aperture opens hiring intelligence to every company, starting at $0

SAN FRANCISCO, September 1, 2026. Aperture Labs Inc. (aperturehq.ai) today announced that its hiring intelligence platform is now available to all companies, with plans from $0 to $599 per month and a custom option for high-volume hiring. Every plan connects to the hiring software a company already uses at no additional cost.

Aperture helps employers understand who they are hiring. The platform conducts the interview on the hiring team’s behalf, asks role-specific questions that build on the candidate’s own answers, and returns a ranked shortlist in which every recommendation carries the reasoning behind it. On request, the platform can also check each interview for signs that the session is not what it appears to be.

“Hiring teams are being asked to make consequential decisions on evidence that is now easy to fake,” said Harsh Shroff, co-founder of Aperture Labs Inc. “A résumé can be produced in seconds and an answer can be supplied to a candidate in real time. Aperture gives companies the intelligence to understand what a candidate has actually demonstrated, and why they should or should not move forward.”

the research

Aperture’s work began with a study of how employment fraud operates and how its methods change from one case to the next. The team reviewed thousands of cases, artifacts, online resources, and open-source fraud communities, alongside court filings, federal indictments, sanctions notices, and published threat research.

What emerged was not a set of isolated scams. It was an organized system that gets better each time part of it is caught.

North Korea is the largest known source. Its IT workers apply for remote positions at American companies under identities that are not theirs, fabricating employment histories and applying to hundreds or thousands of roles at once. Some use video-manipulation tools during interviews to obscure who is actually participating. People inside the United States then keep the employer’s laptops in their homes, so that a worker connecting from overseas appears to be working domestically. The candidate passes the interview, the offer is extended, and the worker receives legitimate access to the company’s systems.

the scale

The U.S. Treasury Department put the program’s 2024 revenue at nearly $800 million when it sanctioned facilitators in North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Spain in March 2026. Estimates vary: the Center for Strategic and International Studies places the figure between $350 million and $800 million. Treasury has said an individual worker can earn more than $300,000 a year, with the regime keeping as much as 90 percent.^[1]

In June 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice announced coordinated action across 16 states, searching 29 suspected laptop farms and reporting that North Korean workers had obtained jobs at more than 100 American companies, including companies connected to sensitive technologies. In a separate prosecution, one domestic facilitator was found to have placed workers at 309 U.S. businesses using 68 stolen identities.^[2]

Research published by Nisos documented a group of 22 individuals who submitted more than 166,000 applications over nine months. Roughly 13 percent led to interviews, and the group received 76 job offers. Technology companies accounted for 42.6 percent of those offers, more than any other industry.^[3]

Verizon’s 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report treated the problem as a distinct security threat.^[4] U.S. authorities have connected these schemes to unauthorized system access, malware, source-code theft, and extortion of the employer after the fact.^[1]

why a standard video call cannot catch this

Most companies interview over Google Meet, Zoom, or Microsoft Teams. These are effective meeting products, but they were built to connect participants, not to tell the interviewer anything about who joined. A general-purpose meeting application gives a hiring team very little to work with, and the recruiter is left doing what recruiters have always done: listening to the answers and forming an impression.

Aperture conducts the interview on its own platform. Because the session takes place within Aperture rather than through a third-party meeting application, Aperture can examine it from start to finish.

how aperture stops it

Each method described above depends on something the applicant supplies: a résumé, a work history, a profile, a video feed. Every one of those can now be fabricated or manipulated. Aperture does not rely on any one of them.

Aperture’s fraud detection, available on request, runs during the interview and is designed to determine whether a session shows signs of impersonation, manipulation, or real-time outside assistance, and to surface those concerns directly to the hiring team rather than burying them in a technical log. Separately, the platform scores what the candidate has demonstrated against the requirements of the role.

interviews that cannot be anticipated

Real-time answer tools work by recognizing a question and generating a response for the candidate. They work best when interviews use common, predictable questions.

Aperture does not run every interview from a fixed script. Each follow-up builds on what the candidate has just said, which lets the conversation pursue a specific claim, examine incomplete reasoning, or ask how and why a particular decision was made. There is no stable sequence to anticipate. The conversation produces deeper evidence about the candidate and gives answer tools nothing to predict.

volume stops being an advantage

Fraudulent applicants depend on volume. They do not need every application to succeed, only a small percentage of a very large number.

A hiring team screening hundreds or thousands of candidates by hand cannot examine each with the same depth, and that limitation is precisely what high-volume applicants exploit. Aperture lets a company evaluate far more candidates without reducing anyone to a keyword match, applying a consistent standard of evidence across the entire pool. The same process that surfaces strong candidates surfaces inconsistencies.

every recommendation carries its reasoning

Aperture does not return a score without an explanation. For each candidate, the platform connects its assessment to evidence drawn from the application, the interview, and the requirements of the role, so a hiring manager can see why a candidate was ranked as they were, what they demonstrated, and where concerns arose. The employer remains responsible for the hiring decision. Aperture’s role is to make the evidence complete, consistent, and readable.

the employer’s own candidates

Many AI hiring companies operate as agencies or talent marketplaces, maintaining their own candidate networks and sending employers people from them. Aperture works differently. It evaluates the people who apply directly to the employer, within the employer’s hiring process and against the employer’s standards. Aperture does not supply candidates from its own pool, does not charge a fee when a company makes a hire, and does not sell candidate data. The interviews and hiring decisions belong to the company that conducted them.

works with existing hiring software

Replacing hiring software is costly and disruptive, so Aperture does not require it. The platform connects with Greenhouse, Ashby, Lever, Workday, LinkedIn, Indeed, and Wellfound. A company links its existing account and continues working within its established process, with nothing to migrate or re-enter. Companies that do not use hiring software can manage the process within Aperture directly.

pricing and availability

All plans are available today at aperturehq.ai/pricing.

The Free plan is $0 per month and supports one active role. Paid plans range from $99 to $599 per month, with higher interview and role limits, and include a 14-day trial. A custom option is available for companies hiring at high volume or requiring the platform configured to their own process, with terms agreed with the company.

Pricing is based on the number of interviews a company conducts and the number of roles it has open. Fraud detection is available on request. Connecting supported hiring software is included on all plans. Companies can create an account and conduct their first interview the same day.

frequently asked questions

sources

1. [1] U.S. Department of the Treasury, Office of Foreign Assets Control, “Treasury Sanctions Facilitators of DPRK IT Worker Fraud Targeting U.S. Businesses,” March 12, 2026.
2. [2] U.S. Department of Justice, “Justice Department Announces Coordinated, Nationwide Actions to Combat North Korean Remote Information Technology Workers’ Illicit Revenue Generation Schemes,” June 30, 2025.
3. [3] Nisos, “People, Process, Personas: Nisos Exposes the Human Risk in DPRK Employment Fraud Schemes,” June 16, 2026.
4. [4] Verizon, 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report, May 2026.