HYPR report finds 98% of fraudulent hires receive company credentials

Nearly all fraudulent hires have been issued corporate credentials by the time they are caught, according to HYPR’s State of HR Identity Fraud Detection report. The identity security vendor points to a 90-day gap between hiring and onboarding as a blind spot in enterprise identity security.

HYPR chief executive Bojan Simic said attackers no longer need to breach a network when they can pass a remote interview and receive authentic credentials from IT, adding that human intuition is not a security control. The report found 98% of HR leaders have encountered candidate fraud first hand, while 96% believe their organisation would detect it.

Detection is spread across disconnected checks: screening, interviews, onboarding, active employment and technical assessments, with companies identifying an average of 2.2 checkpoints per incident. Third-party security tools catch only 53% of identity-based and AI-driven threats, leaving the rest to employee reports, internal audits and external alerts.

Ownership of pre-hire identity risk is better defined on paper than in practice, with HR responsible during recruitment and IT and security stepping in once a hire receives access. Most organisations need one to three weeks to resolve a hiring fraud incident, and around 60% of identity verification and MFA spending is triggered by a breach.