How Tailscale eliminated fake applicants from their engineering pipeline
Summary
Tailscale uses Tofu in their hiring across all roles to catch fraudulent applicants before they reach a recruiter screen, bringing the number of interviews scheduled with fake applicants down to zero and protecting both their team's time and their reputation with hiring managers.
I love that the Tofu team is always ahead of things. We started using Tofu to help us bring the best matched candidates to the top of the pile given our high applicant volume; their fraud offerings were a side bonus. The fraud detection ended up being just as much of a time saver for our entire recruiting team. Now we get to focus on the candidates that are truly invested in opportunities here.
Laurel Kiskanyan
Lead Talent Acquisition Partner, Tailscale
The Challenge
Tailscale originally came to Tofu for workflow support for high-application-volume review, looking for a faster way to surface strong candidates at the top of the funnel. After a few months of using the product, something else started surfacing alongside those strong candidates: a steady stream of fraudulent applicants. Tofu's signals helped the Tailscale team realize that some high-volume roles showed a meaningful concentration of suspicious applications, especially for certain engineering roles. Tailscale is fully remote, making them an especially attractive target for this kind of fraud.
As Tailscale is a cybersecurity company, trust in the hiring process matters. Misrepresented applications moving through the process meant wasted time, potential downstream risk, and a sense of false confidence that builds when a candidate clears one stage and carries that credibility into the next.
The team needed a layer that could stop fake candidates well before they ever got in front of a hiring manager.
Why Tofu
Because Tailscale was already a customer of Tofu, adding fraud detection was a flip of a switch. The Fraud Agent runs alongside the AI resume review they were already using, surfacing potential risk signals for recruiter review.
Once the fraud layer was on, the impact was immediate. Fake applicants stopped reaching recruiter screens, and the number of interviews scheduled with fraudulent applicants dropped to zero.
The Impact
Tofu has become integral to how Tailscale's talent function operates, with the team working in it on a daily basis. Beyond the time it gives back to recruiters, it protects something harder to measure but just as important: the trust between recruiting and hiring managers, which gets quickly eroded when fake applicants make it into interviews. With Tofu in place, recruiters can send candidates forward with confidence, and hiring managers spend their time on real candidates.