premji's “cheating, plain and simple” remarks and subsequent IT-major attendance mandates
High-trust remote
- GitLab all-remote / handbook-first culture
- Automattic distributed work; Zapier async-first remote playbook (company docs and founder interviews)
Caveats
- Gartner's “1 in 4 by 2028” is a projection, not a measured census — treat it as weather forecast, not scripture; the measured floor is the 6% self-reported interview-fraud figure. Deepfake hiring stats often come from vendors selling detection — treat market-size claims with the scepticism they have earned.
- The Amazon 1.4/5 figure is a leaked Slack survey reported secondhand; Blind's 91%/73% numbers are the more solidly sourced poll (self-selected, as such polls tend to be).
- RTO motives are plural, not monocausal. Real-estate pressure, SEZ tax structures, genuine onboarding benefits, and control dynamics coexist with fraud fear. My claim is that eroded trust is the underweighted, unspoken driver — not the only one, and certainly not the one that makes it into the all-hands.
On this site
- An Exasperating Farrago of Firewalls — identity as the real perimeter when attackers log in instead of breaking in.
- Vibes All the Way Down — outsourcing judgment; the cognitive sibling of outsourcing verification.
- The Rope Sellers — accountability moats, and who still has to sign their name in blood.