NEW ZEALAND BUSINESS NEWS
Empowering Kiwi Businesses
Deel, which sells payroll and contractor management software to businesses that hire staff across borders, has launched a product aimed at catching people who use false identities to get hired remotely. The product, Deel Security, is available in more than 150 countries and is pitched at both the recruitment stage and the period after someone has started work.
The company says the tool checks identity from the first application through employment and flags risks such as forged documents, stolen identities, and personas generated by artificial intelligence. It was built on technology from Clarity, an AI security business Deel acquired in July 2026, and Deel has already run it across its own hiring.
Deel pointed to survey work by Censuswide covering 1,011 HR professionals in the United Kingdom and the United States. Of those organisations, 66% reported more suspicious or potentially fraudulent applications for remote roles over the past 12 months, and 93% of HR leaders said deepfake or AI-generated workers concerned them. Just over a third, at 34%, believed their existing identity checks were no longer adequate.
The share reporting more suspicious applicants was highest in IT at 75%, followed by defence at 72% and crypto at 71%. Those are sectors where a single bad hire can expose systems or funds, which helps explain why the concern is concentrated there rather than spread evenly across the economy.
Government warnings have added weight. Authorities in several countries have recently cautioned that remote hiring channels are being used by North Korean operatives. The US Department of Justice has set out a scheme in which North Korean IT workers were placed at more than 300 US companies using 68 stolen identities.
The system looks at signals across CVs, digital footprints, interviews, and identity documents. It can pick up possible deepfake or proxy interviewers, meaning someone other than the applicant sitting the interview. Before an offer goes out, a live selfie is compared with a government-issued identity document. Checks then continue after hiring at points where an attacker would try to gain access.
Findings are gathered into a single risk profile for each candidate, so recruiters see a risk level and security teams see the evidence behind it. The tool connects with Deel’s applicant tracking system and with others including Greenhouse, Ashby, Lever, Workday, and Tracker, as well as identity management software including Okta. That means risk signals appear in systems recruiters and security staff already use, and each verification leaves an audit trail.
High-risk alerts are reviewed by a fraud specialist who explains why the alert was raised, rather than being decided by automation alone. Final decisions on hiring and security stay with the customer.
The market for identity screening in hiring has grown as employers respond to remote recruitment and to generative AI tools that make false documents cheap to produce. Deel cited Gartner research predicting that by 2028, one in four candidate profiles worldwide will be fake.
It also cited First Advantage findings that 89% of HR hiring managers plan to add background screening and identity verification tools within the next two years. Taken together, the figures point to employers moving away from a single document check at the point of offer towards checks that continue through a person’s time in the job.
For smaller businesses without a dedicated security team, the practical change is where the check sits. Verification that stops at the offer leaves password resets, new devices, and requests for elevated access unexamined, and those are the moments the product is designed to cover.
Deel Security is available now in more than 150 countries.
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