How SGA Uses AI to Screen Out Fake Candidates on 400-Applicant Jobs

SGA places IT, non-IT, sales and clinical talent for many clients through vendor management offices (VMOs). Its recruiters work out of JobDiva, and like most staffing teams right now, they're seeing more applicants per job and a growing share of fake ones.

Sarah, Asendia's AI recruiter, now screens SGA's jobs inside JobDiva. It handles the technical screening and fraud checks, so recruiters spend their time on candidates worth talking to.

Where SGA's recruiters were losing time

SGA's recruiters were up against three problems at once: too many applicants, too many fake ones and too little time to screen technically.

• Hundreds of applicants per job. Some SGA jobs draw around 400 applicants, most through LinkedIn Quick Apply. SGA's new website brings in thousands more on its own.
• Fake and falsified candidates. Fake profiles that change over time and falsified third-party resumes keep showing up, especially on developer roles.
• No time for deep technical screening. Recruiters are focused on hitting benchmarks and SLAs. Generic screening questions miss real differences, like whether a candidate has worked with batch or stream processing.

How Sarah screens SGA's jobs

Asendia was set up around how SGA hires, so every type of role gets the screen it needs, from in-depth technical interviews for IT roles to a quick knockout for high-volume jobs.

• Every applicant reached, fast. Sarah contacts new applicants as soon as they apply and re-engages candidates already sitting in SGA's database, so strong profiles don't go untouched.
• Fraud and technical depth checked before a recruiter steps in. Sarah screens every resume, runs phone and video interviews with the technical questions recruiters don't have time to prepare, verifies identity and flags suspected fraud along the way.
• SGA's brand protected. Every message carries SGA's name, respects candidates' contact preferences and goes out at reasonable hours.

"The good thing is screening out a lot of those fake corp resumes," says Ryan Latasa, Director, Client Delivery at SGA.

Recruiters still make the call

Sarah screens; recruiters decide who gets submitted. For every screened candidate, the primary recruiter gets an email with a scorecard and summary before anything goes to a client.

Nothing gets lost along the way. Every outcome is saved as a note in JobDiva, including candidates who didn't pass, so recruiters can pick up anyone the screen got wrong. A candidate a year short on experience is scored rather than knocked out and stays available for other roles, and suspected fraud is flagged for review instead of rejected automatically.

Candidates who complete the full workflow go straight to the top of the list. As Ryan puts it, they are "the first people we call… before any others."

What SGA is seeing so far

About half of SGA's submittals have come from candidates recruiters picked up partway through the workflow. Even when a candidate doesn't finish every step, the results already sitting in JobDiva are enough to move them forward.

The screen also catches what a quick read misses. When a recruiter assumed a candidate wasn't local, Sarah had already asked and confirmed she was. Recruiters go into calls better prepared, too. They read the assessment report before picking up the phone and use the AI's questions to see what to probe. "The candidate note on the profile page was amazing," says Justin Wasserberg, Director of Recruiting.

What's next for SGA

Next, SGA plans to turn every screened candidate into a searchable, Asendia-screened talent pool in JobDiva that recruiters can use like a hot list. Each screen then pays off beyond the job it was run for, giving recruiters a head start on the next role.

Why SGA chose Asendia

SGA had tried other AI screening tool, but it left little room to customize once a question template was picked. Asendia could be shaped around every job type and works inside the system SGA already runs on. The result shows up in how recruiters spend their day:

"Recruiters can spend more time in classic recruiting and making a relationship with the candidate and this is doing the hard stuff about the technology screening and the fraudulent stuff." — Ryan Latasa, Director, Client Delivery, SGA

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