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Anti-fraud Practices

Client: Anti-Fraud Team at Indeed • My role: UX research

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Challenge

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Indeed knew that their constant battle to prevent fraudsters from creating employer accounts needed to extend outside the US. Allowing fake employer accounts left job seekers open to being taken advantage of, harming both job seekers and Indeed’s reputation. Tools used to identify the presence of job seeker fraud suggested that Great Britain and Canada were the next places after the US to focus on fraud prevention.


Our objective: to understand how best to extend measures to prevent fake employer accounts from being created to Great Britain and Canada and identify areas unique to those countries to create a foundation for future design and research work.

Executive Summary
Context
Indeed wanted to understand how to reduce the friction of and optimize the experience of demonstrating the legitimacy of new English-speaking employers outside the US. The underlying goal was to reduce job fraud on their platform by increasing confidence that a new employer account is legitimate.
Findings
British and Canadian employers mirrored the reactions and concerns of US employers.

British employers needed changes to terminology and phrasing to avoid confusion.
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Adjusting terminology on the fly for British Employers

Impact
Provided support for existing work to improve the employer verification experience.

Provided impetus for anti-fraud team discussions with internationalization team around implementing a process for terminology changes based on location without the need for translation.
Speaking to employers

I spoke with British and Canadian employers using prototypes based on existing screens for uploading a document and using a personal ID to prove business legitimacy.

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Using business documents to prove legitimacy

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Using personal ID to prove legitimacy

I presented a table of documents accepted for verification purposes to prompt reactions and preferred alternatives.

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I presented polls to explore their understanding of the security needs for 6 industries: Banking, Hiring, Social Media, E-commerce, Mobile Payment Apps, and personal Health Records.

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One of the 6 industries about which I asked

I explored preferences for 5 different possible fraud explanations using polls to elicit reactions with followup questions.

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One of the 5 explanations for why fraud is important to an employer

I explored preferences for 3 different terms for someone who steals access to an employer account.

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Identifying terminology preferences

What we learned

Employers:

  • Did not understand why verifying a personal ID would have anything to do with verifying the business, causing discomfort

  • Did not necessarily have access to the types of documents we request

  • Did not find US terminology clear when they are in other English speaking countries 

  • Did not think of hiring as an industry in high need of security

  • Did not know what fraudsters do with stolen or fake job posting accounts

  • Did not know that that the actions of fraudsters would affect their company's reputation

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What we should do next
Employer discomfort with verifying using a personal ID


Inconsistent access to documents


No understanding of need for security in hiring


Location-based terminology mismatch
More clearly explain ID verification or identify another alternative to business document verification.

Continue to explore alternate ways to support verification

Continue to explore ways to explain why verification is important for employers

Discussions with internationalization team around the need for ways to have content differ for countries that speak the same language
How this helped the team
Provided support for existing work to improve the employer verification experience.

Provided impetus for anti-fraud team discussions with internationalization team around implementing a process for terminology changes based on location without the need for translation.
Conclusion
Indeed wanted to understand how to best reduce the friction of and optimize the experience of demonstrating the legitimacy of new English-speaking employers outside the US.
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This effort confirmed that many of the concerns of US employers held true outside the US.
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We pinpointed the need to adjust the internationalization process to allow for changing terminology to reflect the needs of countries that do not need the content translated to another language.
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