Recruiting and onboarding, conducted without physical presence, require a leap of faith and a digital solution that proves people are who they say they are. Traditionally, identity verification has been synonymous with face-to-face verification. But, as remote technology improves and fraudsters get sneakier, that’s no longer the case.
Why manual verification broke down
Over time, businesses used to verify remote employees by requesting candidates to send passport scans or documents to a common folder. This method was fine as long as remote hires were not a common occurrence. But as they began to be more prevalent, this solution appeared inadequate.
It’s not just because of the greater number of cases. The whole idea of threat changed. Now almost anyone can forge a document. Also, AI systems can develop photo-realistic copies of official IDs that include all of the holograms, fonts, and mandates in use, which will not be recognizable to a person. With deep fake technology, the bar is even higher: you can’t trust the candidate on the video call using the ID sent is the person on the document.
Proxy interviews, where someone other than the applicant takes the technical interview or access call, are already alarmingly common. Many are not instances of casual fraud but organized criminal activity, commonly in fields where salaries are high, and the opening of internal systems is the specific target.
Yet, none of these problems were designed to be addressed by manual review systems. They were intended to verify the existence of a physical body.
What modern verification actually does
Automated identity verification technology integrates multiple methods cohesively rather than as a linear process. Firstly, OCR extracts and cross-references data from document images automatically and instantly. It then cross-references and checks the information against pre-defined patterns for the documents and issuing countries. AI-based doc forgery detection verifies the authenticity of a submitted document by analyzing its security features. This includes the kind of intricate analysis that is typically time-consuming for a trained human eye to inspect manually. Biometric authentication matches the face on the document with a live face photo of the person.
Going one step further, liveness detection included in biometric authentication requires a real-time action effectively killing a major portion of fraud attempts. As liveness detection requires a real-time action and cannot be fooled by a pre-recorded video or even a printed photo held up in front of the camera.
This is also where dedicated identity verification vendors have started moving ahead of traditional background-check services. The time-to-decision is as crucial as the accuracy itself since onboarding-friction has a direct cost. A candidate who has been offered a role by two different companies will end up choosing the role that gets him to the start-date quickest.
Compliance across borders is not optional
Not all remote teams are playing by the same rulebook. A company that’s hiring across five countries is contending with five different approaches to data privacy, five different document standards, and potentially five different sector-specific requirements heaped on top.
For example, GDPR can dictate how and where employee identity data gets stored and processed in certain regions, and NIST identity assurance levels dictate the minimum standards for the strength of verification in others. Meanwhile, Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) obligations often vary by industry. On top of those, the specifics of a digital nomad visa program mean there are separate residency and tax verification requirements that, while related, aren’t the same as the employment check requirements.
Net-net: An identity check that’s inflexible enough to be adequate in one market may well be insufficient in another. Solutions must be jurisdiction-aware, which is a much tougher engineering problem than it sounds. In the coming years, many organizations will turn to using biometric-based identity verification for remote employee onboarding. The slope of that adoption curve is pretty steep, because the compliance pressure is real and accelerating.
Identity verification as a security control, not a process step
The Zero Trust Architecture functions under one cardinal rule – no user, device, or connection can be trusted by default. Each request to access must be checked. This rule is not complicated to enforce in terms of device management and network access. Yet it is less evident at the human end.
Facilitating identity verification at the time of entry is the most crucial and far-reaching phase of Zero Trust concerning people. If you are unable to determine who a person is before giving them credentials and access to company systems, all subsequent actions act over an unstable base. The insider threat danger – in which a person obtains rightful access under a counterfeit identity – doesn’t resemble a violation. It resembles the ordinary behavior of a worker, right until the point it changes.
Strong identity assurance during onboarding minimizes vulnerability to this risk. It also simplifies adherence to ISO/IEC 27001 standards, with identity management being a statutory control requirement for all entities boasting of that badge.
Building for where hiring is going
The borderless office is here to stay. It was already becoming viable before 2020, and the pandemic has supercharged its transition from ‘nice-to-have experiment’ to ‘vital operating model.’ Most fast-growing tech companies are building their teams in this borderless way – wherever the best person for the job lives is where the job gets done. No commutes, no compromises.
Getting this right means treating verification as a capability, not a checkbox. The companies that do will move faster, hire more confidently, and carry less risk than the ones still emailing passport scans back and forth.