In-person interview requests jumped from about 5% of first rounds in 2024 to roughly 30% in 2025, a 500% increase, and 72% of recruiting leaders say the reason is fraud prevention, not a change of heart about remote work. The honest answer for hiring leaders is that returning to the conference room is a symptom, not a cure. The real fix is a documented, evidence-based interview process that works whether the candidate is in the room or on a screen.
What's actually driving the shift back to in-person interviews?
Two years of rapid AI adoption on both sides of the hiring table created an unintended side effect: nobody is fully sure who they're talking to anymore.
The deepfake problem is bigger than most hiring teams realize
This isn't a fringe concern. By mid-2025, 17% of HR managers said they had personally encountered a deepfake candidate in a video interview, and 6% of candidates admit to some form of interview fraud when asked directly. Gartner projects that by 2028, one in four candidate profiles globally will be fraudulent in some way. Meanwhile, only 31% of companies have deployed any deepfake detection software, and 62% of hiring professionals believe candidates are now better at faking their identity than HR teams are at catching it.
That gap, between how common the problem is and how prepared most teams are, is what's pushing hiring leaders back toward a room where they can look someone in the eye.
Going back to all in-person isn't actually the fix
It's an understandable reaction, but it gives up real ground. Hybrid processes that pair AI-assisted screening with human final interviews cut time-to-hire by roughly 40% and improve first-year retention by about 25% compared with fully manual processes. A blanket return to in-person interviewing also quietly reintroduces problems distributed hiring was solving: it narrows your candidate pool to people who can show up in person, slows down every pipeline, and does nothing to stop fraud earlier in the process, before anyone is in a room at all.
The question isn't "in-person or remote." It's whether your process produces evidence either way.
On what actually needs to change in 2026 hiring processes
What actually stops interview fraud, and inconsistent hiring, at the same time
The teams handling this well aren't choosing a format. They're building a verifiable record of every interview, regardless of format: a defined scorecard agreed on before the interview starts, consistent questions across candidates, and a transcript that ties what was said to how it was scored. That combination does two things at once. It makes it much harder for a fabricated identity or a coached, AI-assisted answer to slip through unnoticed, because there's a documented trail to check it against. And it fixes the older, more common problem: inconsistent, gut-feel interviewing that has nothing to do with fraud at all.
The practical takeaway: whatever format you choose, the interview itself should produce a record you could hand to someone else and have them reach the same conclusion you did.
The bottom line for hiring leaders
In-person interviewing will keep growing in 2026, and for some roles that's the right call. But it's a partial answer to a documentation problem. The teams that get ahead of both fraud and inconsistent hiring are the ones investing in structure: a clear role definition, a scored rubric, and a real transcript, so the record of the interview is as trustworthy as the decision it produces.