The last time I went through the Palantir hiring process, the effort on their end was almost exclusively on technical and cultural fit interviews. My references told me they had not been contacted.

Calibrating your threat model against this attack is unlikely to give you any alpha in 2026. Hiring at tech companies and government is much less deliberate than your mental model supposes.

The current extent of background checks is an API call to Checkr. This is simply to control hiring costs.

As a heuristic, speculated information to build a threat model is unlikely to yield a helpful framework.

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bossyTeacher 18 hours ago | parent [-]

>the effort on their end was almost exclusively on technical and cultural fit interviews

How could you possibly know if they use other undisclosed methods as part of the recruitment? You are assuming Palatir would behave ethically. Palantir, the company that will never win awards based on ethics

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basket_horse 14 hours ago | parent [-]

You’re over thinking it. Like all top tech companies, they just want the best engineers.

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tl 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

On the contrary, they hire the trendiest: https://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/

	▲	basket_horse 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah this seems accurate, I just mean they aren’t looking at your google searches when deciding if they should hire you.

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well_ackshually 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Ah yes, Palantir is "just" a tech company.

Notwithstanding the fact that tech companies hire dogshit employees all the time and the vast majority of employees of any company of size 1000+ are average at best, Palantir happens to be rating so high on the scale of evil that I'd pop champagne if it got nuked tomorrow.

If any company would do it, it would be Palantir.

	▲	basket_horse 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That’s the point. If any company would do it, it’s Palantir, and they don’t. In fact it’s quite the opposite. Their negative public image makes hiring more difficult causing them to accept what they can get. Also, I’m not saying they have the best talent, just that they want the best talent.