Job candidate has presented my work as his own

[PurplePirate]

Will try to keep this short. Have also changed some details for privacy.

I am on an interview panel tomorrow (via Zoom). The chair has just emailed through the pack which includes the slides prepared by the three candidates for their presentations. We ask them to send through their slides in advance in case there is a problem with the Zoom link on the day.

One candidate, I will call Bill, worked at the same company as me about six years ago. When I was there I led a project and I created a distinctive and rather lovely slide deck as part of my work.

FF six years and Bill has submitted my slide deck. The presentation task is something like "Describe a project you have led and your approach to organisational transformation". So do I assume Bill is going to pass my work off as his own? Do I tell the chair now? Wait until the interview and watch him twig?

Bill may not realise I am on the interview panel. We do tell candidates the names of the panel beforehand but I am a last minute replacement for a colleague who is ill so I don't know if HR updated the candidates. I was not involved in shortlisting Bill.

This is too delicious. I think you start by asking him to describe his role in the project. Or do you join the call and wait for the penny to drop? Join the call and introduce yourself, reminding him that you worked together at company X? How long before he realises?

I think the professional approach would be for the hiring manager or panel chair to speak to the candidate before the interview and clarify his position; if he's presenting it as his own work, then they should be open and honest about knowing it isn't.

Interviewing is time-consuming, there is no point in running the interview to 'watch him squirm' plus, if he spots OP on the panel, if he has anything about him at all he'll 'style it out' and say something along the lines of, he's using this slide deck created by his colleague because it gave such an excellent picture of the project that there was no point in recreating in an alternative format.

I’d keep quiet and wait for the magical moment he realises who you are. Are there any questions you could ask that would then compound the situation for him?

As a panel member, I once had someone use a behaviour example based on work I had done they weren’t involved in. I told the rest of the panel when we were scoring and they decided we should remove her from the process. Goodness knows if she had stolen the other examples too!

You’ve never had a professional job, or at least not one where you have to work with senior level and deal with interviews etc, have you?

That behaviour would reflect just as badly on you as on the interview candidate. I run a business and I’d be working out how to get you out.

Not sure if this has already been asked, but is it possible he’s applied for a position he’s not yet experienced in and so instead of showing an example of a project he has run, he’s chosen to talk about a project he has been part of and analyse what you did well and what he’s learned from you/from the project?

You need to speak 6 the panel. It's the professional way to handle things

Even it he did the project himself, taking his previous companies slides and everything in them and presenting them to another company is really bad in itself. Has he changed or redacted sensitive information at least?
Even without the blatent theft of your work, does your company really want to hire the type of person that takes internal company slide decks and presents them at interviews. You need to raise it for more than the reason that he stole your work. But that as well.

Oh thank goodness someone asked a man. Phew.

So the most exciting example he has from his work history of leading a project is 6 years old and wasn’t led by him. It’s not a stellar start for him, is it 😂

Are government ministers not used to being sent presentations to use? I worked in the public sector for years and my expectation was that if a politician needed to do a presentation then a civil servant would prepare it for them and there would rarely be any credit given publicly.

Yeah, I have one at home that I use to back up my photographs. I'd never dream of trying to use it on a work machine though, and wouldn't have done for at least ten years. External presentations are always emailed so they go through the security filters before being loaded onto our system.

Not really, the candidate may surprise you. They often do. Then again, they often don't.

Sigh.
if that’s your complaint, then your response to me makes no sense, by your own logic, as I was responding to another poster and not you
Also, your post is clearly aimed at the OP, regardless of you quoting someone else. It would make literally no sense to berate someone who isn’t actually in this situation. Which is what you did.

Popcorn 🍿

so It wouldn’t be just to “see him squirm” then

This reminds me of the time I was interviewing for a newly qualified lawyer role. One of the internal candidates went hunting through my files to find the interview questions, then told me what she had done (no idea why, guilty conscience?) then tried to blame me for not locking them down so she couldn’t access them.

Really? That all sounds very strange

Sideline but who's using memory sticks? It's 2026 not 2006! They pose serious security risks, most big IT systems wouldn't allow them.
It's very standard to be asked to share slides in advance - the panel can prepare in advance and avoids any tech of formatting glitches in advance.

I had something not dissimilar - it wasn't an interview but an internal procedural 'knowledge test' - ahead of the test I was 'revising' by looking up likely questions on the work intranet, and I accidentally stumbled on the actual test paper 😆Being an honest person, I flagged it to the document owner.

As I said in a later post, this was a little tongue in cheek. If the candidate has got as far as being selected for interview then there will be more than just the presentation that is of interest as they will have been selected before the presentation was known about.

I do so hate plagiarism though, so would happily waste an hour to flush it out. Pretty much everyone I know would do the same.

This is all very careless of him isn’t it? It’s one thing to steal work but quite another to do it without covering your tracks, which is effectively what this is since he can’t have done the most basic checks on where you are now!

Well nothing settles it quite like consulting a 'very experienced husband' thank goodness we’ve got that perspective covered. I was worried there that we might have to rely on our own judgement and experience. Ladies, proceed with confidence we've checked with a man!

Seems weird that something that was done 6 years ago at a different company, has any relevance to an interview now. You know this person, have you told the rest of the panel that?
Surely he'll slip up when questioned about it if he just straight up nicked it?