Vervoe’s anti-cheating feature set leads the market in candidate experience and transparency. Our considered approach finds the balance between authenticity and experience. We understand interviews and assessments are inherently high stakes - candidates might give a fake reference, jazz up their job title, or outright lie about their job experience. With this in mind, we've created a number of anti-cheating features that'll help your team feel confident in the candidate submissions you receive.
Our Stance On Proctoring
It’s typical for other assessment providers to video proctor, or request webcam access to periodically take photos/record candidates throughout the assessment. However, we at Vervoe have found this method to result in high drop-off rates, and it has not proven to minimize cheating significantly. Additionally, this can cause candidates to feel as though their privacy has been violated.
Ultimately, we believe there's a more ethical and efficient way to monitor a candidate's digital behavior. After analyzing feedback from customers, we found most importantly what they really wanted was to trust the result without having to view every candidate's assessment. That's how we came up with a unique feature set that isn't biased or invasive; and a way for customers to trust the result without compromising the candidate experience or being disadvantageous to the candidate.
Our Anti-Cheating Feature Set
We’ve taken a considered position, aimed at finding a balance that would complement our product. This has led us to introduce the combination of the following:
- Simulations & Other Immersive Question Types
- Plagiarism
- Geolocation/Inconsistent Behavior
- Randomization
- Visual Checks (Audio & Video Questions)
- Multiple attempt prevention
- Time-based questions and assessments
- Disable copy and pasting questions
Immersive Questions & Simulations
Imagine watching an Enterprise Sales Associate give a live pitch from a deck they’ve just helped create, or a Marketing Analyst pull game changing insights from data in a spreadsheet, or a UX designer unmuddle and optimize your onboarding flow in under an hour. With Vervoe's immersive questions and simulations, your team can watch candidates perform their skills within the assessment!
Vervoe tests skills and not knowledge, so the ability to ‘Google’ or ‘ChatGPT’ an answer would inherently be limited by the nature of our assessments and simulations. While we do offer other question types, such as multiple choice or knowledge based, these are often followed up by questions to explain your reasoning in other formats. As we bring out more simulations and functionality; the need to ask text or multiple choice based knowledge based questions will continue to be reduced if not eliminated.
Plagiarism
Vervoe’s plagiarism detection allows customers to track candidates that have the same answer, by comparing duplicate content to a question across the platform. If 2 or more answers are the same, the plagiarism flag will be shown from the Select list & Candidate Report card.
Plagiarism detection works across all languages. To activate the plagiarism detection setting, customers must toggle it on via the question settings in Create.
Vervoe’s plagiarism feature works across web and mobile devices and cannot be circumvented, like other inferior methods commonly used by competitors such as:
- Tab switching and tab detection (circumvented by using another device such as a mobile phone or secondary laptop)
- Copy/Pasting (circumvented by manually typing the answer)
- Mouse in window (circumvented by using another device such as a mobile phone or secondary laptop)
Vervoe's primary goal is to assess skills within the context of the job rather than focusing solely on knowledge-based questions. If we were only testing knowledge and recall, we would restrict access to resources that might help candidates find the answer. However, when candidates are asked skills-based questions that simulate tasks they would perform in the role, we encourage them to find answers just as they would in a real-world scenario. This is why we use plagiarism detection—not to penalize research, but to ensure candidates aren't simply copying and pasting responses.
Geolocation
We use geolocation detection to determine if a candidate completes an assessment from multiple locations. If the locations and the timestamps are incompatible, the candidate will be flagged for you to review. Our method ensures that genuine candidates that happen to start an assessment in one location and complete it in another location are not disadvantaged by this process.
Geolocation allows you to detect and flag potential cheating from candidates that have multiple logins in different city locations. The logins must occur within a 30-minute window, and be for the same assessment. This anti-cheating feature is available to all plan types.The multiple locations flag will be visible from the Select stage and on the candidate report card. The flag can also be dismissed from the candidate report card, if need be.
Randomization
Randomization is available to all customers, across all assessments. In its simplest form, it allows you to mix up the questions in an assessment so each candidate receives a slightly different set of questions to answer. This minimizes the risk that information will be shared about the content between candidates. Randomization can be on a question or skill level and some question types like multiple choice even allow randomization within the question itself.
Randomization allows you to select the number of questions from each individual skill group that you wish to rotate. Skill groups can also be toggled off, which means questions from that group won’t be subject to randomization. This removes the chance of a candidate posting your assessment online or sharing the assessment questions with other candidates.
Timers
We support custom timers for both questions and assessments. All due dates and time limits in-app are customizable. We recommend due dates as best practice, and that assessments should be submitted within four days from when a candidate receives the invitation. We don’t recommend setting time limits for the assessment unless it is relevant to the job, like customer service dealing with tickets or SLAs, as it accounts for connectivity issues, and a better candidate experience.
Visual Checks (Audio & Video Questions)
As you may know, Vervoe does not believe in this practice of video proctoring and we do not offer this capability, as we respect each candidate's privacy. However, we do support video and audio questions that give you a real-time look at who is responding to the questions in the assessment if potential cheating has been flagged.
Multiple-Attempt Prevention
We detect if a candidate is trying to register for another attempt, and block them from doing so — one attempt per email address is all we allow.
Disable copy-paste
Candidates are not able to copy the text from questions in Vervoe, to minimize the risk of test questions being shared online or pasted into a search engine.
Suggested Next Steps
Q: Vervoe has flagged someone cheating on their assessment, now what?
A: How you handle the process is entirely up to you and your company. The cheating flag does not tell you if a candidate has definitely cheated however, it has flagged the candidate for displaying unusual behavior that can suggest cheating has occurred. You might want to discuss this with the candidate or investigate their answers further. Vervoe will provide you with the information in-app via a flag.
Q: Will the anti-cheating flags and features affect candidate scores?
A: No, candidate scores are not affected by any of the anti-cheating features, Vervoe simply flags its occurrence. Anti-cheating flags also do not show up when sharing candidate cards and profiles. However, if a candidate's response triggers a flag and is subject to manual grading, the machine learning model will not incorporate your grading decisions into its updates. This policy is in place because the candidate's response is not considered authentic, and as such, the model does not adjust to incorporate these outlier modes of response.
Please note: While we employ anti-cheating measures to monitor a candidate's activities, we cannot say for certain that a candidate has cheated. These measures are there to flag potential concerns, but should not be used by themselves to disqualify candidates.