How to Spot Fake Senior Engineers Before You Hire Them

You post a senior developer role.

Applications flood in. Impressive resumes. 8-10 years experience. Big company names. GitHub portfolios that look solid at first glance.

You hire someone. They pass the interview. They know the buzzwords. They talk like a senior.

Then week two hits.

They hard-code API keys into production. They write unit tests that don’t actually test anything. A basic parsing function takes them six days and three meetings.

You just hired a fake senior.

The Resume Red Flags Nobody Talks About

Before you even get to interviews, you can filter out a lot of fake seniors by knowing what to look for on paper.

Recruiters dealing with fraudulent candidates describe patterns that show up again and again.

LinkedIn profiles that look suspiciously new for someone claiming 10+ years of experience.

GitHub accounts with activity that doesn’t match the claimed experience level. 

Portfolios that fall apart when you ask specific questions about architecture decisions.

Watch out for candidates who list every technology under the sun but can’t demonstrate depth in any of them.

Interviews That Actually Expose Fake Seniors

Generic LeetCode problems won’t help you here. Fake seniors can memorize solutions. 

You need interviews that simulate actual work.

Here’s what experienced engineering managers recommend:

Have them walk through a real past project in extreme detail. Not the happy path. Ask about problems they hit. How they debugged production issues. What metrics they monitored. What permanent fixes they implemented.

Fake seniors cannot maintain specificity. They deflect. They blame external factors. They can’t articulate a structured debugging process.

Real seniors light up during these conversations. They remember the gnarly parts. They explain their thinking process. They acknowledge mistakes and what they learned.

Use realistic technical exercises, not toy problems. Give them a small task that mimics your actual stack. Build or modify a REST endpoint. Refactor a messy function. Write a database query with real-world constraints.

Watch how they work. Fake seniors either over-engineer simple problems or Google obviously basic things. Their code breaks on edge cases. They avoid tests or write tests that don’t actually verify anything.

Real seniors write clean, maintainable code. They consider edge cases. They write meaningful tests. They often propose improvements to the task itself.

Probe ownership and problem-solving. Ask about a production incident they handled. What went wrong? How did they investigate? What logs did they check first? How did they communicate with stakeholders during the outage?

If they say they “just tried things until it worked,” that’s not senior behavior.

The Patterns That Show Up in Week One

Let’s say someone slips through your interview process. How do you catch it early?

Fake seniors reveal themselves through specific behavior patterns that show up fast if you’re watching.

They avoid taking end-to-end ownership of tickets. They complete one part, then hand it off. Or they claim blockers that aren’t really blockers. 

Real seniors drive tasks to completion, even across team boundaries.

They frequently reassign blame when things break. It’s the requirements. It’s QA. 

It’s DevOps. It’s the legacy codebase. Real seniors own the outcome regardless of external factors.

They’re noisy in meetings but light on tangible contributions to the codebase. Lots of opinions. Minimal pull requests. 

When they do ship code, it frequently fails QA on medium-complexity tasks.

They ask for meetings instead of writing clear async questions. This is huge for remote work. Real seniors investigate on their own, document what they tried, then ask specific questions. 

Fake seniors immediately schedule a call for things they should be able to figure out.

Building Your Fraud-Resistant Hiring Process

Here’s how to pull all of this together into a hiring process that filters out fake seniors before they get an offer.

Screen resumes for consistency. Dense job histories, vague roles, thin online presence for claimed experience level. Filter these out early.

Conduct multiple video interviews with cameras on. Technical rounds, culture fit, architecture discussions. Watch for consistency in communication style and knowledge across rounds.

Focus interviews on real work, not algorithms. Project walkthroughs, debugging scenarios, realistic coding exercises. Probe for depth and specificity.

Check references directly, ideally by phone. Verify employment with past companies when possible. Watch for patterns across references.

Run a paid trial project. Evaluate process as much as outcome. Watch communication patterns and code quality.

Watch behavior closely in the first month. Ownership, code review engagement, async communication quality. Act fast on red flags.

No system is perfect. But each layer catches different types of fraud.

What This Means for Filipino Remote Workers

The Philippines has incredible engineering talent. But the rise of fake seniors hurts everyone, especially legitimate Filipino developers trying to build remote careers.

When companies get burned by fraudulent candidates, they become more skeptical of all remote candidates. That makes it harder for real senior engineers to get opportunities.

The talent verification system on platforms like HireTalent.ph exists specifically to help solve this. ID verification, address verification, phone verification. Portfolio validation. Skill assessments. These aren’t barriers; they’re trust signals that help real talent stand out.

If you’re a legitimate senior engineer, lean into verification. Show your work. Be specific in applications. Welcome technical challenges. You want employers who can tell the difference between real and fake.

And if you’re hiring, don’t let a few bad experiences make you write off entire talent pools. The real seniors are out there. You just need better filters.

Key Takeaways for Hiring

Fake senior engineers are a real problem in remote hiring. They’re getting better at gaming interviews. They’re costing companies massive amounts of time and money.

But they reveal themselves through specific patterns if you know what to look for.

Real seniors own outcomes. They debug systematically. They communicate clearly. They admit what they don’t know. They welcome feedback. They ship clean, maintainable code.

Fake seniors bluff. They avoid ownership. 

Your job is to design a hiring process that makes these differences obvious before someone joins your team.

Focus on real work, not toy problems. Run paid trials. Watch behavior in the first month. Act fast when red flags appear.

The cost of getting this wrong is too high to rely on gut feel and impressive resumes.

Build better filters. Trust your filters. Hire real seniors.