BlogScreening candidates: Finding the right talent in a sea of applicants | The Recruiting Roadshow
Key highlights
- Strong hiring starts before screening, with clear alignment and better pipelines. Top teams don’t rely on inbound alone. They calibrate early using real candidate profiles and build pipelines across networks, referrals and outbound to surface stronger signal from the start.
- Signal is evidence of how someone works, not where they’ve worked. The strongest candidates demonstrate problem-solving, adaptability and impact instead of just credentials or keywords.
- Trust is becoming a core hiring metric. As AI-driven applications and candidate fraud rise, leading teams are validating identity earlier and designing processes that protect decision quality.
That’s where most teams are right now. According to The Hire Standard, the new industry benchmarking report from Greenhouse, applications per recruiter have surged more than 411% since 2022 – while the number of recruiters per organization has been cut in half. More volume, fewer people, less room to get it wrong.
And these relevant recruiter challenges are exactly what we wanted to dig into with The Recruiting Roadshow video and blog series.
Host and recruiting expert Brandon Jeffs hits the road for in-person conversations with talent leaders across the country – no conference stage, no slides, just real talk about how recruiting actually works today. Across the first three episodes, he sits down with three practitioners working in very different environments: Alan Leung, a recruiting manager at Boulevard in San Francisco building pipelines for early stage startups; Nicole Sgarlato, the founding recruiter at Momentic, who broke into tech after a decade of driving tow trucks; and Tommy Weinert, founder of Mount Indie, a search firm specializing in high-stakes, security-cleared hiring.
Different worlds. Same core problem: how do you find real signal when everything looks qualified on paper?
Here’s what they shared – and how you can put it to work.
Start by agreeing on what “qualified” actually means
It sounds obvious. But one of the fastest ways screening breaks down is when recruiters and hiring managers aren’t aligned on what good looks like – and they don’t realize it until candidates are already in the pipeline.
Alan has a fix for this. At Boulevard, where he matches fractional recruiters with early stage founders, he doesn’t just run a kickoff and hope for the best. Before the search even officially starts, he brings 5–10 real candidate profiles to the table and walks through them with the founder.
Why? Because what someone says they want in a 30-minute kickoff and how they actually react to a real person’s background are often two different things.
Alan mentioned, “What oftentimes you see is what they say the first 30 minutes of the kickoff and what they say about a candidate I bring on is not alignment, or they’re a little bit more optimistic about certain candidates that weren’t really discussed in the kickoff. So you got to balance out both the job kickoff and also the candidate calibration.”
That calibration step changes everything downstream. When you test your criteria against real profiles early, you stop screening against assumptions – and start screening against what the hiring manager will actually say yes to.
Alan also makes a point that’s easy to overlook when volume is high: you can’t build a strong pipeline from a single channel. Especially at earlier stage companies where inbound is thin, you need to pull from referrals, VC networks, silver medalists from past searches, outbound – all of it.
Building pipeline is a constant evolution. It’s constant iteration. You can’t always depend on inbound. I think it’s a holistic picture of how you tackle the pipeline problem.
– Alan Leung, Recruiting Manager, Boulevard (Ep. 1)
The teams that screen well are the ones who’ve already built a pipeline diverse enough to surface people who wouldn’t have found the role on their own.
Signal is evidence of capability – not a credential checklist
Nicole’s story brings this to life from the candidate side.
Before she was a recruiter, she spent ten years in her family’s towing business. She didn’t finish college. She’s a right leg amputee and a former Paralympic athlete. None of that maps neatly to a recruiting job description. But when she cold-applied to Lyft – one of thousands of applicants – something in her background stood out.
She got the job. Then she built engineering teams at Retool. Now she’s the founding recruiter at Momentic, where she was the sixth hire and has already helped grow the team to thirteen.
What she brought to that first role wasn’t a credential. It was a way of working – the kind of grit and adaptability that comes from figuring things out in high-pressure, low-resource environments.
As a tow truck driver, I’ve learned to not wait for the perfect conditions, because I had no choice. My experience has led to me moving forward and being more scrappy... and being an athlete has built confidence – not ego, but being prepared.
– Nicole Sgarlato, Founding Recruiter, Momentic (Ep. 2)
If your screening criteria lean too heavily on pedigree, keywords or linear career paths, you’re going to miss candidates like Nicole. And in a market where the best people aren’t always the most obvious ones, that’s a costly filter to have in place.
When trust is the signal that matters most
Volume and misaligned criteria are one kind of screening challenge. Fraud is another – and it’s escalating fast.
Tommy Weinert sees this up close. At Mount Indie, he fills security-cleared positions for U.S. defense contractors. In that world, the consequences of letting the wrong person through aren’t just operational – they’re a matter of national security. Tommy points to the rise of synthetic candidates, identity fraud and state-sponsored infiltration operations like Jasper Sleet, where foreign operatives use the hiring process to get inside U.S. organizations.
Recruiters in my space literally are on the front lines of national security. And as far as mission goes, if that doesn’t get you out of bed in the morning, I don’t know what will.
– Tommy Weinert, Founder, Mount Indie (Ep. 3)
This isn’t just a defense sector problem. The AI in Hiring Report from Greenhouse found 91% of recruiters and hiring managers have spotted or suspected candidate deception. Additionally, over 40% of U.S. candidates report using prompt injection to bypass screening filters – with another 51% of non-users saying they’d consider it.
That’s a trust gap that every hiring team needs a plan for.
Tommy also makes a distinction that’s worth sitting with, especially as more teams adopt AI-powered screening tools.
He added, “You can’t pile on great technology on bad process...You are not making a candidate assessment when you use AI. You’re making a resume assessment. And it’s your job as a recruiter to then take that assessment, call the candidate and say, let me fill in these blanks here.”
AI can surface patterns and save time at the top of the funnel. But the real evaluation – judgment, adaptability, trustworthiness – still depends on a human picking up the phone.
Five ways to screen smarter in a high-volume world
Across all three conversations, a clear set of moves emerges for teams that want to cut through the noise without sacrificing quality.
Define signal before you start screening. Use structured scorecards and calibration sessions – with real profiles, not just a job spec – to align on what “qualified” actually means for each role.
Build pipelines from multiple sources. Don’t rely on inbound alone. Outbound sourcing, referrals, past candidates and network-driven outreach all help surface people who wouldn’t have found you on their own.
Validate identity early for high-risk roles. Fraud is getting more sophisticated. Build in identity verification where the stakes are high – before you invest interview hours.
Use AI to surface signal, not to make decisions. Let AI help with pattern matching and prioritization. Keep judgment calls with the people who can actually pick up on what a resume can’t tell you.
Create healthy friction where it counts. Not every step should be frictionless. Structured interviews, deliberate evaluation checkpoints and calibrated assessments are what protect decision quality when volume is high.
The teams that hire well are the ones that see clearly
The top of the funnel isn’t going to get quieter. Applications will keep rising, AI-assisted candidates will keep evolving and the pressure on leaner teams will only grow. But the teams that hire well in this environment won’t be the ones who process the most applications. They’ll be the ones who know exactly what they’re looking for – and have the systems to find it.
That’s the throughline from every conversation in this first batch of the Recruiting Roadshow. Signal is out there. You just have to be intentional about how you define it, where you look for it and how you protect it.
Download The Hire Standard to benchmark how your team screens, prioritizes and finds signal – and where you can improve in a high-volume funnel.
FAQs
1. What does “candidate signal” actually mean in hiring?
Candidate signal is evidence that someone can do the job—not just indicators like pedigree or keywords. It shows up in how candidates solve problems, communicate their thinking and demonstrate real impact.
2. Why is it harder to identify strong candidates today?
Application volume has surged and AI tools make it easier for candidates to optimize resumes and apply at scale. That creates more noise, making it harder to distinguish truly qualified candidates using traditional screening methods.
3. How can recruiters improve signal detection in a high-volume pipeline?
Start by defining what “good” looks like for the role, use structured evaluation methods and incorporate multiple sources of signal like interviews, work samples and network insights. For higher-risk roles, add early identity validation to protect trust in the process.
