With the 2025 HR conference season at an end, it’s only natural to reflect on what we heard, what we learned, and what we expect to see in the months ahead. No surprise, AI took up a lot of the oxygen in the room at nearly every event we attended this year, but it’s not necessarily what you’d expect.
Yes, consumer usage of AI continues to rise. Verizon’s 2025 Mobile Security Index found that 93 percent of organizations report that employees have genAI tools on their mobile devices to “assist them in their daily workflows.” Accounting for any deviation in the numbers, we’re pretty close to 100 percent. What’s troubling, though, is that only 50 percent of companies have defined and enforced usage policies, and just 45 percent provide comprehensive training on the risks. That’s a huge liability, and we’re only talking about mobile – not even desktops and laptops.
We can see a correlation between the amount of AI consumed and the rise of deep-fake candidates and automated applicants. Gartner believes that by 2028, some 25 percent of candidate profiles worldwide will be fake, still at the current rate that might happen even sooner – unless something changes.
While compliance has always played a prominent role in HR and work tech, it’s time we embedded it into the hiring funnel from the start. Let’s call this concept “high compliance hiring,” and it’s the first – and potentially the best – line of defense against AI candidates preventing real humans from getting jobs. Here’s what that could look like:
- Attract and interview – From the outset, compliant hiring hinges on clear, concise job descriptions that use accurate, non-discriminatory, and inclusive language. Recruiting teams need to carefully stipulate essential qualifications in accordance with the latest employment laws and include accommodation statements. Likewise, there are dos and don’ts for compliant, accessible interviewing, such as described by the Employer Assistance and Resource Network on Disability.
- Screen and verify – To create a seamless experience and validate candidate information at the same time, use a secure platform to collect and verify photo identification, such as driver’s licenses or passports. The benefit of this approach is threefold: it helps mitigate security risks, speeds up identity checks, and keeps candidates in the communication loop.
- Hire and onboard – ID verification is just one piece of this overall puzzle, and every organization has different documentation needs when it comes to onboarding, from I-9 to W-9 and everything in between. But the combination of candidate-centric documents and parsing technology simplifies this step in the process while ensuring that only real humans make it through the workflow.
- Comply and monitor – Off-site compliance is just as important as on-site compliance, before, during, and after a candidate becomes an employee. Even so, it can be tough to know if something changes when workers are remote, dispersed, or on the road. By building continuous monitoring into hiring, it becomes part of the organization’s culture, ingrained and expected.
With recruiting teams stretched thin and application volumes increasing, moving to high-compliance hiring is the necessary response to an alarming trend that’s depleting valuable resources. But it can’t be piecemeal. We need strategies that weave together every step of the process to shore up hiring and ensure that humans are screened in, bots are screened out, and compliance remains front and center.
Authored by Jason Putnam, CEO at Vetty
Jason Putnam is the innovative CEO at Vetty, a high-velocity hiring platform streamlining verification and onboarding at scale. With over 15 years of executive experience in SaaS, go-to-market strategy, and revenue growth, he specializes in building high-impact teams, scaling startups, and delivering meaningful customer value.
