The 2026 Trust in Hiring Report
Why candidates exaggerate and misrepresent themselves — and what it means for hiring integrity.
Read the report →2026
The Rise of the
Shadow Workforce
A growing layer of workers, technologies, and third parties is operating behind the scenes, often outside traditional visibility and verification. New GCheck data shows employees are firsthand witnesses.
71%
have worked with a colleague who turned out not to be what they claimed professionally.
81%
have worked for an employer that hired someone who could not do the job they were hired for.
52%
say remote and hybrid work has made it harder to truly know their coworkers.
28%
have suspected a coworker was not the person who was actually hired.
97%
believe misrepresenting skills or identity creates risk for the business.
Executive Summary
As organizations embrace remote work, distributed teams, AI tools, contract labor, and global hiring, a new workforce challenge is emerging. Employers increasingly struggle to verify who is actually performing work, whether workers possess the skills they claim, and whether the person they hired is the person doing the job.
New data from GCheck, based on a national survey of 1,500 employed U.S. adults, shows that employees are firsthand witnesses to the rise of what is best described as a Shadow Workforce: a growing layer of workers, technologies, and third parties operating behind the scenes, often outside traditional visibility and verification processes.
"Not knowing who you are working with is only part of the problem. Employees increasingly believe organizations are hiring people who are not who, or what, they claim to be."
Working Alongside Strangers
Employees Say They Do Not Really Know Who They Work With
Remote and hybrid work has widened a basic visibility gap: many employees could not identify colleagues in person, or say they would not know if a coworker was doing their job at all.
Figure 1 Remote work widens the recognition gap
Employees who say they would not recognize many colleagues in person, by work arrangement.
Faking it to make it
Employees Believe Hiring Is Gamed at Nearly Every Stage
Not knowing who you work with is only part of the problem. Employees increasingly believe organizations are hiring people who are not as qualified as they claim, and in some cases, are not who they claim to be at all.
Nearly three-quarters (71%) say they have worked with someone who turned out not to be what they claimed professionally, while 81% have worked for an organization that hired someone who ultimately could not perform the job. More than three-quarters (77%) have had to cover for, fix, or take on extra work because a coworker lacked the necessary skills, including 22% who do so frequently.
Employees are not just questioning whether people can do the job. They are questioning whether they are doing the job at all: nearly 1 in 3 believe coworkers have had other people perform work on their behalf (30%), and a similar share believe coworkers are working multiple jobs during the workday (30%).
Figure 2 Hiring Is Gamed at Nearly Every Stage
Share agreeing with each statement about how candidates and coworkers present themselves.
The Illusion of Productivity
Appearing Productive Creates Cover for the Shadow Workforce
The Shadow Workforce often hides in plain sight, blending into everyday activity and making it harder to separate meaningful work from visible activity.
Many employees (84%) believe coworkers exaggerate how busy they are, while nearly half (45%) believe colleagues intentionally create the appearance of productivity without actually being productive. Workers themselves admit to engaging in behaviors that blur the line between activity and output.
Figure 3 Younger workers are far likelier to pass off AI work as their own
Used AI to complete work while letting employers believe they did it themselves, by generation.
The Executive Exception
Covert AI Use Rises With Seniority
Seniority runs in a direction many would not expect. Rather than declining as responsibility rises, quietly passing off AI work climbs with rank.
Fewer than 1 in 10 individual contributors (9%) report quietly passing off AI work, compared with 18% of managers and 30% of senior leaders and executives. Because the three groups are similar in age, this is not a generational effect. The people most responsible for setting standards are the likeliest to sidestep the honesty they expect of their teams.
Employees also report other behaviors that make workplace activity harder to verify, including manipulating online status indicators (11%), working another job during work hours (8%), and delegating substantial portions of work without employer knowledge (7%).
Figure 4 Covert AI use rises with seniority
Used AI to complete work while letting employers believe they did it themselves, by role.
Ghost Workers
Ghost Workers Are the Most Extreme Form of the Shadow Workforce
Most employees have never heard the term "ghost worker," someone who uses a stolen or fake identity to get hired, or who has someone else do their job. Yet many have already observed the behaviors associated with one.
Employees point to a growing list of warning signs associated with potential ghost worker activity, from repeated excuses for missed work to sudden changes in communication style.
Figure 5 The Warning Signs Employees Notice Most
Behaviors that have made employees question a coworker's credibility.
Verification Becomes the New Workforce Imperative
The Assurance of a One-Time Check Starts to Decay the Moment Onboarding Ends
Ghost workers may be the most extreme expression of the Shadow Workforce, but the findings suggest the conditions that allow them to exist are already taking shape.
The Concept
The Verification Half-Life™
The assurance an employer buys with a one-time background check at hire begins to decay the moment onboarding ends. A background check confirms identity, history, and credentials as they stand on a single day, and nothing reconfirms that the person hired is still who they were, still qualified, and still the one doing the work. Every day since the last check leaves an employer knowing a little less than it thinks it does.
97% believe misrepresenting skills or identity creates business risk, including 52% who say it creates significant risk.
Yet employees have little confidence that current safeguards are sufficient. Only 14% believe employers are doing enough today to verify workers, while fewer than 1 in 4 (24%) are very confident their employer would catch someone who significantly misrepresented their skills, experience, or identity.
Operational Responses
Operational Responses to the Verification Half-Life™
A background check is a snapshot in time, accurate the day it runs and no longer. Each response below resets the clock, reconfirming identity, capability, or accountability rather than assuming it after day one.
Mapping the Mandate to Compliance for Good®
The Compliance for Good framework rests on three pillars: Transparent Compliance, Fair Compliance, and Protective Compliance. The 2026 data operates as the framework's operating agenda for the Shadow Workforce era.
| Pillar | What Employees Are Asking For | |
|---|---|---|
| Transparent Compliance | Clear communication of what is verified before and after hire, so expectations are set up front rather than discovered later. | 40% want transparency into what is verified |
| Fair Compliance | Consistent verification standards applied to every hire within the same job category, with human review of findings. | 54% want consistent checks within job category |
| Protective Compliance | Verification that extends beyond hire, reconfirming identity, capability, and accountability throughout the employee lifecycle. | 37% want verification that continues after day one |
The Bottom Line
The Challenge Is No Longer
Simply Verifying Workers at the Point of Hire
Ghost workers may be the most extreme expression of the Shadow Workforce, but the findings suggest the conditions that allow them to exist are already taking shape. They are a warning sign of a broader workforce challenge: one where organizations increasingly struggle to verify who workers are, what they are capable of doing, and whether they are actually doing the work they were hired to do.
As work becomes more digital, distributed, and AI-enabled, those questions become harder to answer, and more important for employers to get right. The challenge is no longer simply verifying workers at the point of hire. It is maintaining confidence that the person hired remains the person doing the work, that critical skills are genuine, and that accountability does not disappear after onboarding.
The message from employees is clear: the assumption that the person hired is the person doing the work can no longer be taken for granted.
Methodology
Findings are based on a GCheck survey of 1,500 employed U.S. adults, fielded in June 2026 via Pollfish and weighted, with a margin of error of approximately plus or minus 2.5% at 95% confidence and wider for subgroups. Figures reflect employees’ own reported behaviors and their perceptions of colleagues and employers; the two are reported separately and never combined in a single figure. Subgroups under 100 respondents are shown for directional comparison only, most notably Baby Boomers, and race and ethnicity were captured but excluded from analysis as largely confounded by age.
| Segment | Group | Sample (n) | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gender | Male | 737 | 49% |
| Gender | Female | 763 | 51% |
| Generation | Gen Z (18–29) | 136 | 9% |
| Generation | Millennials (30–45) | 590 | 39% |
| Generation | Gen X (46–61) | 694 | 46% |
| Generation | Baby Boomers (62–80) | 80 | 5% |
| Work mode | Fully in-person | 865 | 58% |
| Work mode | Hybrid | 403 | 27% |
| Work mode | Fully remote | 232 | 15% |
All figures are weighted proportions, rounded to whole numbers, so a total may differ from its components by a point. Single-select questions report the share choosing a response; multi-select questions report the share selecting each item, so their totals can exceed 100%. Where a question was asked of a subset, the base is that subset. No index or composite scores are used.