Technical Check Failures: A Fallback Plan That Saves Talent

It is 6:10 pm on a Thursday. Your finalist for a revenue-critical engineering role starts a timed coding assessment. Ten minutes in, their screen freezes, the proctoring feed drops, and the session auto-submits. The score is a fail. The candidate sends a screenshot showing their ISP outage. The hiring manager pings, "Can we just let them redo it?" Security replies, "Retakes are how proxy rings get in." You are the tie-breaker. By the end of this playbook, you will be able to design a fallback strategy that: (1) recovers legitimate talent quickly, (2) closes fraud openings created by ad hoc retakes, and (3) produces an audit-ready record of why you granted an exception.

Remote hiring has made identity and integrity part of the hiring lifecycle, not a niche concern. Checkr reported that 31% of hiring managers say they have interviewed a candidate who later turned out to be using a false identity. That implies false identity is common enough to affect policy design, not just edge cases. It does not prove your org has the same exposure, nor does it specify your industry or seniority mix, so treat it as directional pressure to add controls, not as a forecast. Pindrop reported that 1 in 6 applicants to remote roles showed signs of fraud in one real-world pipeline. Directionally, that means the retake path will be targeted if it is the easiest way to swap a person or outsource answers. It does not mean 1 in 6 of your candidates are fraudsters, because pipelines, roles, and detection definitions vary. At the same time, over-rejecting creates avoidable cost. SHRM notes replacement cost can range from 50-200% of annual salary depending on role. The implication for CHROs is not "every false negative costs X," but that a sloppy process that loses good people has material downstream cost and reputation impact.

A fallback strategy fails when it is owned by "whoever is online". Set clear operators and decision boundaries: - Process owner: Recruiting Ops owns the fallback policy and workflow state changes in the ATS. PeopleOps leadership approves policy and monitors fairness and candidate experience. - Control owner: Security (or GRC) defines the minimum identity and fraud controls required for any retake or alternative step, and reviews only escalations. - Signal owner: Hiring manager owns performance interpretation once integrity is confirmed (score context, work-sample review). What is automated vs manually reviewed: - Automated: session failure classification (timeout, disconnect), retake eligibility checks, step-up verification triggers, evidence attachment, candidate messaging templates. - Manual review: only when integrity signals are mixed (for example, multiple face mismatches, anomalous device changes) or when the candidate requests an exception outside policy. Sources of truth: - ATS is the system of record for stage status and decision rationale. - The interview and assessment systems are systems of evidence (logs, recordings, scoring artifacts). - The verification service is the identity authority (verification result, liveness outcome, timestamped checks).

A good fallback plan is a ladder, not a single "retake" button. Each rung trades candidate friction for integrity confidence, based on what failed. Step 1: Classify the failure (within minutes). Separate platform failures from candidate environment failures and from integrity failures. If you cannot classify, treat as ambiguous and require step-up checks. Step 2: Preserve partial signal. If the candidate completed 60% of the assessment before a verified outage, store what you have as a partial artifact and do not overwrite it with a retake score. This reduces gaming and helps hiring managers interpret progress. Step 3: Choose the minimum recovery action that restores fairness: - Platform outage confirmed: restart session with same identity, same time limit remaining, same question set version. - Candidate connectivity failure: allow one retake within a short window with a new question variant and step-up verification. - Proctoring feed failure: route to an alternative assessment mode (shorter timed task plus structured interview) rather than repeated retries. Step 4: Enforce a retake budget. Define attempts and windows per role level. The goal is consistency, not punishment. Retake budgets also reduce reviewer fatigue from endless exceptions. Step 5: Add step-up controls when risk increases. Examples: device change since last attempt, unusual location shift, repeated failures, or high-stakes roles.

Below is a concrete retake policy config you can hand to Recruiting Ops and Security. It encodes a bounded retake budget, integrity step-ups, and Evidence Pack requirements so decisions are consistent and auditable.

Use this YAML as a starting point. It is intentionally strict on identity continuity and evidence capture to prevent "friendly" exceptions from becoming an attack path.