Named a Leader: 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Identity Verification
The problem
Your hiring process is unprotected
Resume screening, video interviews, and the I-9 checks your team already runs weren't designed to catch what's targeting them now, and the downstream effects are clear:
Gartner® projects that 1 in 4 candidate profiles will be fake by 2028, and resume fraud detection built to catch typos and gaps was never built to catch a cloned voice or a fake face. Fake candidate detection at that volume can’t rely on recruiter intuition. Deepfake candidate detection and AI interview fraud are now board-level risks, not edge cases recruiters can be expected to catch on a video call.
Google's Mandiant threat intel team traced one North Korean IT worker fraud network to at least $6.8M across 300+ US companies, exploiting exactly what remote hiring runs on: a name, a resume, a face on a screen. Remote hiring fraud and fake employee schemes thrive in that gap, and fake employee detection that starts after onboarding starts too late. Contractors and distributed teams get verified less often than full-time hires, where candidate impersonation and ghost employee schemes concentrate.
I-9 compliance only requires that a document look authentic, a lower bar than the IAL2 identity proofing and NIST 800-63 standards set for confirming who someone actually is.A single fraudulent hire with system access can cost more in breach response and remediation than verifying every candidate would ever have cost up front.
The solution
Verify identity before day one
1Kosmos verifies every candidate against a real government-issued ID and a live biometric scan before the offer goes out, so a cloned voice or a fake face has nowhere to land. Candidate identity verification runs the same way for a contractor overseas and a full-time hire in the office. The identity verified at hire carries forward across every login and access request for as long as they're on your payroll.
Deepfake detection in real time
Liveness detection stops a deepfake before it reaches an interview.
Verification for every worker type
Every contractor and remote hire gets the same verification as a full-time employee.
I-9 and IAL2 in one step
Verification clears the IAL2 bar I-9 alone wasn't built to reach.
Duplicate identity detection
The same face under a different name gets flagged before it reaches payroll or systems.
Verification before system access
Candidates clear identity verification before the offer letter, closing the window where impostors slip through.
Reusable identity, from hire to login
The identity verified at hire becomes the credential used at every login, with no re-proofing from scratch.
Recognized & certified
FAQs
New hire identity verification confirms that a candidate or new hire is a real person and the same person who applied, using government-issued ID and live biometrics. An employment verification company, like The Work Number, confirms job history and salary for a lender or landlord after the fact. The two aren't interchangeable: one proves identity, the other proves employment history.
Liveness detection confirms a real, physically present person is completing verification, not a photo, a recording, or an AI-generated face. It analyzes micro-movements, depth, and texture in real time during the verification session, which is what allows 1Kosmos to catch deepfakes and injected video before a fraudulent candidate advances to an interview or onboarding.
Biometric matching compares a candidate's live facial scan against the photo on their government-issued ID, confirming the person completing verification is the person the document belongs to. The match is deterministic: candidates either match their ID or they don't, with no confidence score or guesswork in between.
Resume fraud misrepresents a candidate's experience or credentials. Synthetic identity fraud goes further, combining real and fabricated information, a real social security number paired with a fake name, for example, to construct a persona with no real person behind it. Identity verification catches synthetic identities because the document and biometric data won't match any real government record.
Workforce identity verification runs from any smartphone or browser, so contractors, gig workers, and distributed teams complete it without an in-person visit. Coverage extends across 194 countries, so an offshore or distributed contractor is verified the same way as someone hired locally.