Customer Story | OneSignal
OneSignal reclaimed 16+ hours a week with Gem’s AI Fraud Detection Agent
6 min read
or share
Applicant fraud is growing, and OneSignal was fighting it manually
At OneSignal, Julia Graham had become something of a human lie detector. As a tech recruiter, she was fielding back-to-back candidate screens from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. — and increasingly, her gut was telling her something was wrong before the data could confirm it.
"It was exhausting," Julia recalled. "I was constantly on calls where you could tell someone wasn't real, or if they did slip through, I was having to backtrack — a ton of wasted time for me, for interviewers, for everyone."
The volume of fraudulent applicants had grown so significant that Sam Perlman, VP of People at OneSignal, had started to worry about more than just wasted hours. "When Julia came out of a recruiter screen saying 'another fake one,' I started thinking: what happens to our company data if someone like that crosses the threshold? The risk is terrifying."
That fear nearly became a reality. A candidate made it through eight interviews, impressed the entire hiring team, and came close to receiving an offer — all while Julia suspected something was off. There was no tool to confirm it. Just instinct.
OneSignal's fraud challenge wasn't unique — it was a sign of what's coming. Gartner predicts that by 2028, one in four candidates will be fake, driven by mass bot-generated applications, fabricated identities, and increasingly, state-sponsored fraud attempts. Julia was seeing it play out in real time: profiles impersonating real engineers at real companies, sophisticated enough to pass a first screen, organized enough to clear multiple interview rounds.
"It's a scary market," said Sam. "Is it someone who'll just take the money and run? Someone trying to multi-job? Or now — literally — someone with different intentions entirely? That's a risk I can't accept."
Julia was catching most of it, but the process was manual, inconsistent, and unsustainable. Checking LinkedIn connection counts. Looking up when accounts were created. Cross-referencing email domains. For every suspicious application, that's one to two minutes of investigation — before even picking up the phone. "Julia should not be our only line of defense," Sam said. "That's not safe, and it's not scalable."
Finding Gem's Fraud Detection Agent
OneSignal first heard about Gem's Fraud Detection Agent through Jason Zoltak, co-founder of Tofu — the fraud detection technology that powers the product. He demoed the product live, using OneSignal's near-miss candidate as a real-world test. The results were immediate: the system surfaced exactly what Julia had suspected, backed by evidence. When Gem announced Early Access for Fraud Detection Agent, OneSignal was first in line.
"It didn't even take five minutes to figure out," Julia said. "It was just seamless — intuitive with my existing flow in Gem. When you're learning new tools, it can take time to really get the hang of things. This was immediate."
Gem automatically flagged 88% of at-risk applications
The impact was visible from day one. On one open tech role, Julia pulled up her applicant queue in Gem: 127 total applicants. 112 flagged high risk.
"Ninety percent of the suspicious resumes I was seeing before weren't an exaggeration. It's legitimate."
Her new workflow is more streamlined: Review the high-risk applications with a quick spot-check, bulk reject with confidence, then give meaningful attention to medium-risk candidates — digging into LinkedIn profiles, connection counts, account creation dates — the things the tool flags as worth a closer look. From there, she moves to low-risk applicants and advances the best.
The time savings are significant. Julia estimates one to two hours per week saved just on applicant review, plus roughly 12 hours of screening time avoided by not advancing fraudulent candidates to phone screens. In a single role, that's 16+ hours reclaimed every week — not including downstream interviewer time.
"If Julia saved two hours reviewing, then avoided screening 25 fake candidates, you're already at 14 hours. Add scheduling, hiring manager time, follow-ups — in one role alone, it's substantial. And that's just one role," Sam noted.
One unexpected insight emerged during early access: When Gem's AI application ranking and Fraud Detection Agent run together, candidates matching 80–100% to a job description are almost always fake. Bots auto-apply by tailoring profiles to match job descriptions exactly. Real candidates, who have company-specific experience and their own backgrounds, rarely hit that mark.
16+ hours saved per role, per week, and renewed trust in inbound
The downstream effect of Gem's AI Fraud Detection Agent went beyond the application queue. High fraud volume had been quietly eroding OneSignal's confidence in inbound recruiting as a channel at all. Why invest in reviewing applicants when nine out of 10 are fake?
Gem's Fraud Detection Agent changed that calculus. With fraud filtered out automatically, inbound is a viable pipeline again — and the real candidates who apply there aren't getting lost in the noise.
"Now we can trust inbound again,"
Sam Perlman, VP of People at OneSignal
And for Julia, the change was personal. "It was getting pretty dark there for a second," she admitted. "I could not talk to another fake candidate. It's draining. Now I'm actually spending my time on people who are real."
From gut instinct to evidence-backed decisions, powered by Gem’s all-in-one platform
For Sam and Julia, Gem's Fraud Detection Agent isn't just a time-saving tool — it's a foundational change to how they think about recruiting security.
"Julia's been incredible at catching this manually," Sam said. "But relying on one person's instincts isn't a system. Gem's Fraud Detection Agent gives us the evidence to make confident, consistent decisions — and makes sure we're not putting that burden on her alone."
Julia put it simply: "Trust it. It will only make your life easier. It's an absolute no-brainer."
"Gem's Fraud Detection Agent gives us the evidence to make confident, consistent decisions."
Sam Perlman, VP of People at OneSignal
