The growing use of digital communication has made it easier for organisations to reach employees, candidates and customers. However, rising fraud and impersonation are making people increasingly cautious about engaging with unfamiliar contacts.
For HR teams, this presents a challenge that extends beyond cybersecurity. Unanswered recruitment calls, suspicious job offers and fraudulent messages impersonating senior leaders can undermine workplace trust, delay hiring and affect employee confidence.
Sangeetha Ravikumar, Head of HR, India, for Truecaller, says organisations have improved their ability to reach people but have not necessarily strengthened the credibility of those interactions.
"We have solved for reach, but not for trust. Connecting has never been easier; being believed has never been harder," she says.
The scale of the problem is significant. Truecaller identified over 4,168 crore spam calls in India during 2025, including approximately 770 crore fraudulent calls impersonating banks, government offices and well-known brands.
Such activity is changing how people respond to legitimate communication, with employees and candidates increasingly checking unfamiliar numbers and messages before taking action.
The productivity cost of unanswered calls and missed opportunities
Communication distrust creates operational costs that organisations may not immediately recognise. Recruiters spend additional time following up with candidates, while employees and business partners may delay responding to unfamiliar requests.
Ravikumar describes this as a hidden tax on organisational productivity.
"Think of distrust as a hidden tax. It doesn’t appear on a P&L, but it shows up in slower hiring, missed opportunities, follow-up fatigue and lost customers," she says.
The consequences extend beyond additional follow-ups. Candidates may miss genuine employment opportunities, customers may ignore legitimate business calls, and important conversations may never take place.
Data from an Indeed survey of Indian employees and job seekers highlights the recruitment implications:
14% said scams had made them sufficiently cautious to miss genuine opportunities.
Among Gen Z respondents, the figure rose to 52%.
The challenge is particularly relevant for recruiters reaching prospective candidates who may not recognise incoming numbers. A genuine recruitment conversation can therefore require multiple attempts across calls, emails and professional networking platforms.
Why recruitment fraud is changing the candidate experience
Recruitment communication increasingly competes with fraudulent approaches that imitate legitimate hiring processes. Scammers frequently use familiar terms such as opportunities, offers and shortlisting to establish credibility with job seekers.
An Indeed survey found that 93% of Indian job seekers had encountered suspicious or fraudulent job offers. Meanwhile, 51% were not confident about distinguishing genuine recruiters from impersonators.
The survey also found that three in four job seekers sometimes ignore job postings because they fear fraud.
For organisations, this creates risks across recruitment and employer branding. Genuine recruiters may struggle to reach prospective employees, while fraudulent offer letters issued in a company's name can damage its credibility.
Ravikumar says employers need to make their recruitment processes easier to verify. She identifies several measures that can help establish legitimacy:
Verified identity on recruitment calls.
Official email domains for candidate communication.
Publicly accessible information explaining the hiring process.
Consistent descriptions of recruitment stages across communication channels.
Monitoring for fraudulent communications impersonating the organisation.
She also points to the risk of losing passive talent when candidates become reluctant to engage with unfamiliar recruiters. What organisations sometimes interpret as candidate ghosting could, in certain instances, reflect a wider trust problem.
Trust is becoming central to employee and customer experience
The implications of communication distrust extend beyond recruitment into everyday employee and customer interactions. Digital communication increasingly shapes how people experience organisations, including their confidence in official messages.
The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer found that 78% of employees globally trust their employer. This compares with 64% for business in general and 53% for government.
Ravikumar views employer trust as an important organisational asset that can be weakened by convincing impersonation attempts.
A fraudulent email posing as payroll or a senior executive, for instance, can create uncertainty around the authenticity of official communication. Similar concerns arise when customers receive calls, messages or one-time passwords associated with a brand.
Drawing on Frances Frei's trust triangle of authenticity, logic and empathy, Ravikumar emphasises the importance of establishing identity before expecting people to act on digital communication.
"Trust is no longer one part of the experience. It is what the rest of the experience is built on," she says.
Technology needs to work alongside workplace culture
Technology can help organisations identify communication sources and flag suspicious interactions. However, Ravikumar says technical safeguards cannot independently determine whether an employee should act on a particular request.
She identifies workplace culture as an equally important part of organisational protection. Employees need to understand official communication channels and feel comfortable questioning unusual instructions, including those apparently coming from senior leadership.
HR has a role in establishing these practices through onboarding, employee training and leadership behaviour.
Ravikumar identifies three areas where organisations need to strengthen their preparedness:
1. Voice cloning and deepfakes
Artificial intelligence is making it increasingly difficult to distinguish genuine executive communication from impersonation. Ravikumar cites a 2024 incident in Hong Kong, where a finance employee at a multinational engineering firm transferred approximately USD 25 million following a deepfake video call.
She says requests involving money, credentials or sensitive information should require an additional verification step, irrespective of the apparent sender.
2. Fraudulent candidate identities
Gartner predicts that one in four candidate profiles worldwide could be fake by 2028. This makes identity verification during remote recruitment and onboarding an increasingly important consideration for employers.
3. Scams across multiple communication channels
Fraudsters are moving between telephone calls, SMS, emails and messaging platforms to establish credibility. Consequently, employee awareness programmes focused on individual communication channels may not adequately address emerging threats.
Ravikumar recommends building consistent verification habits, including calling back on recognised numbers and encouraging employees to question urgent requests.
Communication trust is moving towards the boardroom agenda
For organisations, the next challenge will be treating communication trust as a business capability rather than limiting responsibility to technology and cybersecurity teams.
Ravikumar draws a parallel with the evolution of cybersecurity, which moved from a specialised technical concern to a boardroom priority.
She says communication trust has implications for business growth, talent acquisition and organisational reputation. Whether candidates respond to recruiters, customers complete transactions or employees act on official instructions depends partly on whether they trust the communication.
She recommends shared ownership across HR, communications, security and customer-facing teams, supported by measurable outcomes.
These could include time-to-connect, candidate drop-off rates, employee reporting of phishing and impersonation incidents, resolution timelines and customer response rates across official channels.
For HR leaders, this means incorporating communication verification into everyday workplace practices rather than treating it solely as an occasional security exercise.
Ravikumar believes organisations that establish clear verification processes and encourage employees to question suspicious requests will be better positioned to protect workplace relationships.
"Trust is the new deliverability. If people don’t believe the message, it hasn’t really been delivered."
