Secure Hiring Process

The rise of remote hiring resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed how companies hire employees, standardizing remote hiring and onboarding processes across industries. This global shift has enabled companies to more easily recruit from broader talent pools. Unfortunately, cybercriminals have been quick to target and exploit remote hiring practices because of their flexibility.

There are a wide range of cyber risks in remote hiring, from cybercriminals specifically targeting new employees at organizations, stealing candidates’ sensitive information from unencrypted communications, or even impersonating legitimate candidates to gain access to an organization’s systems. Even national security concerns regarding remote hiring practices have emerged – in 2022, the Office of Foreign Assets Control released a Fact Sheet that warned U.S. employers against the inadvertent recruitment, hiring, and facilitation of IT Workers from North Korea.

This guide will include best practices for secure hiring practices for remote workers so that your organization can safeguard its recruiting against sophisticated cyber threats.

Secure Hiring Best Practices

Communicate Securely Through Encrypted Channels

During the interview and hiring process, sensitive personal information is often transmitted over insecure channels like email or open messaging applications. Using only secure communication channels for any sharing of sensitive information and personal data is key for maintaining a secure hiring process.

Data encryption prevents cybercriminals from accessing communications by making them indecipherable to unauthorized users. There are several platforms that are end-to-end encrypted like Microsoft Teams, Slack, Zoom, Signal, WhatsApp, and others, which keep conversations private and secure. When it comes to collecting and temporarily storing sensitive information from new hires and documents for data verification purposes, it is essential to use secure cloud storage programs like Microsoft OneDrive, GoogleDrive, Apple iCloud Drive, and Dropbox. 

During the remote onboarding process, new employees often have to submit tax forms, IDs, financial information, and other documents which, if exposed, could have devastating consequences such as identity theft and financial loss. For traditional, in-person roles, this document sharing usually happens in person. With remote workers, it is crucial to use secure channels in order to mitigate risk and prevent the digital leaking of private information and sensitive data.

Employ Robust Identity Verification

As remote hiring has ramped up, so have incidents of fraudsters impersonating legitimate candidates and new hires using AI and deepfakes. Once they get access to an organization’s systems, they can launch large-scale attacks from inside. This is why it is essential for hiring managers to adequately verify the identity of a new employee. 

A simple way to prevent a cybercriminal from gaining a new hire’s privileged access to systems is to require multi-factor authentication, where a user must provide at least two factors of identity verification, like  a password, finger scan, push notification acceptance on another device, or code verification. This added layer of security can prevent a hacker from gaining access to the employee’s credentials or the company’s system.

It is also important for recruiters and hiring managers to identify legitimate candidates to ensure secure recruitment. Suspicious candidates may have incomplete LinkedIn profiles, a lack of presence on other social media platforms, and resume information copied from other top candidates. During the interview or onboarding process, hiring managers might notice other discrepancies like an accent that is inconsistent with where they claim to be from and a refusal/inability to turn their camera on during a video interview.

Secure Remote Devices with Endpoint Management

Another practical concern of onboarding remote employees is making sure that their technology is secure from cyber threats. Remote employees often work on personal technology like laptops, mobile devices such as phones and tablets, or desktop computers. If this technology isn’t secure, it can introduce significant threats and vulnerabilities into a company’s network. 

Implementing a VPN (virtual private network) is a crucial step of secure endpoint management. A VPN disguises connections by creating a secure tunnel for data transfer, essentially encrypting data and hiding a device’s IP address. Other endpoint security strategies include requiring that the device perform regular virus scans, password updates, and other security protocols. 

By applying and enforcing remote work policies relating to endpoint security, companies can get ahead of cybercriminals who lie in wait for vulnerable systems to come online. 

Implement Secure Access Control Practices

Enforcing stringent access control policies is the best way to ensure that unauthorized individuals cannot access sensitive information. With remote employees, it is especially important that they can only access systems and information that is necessary for fulfilling their job responsibilities – this follows the Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP). If unauthorized employees have the ability to gain access to confidential client data like health and financial records, the company will find itself non-compliant with HIPAA and GDPR regulations, which can result in costly breaches and fines.

A solid Access Control Policy requires an organization to implement Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), whereby access permissions are assigned to employees based on their job responsibilities – this limits access to sensitive data and minimizes risk in the event of a security incident.  

Strong identity verification protocols and secure access control go hand-in-hand for reinforcing secure talent acquisition and onboarding. This is why integrating an Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy is also crucial – IAM tools will monitor who has access to certain data so that a company’s security team is alerted if an unauthorized user is given access.

Provide Thorough Cybersecurity Training

For an onboarding process that emphasizes security, it’s critical to teach new employees security best practices and how to identify and respond to a variety of cyber threats. Providing employees with comprehensive cybersecurity training is required by many compliance frameworks and will ensure employees are prepared.

Cybersecurity training for employees is necessary for promoting a security-first culture, which will prevent possible breaches caused by inattention and a lack of familiarity with current cyberattack strategies. 

Some topics that should be covered include:

• Best practices for password usage and hygiene
• Common phishing and email scams
• The handling and storing of sensitive information
• Wifi usage and the importance of secure network connection for remote employees
• Performing necessary system updates

Cybersecurity trainings should include simulations so that employees are prepared to think critically  and quickly when faced with a phishing attempt or other cyber attack. 

Learn more about how to build a cybersecurity training program for employees.

Monitor and Audit Remote Devices Regularly

Because remote employees often operate outside of the protections of the secured corporate networks of their workplaces, they risk being exposed to unsecured wifi networks, outdated software, and sophisticated phishing attacks. It is critical for IT teams to monitor their devices for any signs of unusual behavior or vulnerabilities.

Without consistent monitoring, vulnerabilities can go unnoticed and be exploited by bad actors, leading to potential breaches, compliance violations, and data loss. SIEM (security information and event management) tools can help monitor servers, endpoints, and networks, alerting security teams when anomalies are discovered within logs. 

Regular audits help identify and address security gaps proactively while ensuring that devices are configured according to organizational security policies, patched against known vulnerabilities, and free of unauthorized applications. This diligence is essential to safeguarding sensitive corporate information, maintaining regulatory compliance, and building a resilient, security-first culture among remote teams.

AI & the Future of Remote Hiring

The recruitment process across industries has been radically transformed with the rise of remote work since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and this shift has gone hand-in-hand with the rise of AI technology use in talent acquisition.

AI-powered talent screening tools can make the hiring process faster and more inclusive for recruitment teams by recognizing patterns of desired experience and key words in candidates’ resumes and filtering out job seekers whose experience does not align with a given role. While innovative, the use of poorly-designed AI tools can lead to overlooking qualified candidates or accidentally perpetuating biases. 

When used thoughtfully, however, AI tools can facilitate the recruitment process by empowering companies to tap into broader talent pools, personalize the candidate experience, and make more data-driven hiring decisions, which will help build stronger, more diverse remote teams. There is no doubt that companies that implement AI tools judiciously will have a major competitive advantage.

Conclusion

While hiring remote candidates can be intimidating from a security standpoint, this guide covers the essential practices that your organization can implement to bolster the security of your remote recruitment and onboarding processes. Remote work is not going anywhere, and organizations that want to stay competitive need to ensure that their remote hiring process is ironclad so that they remain protected and proactive.

Unsure of how to start? 

Reach out to BD Emerson’s team of skilled cybersecurity consultants. Whether you need help building out remote work policies, shoring up your network security, or creating a cybersecurity awareness training for employees – we do it all, and will help you meet your security goals. Don’t wait for a costly security breach to ask for help. Schedule a consultation today.

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