Introduction

Candidate experience and candidate quality are inextricably linked, and critical for business success. Job seekers consider the candidate experience a clear indicator of the employee experience, and great candidates will actually drop out of the hiring process if they have a bad experience as a candidate. Considering many companies today are struggling with quality of hire and candidate quality, focusing on improving the hiring process in a way that enhances the candidate experience will help solve both issues.

Companies can improve the candidate experience and candidate quality by improving the middle part of the hiring process: the candidate screening and evaluation process. This article breaks down what candidate screening is, why it’s important, what’s broken, how to fix it, and the benefits you’ll see from modernizing your screening process and tech stack. We will also look at new solutions powered by AI that help to streamline these processes, further automate candidate screening and improve the candidate experience. 

What is candidate screening?

Candidate screening is the process of evaluating job applicants to determine which ones will be suitable for the open position. Traditionally, this takes place after sourcing and before interviews as the first step in the larger candidate evaluation process. It can include things like parsing, reviewing and matching resumes, reading cover letters, initial pre-hire assessments and sometimes even asynchronous video interviews. Yet we see many activities that might typically be classified as ‘candidate screening’ happening further down the funnel. This is because AI has increasingly leveled the playing field for applicants seeking their first interview. Talent teams are deploying more tools later in the candidate journey to help evaluate who is going to be the best fit. This is the modernization of candidate screening. For example, many top talent teams are also adopting online screening solutions as part of the screening process to evaluate a candidate's online presence for potential misconduct risks as well as positive traits and competencies that can be used to improve and personalize interviews. This approach saves hiring teams time by helping narrow down the candidate shortlist to focus on the “best fits” as well as create a great candidate experience.

Why is candidate screening important?

The goal of candidate screening is to determine which applicants should make it through the evaluation stage to the shortlist and move throughout the various stages of the hiring process. That means considering which applicants meet the basic skills requirements of the job, have the right qualifications, would make a great fit, and would contribute positively to the overall team and organization. With information about which candidates are qualified and quality, hiring teams can narrow down their shortlisted candidates and focus on selecting the best person for the job as efficiently as possible.

What are the goals of candidate screening?

The goals of candidate screening are to:

• Identify qualified candidates 
• Evaluate candidate quality 
• Narrow down the candidate pool 
  

Candidate screening needs a facelift. 

Candidate screening evaluates an extensive applicant list to determine a shortlist of candidates who should move onto the interview stage. Unfortunately, this process is still time consuming, labor intensive, and rife with unconscious bias. Many talent teams rely on various processes and talent acquisition tech stacks to ease those pain points. Today with the increase of AI created applications, more and more candidates appear increasingly suitable for an interview.

In 2024, this typically looks like sifting through resumes, reviewing cover letters, screening interviews, and initial pre-hire assessments. The tech stack that supports this typically includes Applicant Tracking Systems (ATSs), chatbots or texting solutions with pre-screening questions, interviewing technology like video interviews or phone screening solutions, and pre-employment assessments. 

However, many of these solutions introduce new problems of their own. For example, as many as 70% of candidates lie on their resume and 81% lie in interviews. They may use ChatGPT to write their resumes and cover letters. Many use new AI interview technology to help them answer interview questions in real time. Most candidates also know how to cheat on pre-employment assessments. And, if the assessment is too long or complex, many candidates will just remove themselves from the hiring process altogether, leading to candidate drop off. Each of these make it harder to differentiate between candidates, assess actual candidate quality, and even result in candidate drop off due to poor and lengthy candidate experiences. The technologies that improve screening reduce friction for candidates, reduce drop-off and save time for recruiting teams.‍

Improving Candidate Screening

With all of the noise in the application process today, how can recruiting teams ensure that high-quality candidates move forward and low-quality candidates do not waste time and resources? How can this be done in a way that creates a positive candidate experience? And, in many cases, how can this be done at scale?

Answering this involves modernizing your candidate screening process and expanding the concept of candidate screening to go all the way to your finalist, instead of just creating a short list.

3 Ways to Modernize Candidate Screening in 2025

Like recruiters, candidates want a quick, fair, and frictionless hiring process. Accomplishing this means creating a talent acquisition process and tech stack that meets candidates where they are, helps evaluate their everyday behaviors, and frictionlessly provides deep insights about candidates. With this as a baseline, hiring teams can modernize candidate screening to improve both the candidate experience as well as quality of hire. Many are turning to AI as part of the solution. 

#1. Include a Candidate's Online Web Presence 

Over the next five years, digital natives will grow from 50% to 75% of the workforce. Companies balancing the need for candidate insights with a positive candidate experience are adopting modern online candidate screening solutions and leveraging the billions of pieces of content that are publicly available online. Screening where candidates live their lives helps companies better understand who their candidates are efficiently, compliantly, and scalably. With AI allowing candidates to almost perfectly align them to roles and game assessments, recruiting teams now need to turn to additional sources of information that give them insight on candidate fit. Screening tools that compliantly include insights from a candidate's publicly available online web presence allows recruiting teams to better understand the candidate. Are they someone who you want representing your brand? Will they work well with the team? Are they who they say they are? Modern recruiting teams are leveraging insights from a candidate’s publicly available online web presence to help determine candidate fit.

More and more hiring teams are turning to online candidate screening solutions for these insights. As HR and Recruitment expert Tim Sackett says in “Should you be checking social media accounts of your candidates?”, these new, modern candidate screening solutions can provide unique data points on candidate fit and quality that can help hiring teams quickly and frictionlessly better get to know candidates and how they will show up in the workplace. 

These solutions can work in two ways and occur at different points in the screening process. First, they can provide an initial overview of your candidate’s positive personality traits and workplace competencies to help you better understand whether your candidates are creative, dependable, or problem solvers. They can also provide science-backed interview questions to help personalize interviews based on the candidate’s unique competencies. These tools should be implemented after a recruiter’s initial screening but before the interview with the hiring manager. This allows for the hiring manager to identify if a person has the key traits needed for success in a role, and to tailor interview questions to bring those traits to the surface.

Once the list has been reduced to a handful of finalists, forward thinking practitioners leverage a candidate's online web presence to uncover any signals of online misconduct. Has one of your finalists shared content inciting violence, made threats, or sexually harassed people online? The best of these solutions simply require candidate consent to compliantly screen publicly available content for misconduct behaviors that align with your Employee Code of Conduct. They also remove any protected-class information and content that isn’t job relevant. 

As the future of social media becomes more driven by video, ensuring that an online screening partner has these capabilities is essential for capturing the most signals of misconduct. An independent market research study found that 82% of HR and Talent leaders consider screening video content a must-have feature in their online and social media screening. The very best of these third party solutions are adapting to keep up. 

#2. Combate AI Applications with AI Screening 

AI is impacting the modern workplace and transforming the way we work. It gives us the ability to process more data points faster than ever before so that people can quickly, efficiently, and scalably make the best hiring and business decisions. While AI may be creating a problem for talent acquisition teams at the top of the recruiting funnel, it is also part of the solution to evaluate these applications to get to a final list of candidates.

Hiring teams are leveraging AI in candidate screening solutions to gather deeper candidate insights throughout the process. When used properly, AI can automate a large number of manual processes, including the ability to capture, format, and process a huge amount of data in a very short period of time. This allows people to review more data from more sources faster than ever, enhancing our ability to make reasonable business decisions, and in this case hiring outcomes. 

Candidate screening solutions powered by AI, for example, can do all kinds of things including extract candidate insights and experiences from resumes, power recruitment texting solutions and conversational AI chatbots, and input data from an ATS to a CRM and vice versa to ease the application and nurturing process. It can help figure out which candidates’ resumes best align with a job description. It can even spot behavioral patterns from online communications, including identifying signals of misconduct like posts inciting violence in someone’s public social media content, and more. AI is a great tool to understand large amounts of applicant data and surface those insights to recruiting teams in order to make better informed decisions. Modern hiring teams are prioritizing implementing and testing these types of AI screening solutions.

#3. Use AI Screening to Reduce Candidate Friction

In addition to a fast hiring process, candidates want a frictionless and seamless process. They don’t want to have to type in the same text that’s on their resume into an online application. They don’t want to sit awkwardly by the computer on a one-way video interview answering screening questions by themselves. And, they definitely don’t want to take a 45 minute assessment. 

Today, modern screening solutions using AI have the ability to screen a person’s publicly available online content to determine fit. 

These advanced AI solutions can tell a lot about a person through their web presence without requiring candidate action beyond their consent. Natural language processing technology can frictionlessly and compliantly understand a candidates’ positive personality traits and workplace competencies based on how a person communicates online. It can then identify valuable interview questions that are personalized to the candidate based on their unique competencies. And, it can also uncover signals of misconduct like whether someone shares bigoted, violent, or threatening content online. This technology works across text, image, and even video content. This helps companies not just screen at the pace their candidates create content, but do so in a way that meets them where they are, online. Online screening tools are powerful because they do not require any input from a candidate increasing speed to hire on the employer side while simultaneously significantly improving the candidate experience. Modern hiring teams are implementing and testing screening tools that provide them insights without requiring candidates to fill out a form or take a test.

The Benefits of Modern Candidate Screening 

Today’s top talent teams are focused on future-proofing their organization. That means adopting modern hiring processes as well as technology stacks. Modern candidate screening solutions are making this easier. They meet candidates where they are, screen where they live their lives, require minimal action from candidates, work quickly and efficiently as well as reveal behavioral patterns over a long period of time. This level of data gives hiring teams a true sense of who their candidates are in a compliant and scalable way. 

The benefits of making these changes are plentiful, spanning across improving the candidate experience and quality of hire as well as reducing risk and costs for the organization. In other words, it makes hiring great people easy. 

Enhance the candidate experience

Candidate experience can make or break a company’s efforts to attract and hire great people. A poor candidate experience can hinder talent attraction efforts as candidates who have a negative candidate experience are likely to leave bad reviews and talk about their experience with friends. Candidates are also less likely to complete an application, increasing candidate drop off rates for a poor candidate experience. Even in today’s tough job market, over half of job seekers said they declined an offer because of a poor candidate experience. This isn’t surprising considering 53% of job seekers said they had at least one bad hiring experience in the past 12 months. 

Research shows employers who are doing this best are doing so with AI. What helps enhance the candidate experience is automated solutions that enhance communication, decrease time to hire, reduce friction, and allow for more personalization. In addition to enhancing candidate outreach and communications, ERE’s CandE research reports that AI solutions assist in matching skills and other factors to help recruiters identify their best candidates for the roles. 

Improve quality of hire

Modern candidate screening solutions can also help improve quality of hire. The right processes and tools enable employers to balance finding as many candidates as needed, learning enough to make great decisions, and creating fast and seamless hiring experiences. 

By using AI screening solutions to learn deeper and more accurate insights about candidates in a way that enhances the candidate experience, companies are setting themselves up to improve quality of hire. Hiring teams can use these new screening solutions to quickly and accurately understand how candidates will show up at work based on their daily behaviors over a long period of time. They can reveal positive personality traits, workplace competencies that the candidates excel at, and even patterns of potential misconduct. Organizations see less candidate drop off, higher acceptance rates, and be able to make more informed hiring decisions – all of which improves quality of hire. 

Mitigate Risks and Reduce Costs

Hiring the wrong people is expensive. So expensive that reports show companies lose nearly $15,000 for every bad hire. Understanding which of your candidates are good-quality candidates as well as those who may be qualified but aren’t quality improves hiring outcomes and reduces risk of misconduct. 

The State of Misconduct at Work in 2023 reveals over 10% of candidates had at least one sign of online misconduct. These signals span across things like publicly inciting violence on social media, talking about stealing at work, or even sexually harassing acquaintances or coworkers online. 

Considering misconduct costs companies trillions of dollars each year and lots of nine to five nightmares, screening for misconduct is a way employers can reduce cost and mitigate risk rapidly in an organization for relatively low cost. 

Conclusion 

Ultimately, the goal of hiring is to hire great people. Despite lots of practice, accomplishing this is still a challenge. Hiring great people requires deep candidate insights that help get to the bottom of who a candidate is and how they will show up at work. Unfortunately, balancing the need for deep insights with a relatively fast and painless hiring process can be a struggle. A happy medium often requires a give and take between more candidates, better insights, and a reasonable candidate experience. But today, this is no longer the case. Modern hiring teams are integrating screening solutions powered by AI to achieve those insights earlier in the process, using frictionless solutions and improving the candidate experience.

The most valuable screening programs allow hiring teams to more easily gather accurate insights about a candidate’s experiences, quality, and fit. They screen where candidates have lived their lives over a long period of time. And, they do it in a way that’s fast and easy so the best candidates are engaged, nurtured, and available through the end of the hiring process. All of this results in hiring teams better understanding who their candidates are so they can efficiently, compliantly, and scalably evaluate candidate fit and quality with ease. 

For more information about how candidate screening powered by AI can improve your candidate experience and quality.

Learn more. Schedule a demo with Fama today.