Last month a candidate for our operations coordinator role sent in a writing sample that wasn't hers. Two paragraphs were lifted almost word-for-word from a Medium post published in 2022. I found it in about ninety seconds. She was our second-round favorite going in.
The easy move is the ghost. Send a form rejection, close the file, move on. I don't do that, and I think most owners of a 15-person shop shouldn't either.
I send a short, direct email. Something like: "Hi Rachel, I appreciated the time you spent on our process. During review I noticed portions of your writing sample match a published article from 2022. Because of that, we won't be moving forward. I wanted you to hear it from me directly rather than a generic note." That's it. No lecture. No moral essay. Two reasons I do it this way. First, she may genuinely not have understood our expectation — a lot of people now paste AI drafts and don't think of it as plagiarism. Second, our town is small and our industry is smaller. The candidate you ghost today is the vendor rep across the table in three years. Being clean and professional costs me four minutes.
Here's the part I sat with longer. If I only caught it because I happened to Google a phrase, how many samples have I not caught? Probably some. So we changed the writing exercise. Instead of "send us a 400-word sample on customer retention," we now do a 30-minute live exercise on a Zoom call: here's a real (sanitized) email from a frustrated client, draft the response, talk me thorugh your choices. You cannot fake that in real time. It also tells me more in 30 minutes than any take-home ever did — how they think, how they handle being watched, whether they ask clarifying questions before writing.
The live exercise is harder to schedule. It adds maybe 45 minutes of my time per finalist. Worth it. Of the last four hires we made this way, all four are still with us at the six-month mark, and three of them referenced the exercise as the moment they knew they wanted the job.
I still assume good faith by default. Most candidates aren't cheating. Most are anxious, over-preparing, and trying to look polished. The one who plagiarizes is rare, and when I find one I remove them from the process the same day — no drawn-out debate with myself, no "but she interviewed so well." She did interview well. She also sent us someone else's writing. Both things are true, and only one of them matters for the hire.
If you're rebuilding a hiring process for a team growing past twenty people and want a second set of eyes on the exercises you're using, send us a note. This is the kind of thing we help small operators think through before it costs them a bad hire.
— Amanda @ SBATC
