While working for one of the largest consultancies, I had to interview an offshore candidate for an onshore position in my team. It was a database development job and I asked the typical SQL questions, data modelling, etc - all over Skype with no camera. The guy on the other side seemed very knowledgeable. Amazingly high level for the job actually, and better than what his CV suggested. Being an internal candidate, I did not suspect anything and recommended him for the job. A month or so after that, management flew him in and I got to meet him in person. To my surprise, his language skills and much less his technical skills were anywhere near what I experienced at the interview. He was very keen to be a manager, with very very poor SQL skills - even in theory. A friend of mine later told me that it is a common practice in the offshore dev center to let the good devs interview for positions and then to send another person to do the job. They apparently did that to clients quite often and it was not surprising to him that I got the same treatment - even though it was an internal assignment.