How to Avoid the Hidden Costs of Bad Candidate Screening

Bright Ewuru

Half-baked candidate screening can have unpleasant effects. What’s worse is that these outcomes often go unnoticed until it’s too late. Knowing what to look for and how to correct your hiring strategy is essential to preventing these costly missteps. Let’s take a look at how poor candidate screening can show up in your workplace, together with the top five strategies to prevent these issues from starting in the first place.

4 Hidden Costs of Poor Candidate Screening

1. Bad Hires

Inefficient candidate screening often overlooks critical factors such as skills, personality, values, and cultural fit. Broken processes and subjective decisions are its hallmarks. As a result, there’s usually low predictive validity for job performance or a mismatch of soft skills and overall attitude.

2. High Employee Turnover

Shoddy assessment of skills and team compatibility leads to employee underperformance, friction, and disengagement. Companies are forced to terminate employment and hire new employees.

3. Reduced Productivity and Team Morale

When underqualified hires struggle with tasks, due dates are extended, and corrections skyrocket. Valuable time is spent teaching basic tasks and monitoring progress unnecessarily. This can force competent team members to slow down and dampen team spirit.

4. Lost ROI

Hiring, onboarding, training, and paying an unfit employee only to replace them converts hiring investments into financial leakage. When a cycle of expenses leads to another cycle of expenses, the organization’s loss compounds.

5 Candidate Screening Strategies to Avoid These Pitfalls

1. Adopt Skills-Based Hiring

You can elevate your hiring process by thoroughly assessing candidates on what they can do. Instead of focusing heavily on degrees, job titles, and other traditional credentials, evaluate their practical abilities for role fitness.

And the numbers prove the excellence of this approach. 90% of organizations using skills-based hiring report a reduction in bad hires, while 94% of them find that it’s more predictive of performance.

Recognizing and measuring vital hard and soft skills can be all too easy. Pre-Hire Assessments are chock-full of skills tests that can assess on-the-job knowledge, while AI-powered tools like Jules AI Copilot Talent Assessment can use your job description to create a custom assessment instantly.

2. Implement Psychometric Assessments

Transferable skills aren’t the only important consideration when screening candidates. You need to identify how candidates think and behave.

Psychometric tests give deeper insight into who your candidates are by measuring their mental, cognitive, and behavioral attributes. By evaluating each candidate’s personality and behavior, these tests shift the lens to psychological alignment with the job’s reality, ensuring better candidate-role matching and predicting long-term fitness.

3. Conduct Thorough Reference and Background Checks

It isn’t news that candidates often make false background claims and give fake references to potential employers to either hide a negative employment history or improve their chances of getting the job.

Rigorous reference and background checks can uncover the authenticity (or the lack thereof) of those claims. The data from past supervisors can help reveal behavior patterns and identify red flags early, all to prevent mishires and avoid risks.

Reference checking software can accelerate your hiring efficiency by:

Automating reference confirmation requests
Maintaining objectivity through anonymity features and standardized sets of questions
Recording references exactly as provided
Confirming the identity of the reference giver

4. Leverage the Power of AI

Sidestep the drawbacks of traditional hiring processes by logging into the future of candidate screening.

AI-powered candidate screening can revamp your process in remarkable ways, including:

Turbocharge your resume screening by assessing hundreds of resumes in minutes and scoring top candidates for you instantly with a resume screening tool.
AI-generated interview guides that eliminate subjectivity by creating standardised question sets
AI-driven video interviews that can help interviewers review and compare candidates efficiently through automated transcription and sentiment analysis.

5. Involve Multiple Trained Hiring Managers

Level up your hiring process by creating a panel of diversified hiring experts. This enhances your screening standards because they will follow standardized processes, which ensures consistency. They also specialize in various competencies, making sure that no skill area is overlooked. Together, they also guarantee a more objective assessment.

Bad candidate screening and its invisible costs are totally avoidable. Request a demo with Cangrade as you implement these steps to improve your hiring process.