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We found North Korean engineers in our application pile

Cinder is part of a growing list of US-based tech companies that encounter engineering applicants who are actually suspected North Korean nationals. Here's what we're doing about it.

Fast-growing start-ups eager to ship more products might overlook gaps in resume, unreliable or missing education records, or poor command of written or spoken English for an engineer with sufficient skill who is ready to start working soon. We have a unique perspective on this problem for a few reasons: our company is in the internet safety industry, two of our co-founders came from the CIA, and I have twelve years of experience working on cybersecurity and human rights issues related to North Korea. However, our process wasn’t perfect, and we still ended up on occasional Zoom calls screening applicants who we would quickly discover, mid-call, had fabricated their career history and only recently created their online presence.

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