How BridgeView Vets and Screens Technical Candidates

When we post a role on BridgeView, we get around 200 applicants. That number moves around by role, but it’s a solid average. Of those 200, we typically only see 5.5% that are viable and worthy of consideration.⁽²⁾ The other 94.5% get filtered out across six stages, and honestly, most of that filtering is work we’d rather not have to do at all. It’s just part of what it takes to get a hiring manager a shortlist they can trust.

Here’s the thing we’ve realized after years of doing this: we can justify investing in tools that automatically filter out that 94.5% because this is literally all we do, every single day. Screening technical candidates isn’t a side task squeezed between other priorities for us. It’s the business. Most organizations don’t have that same luxury. You don’t hire often enough, or at enough volume, to justify building or buying the kind of hiring infrastructure we’ve had to build. We do, because we have to. That infrastructure, and everything we’ve learned running candidates through it thousands of times, is exactly what you’re tapping into when you work with us.

This post walks through what actually happens at each of the six stages, using our own screening process as the example. Not a marketing summary of it. The real mechanics: what we check, what tools do the checking, and why a candidate can look completely legitimate for weeks and still get flagged in the final stretch.

What Does Our Full Screening Funnel Actually Look Like?

Six stages, each one narrower than the last. Starting from 200 applicants, our screening funnel narrows to 86 eligible candidates (43%) after eligibility screening, 46 potential fits (23%) after resume and profile review, 30 candidates (15%) after structured assessment, 15 viable prospects (7.5%) after video screening, and finally 11 truly viable candidates (5.5%) once fraud-risk review is complete.⁽²⁾ Only those 11 ever reach a hiring manager’s shortlist.

That’s not one filter doing all the work. It’s six, each one built to catch something the previous stage wouldn’t have.

The eligibility step alone accounts for more than half the drop-off. 57% of applicants get ruled out almost immediately: location doesn’t work, work authorization doesn’t check out, the basics simply don’t line up.⁽²⁾ What survives that first cut is a much smaller group, and it’s the group where the harder work actually starts for us.

The math is worth sitting with for a second. A 5.5% pass rate isn’t a sign we’re being overly strict. It’s a sign that most people who apply to a job posting were never going to be a real fit for it, and we’d rather absorb the work of finding out which ones are than hand that job to a hiring manager’s calendar.

Stages 1 & 2: What Do We Deal With Before a Recruiter Even Opens the File?

A pass for basic fit, then a pass for inconsistencies across everything a candidate has publicly claimed. Eligibility screening comes first: location, work authorization, and the fundamental requirements of the role, which alone rules out 57% of applicants before any of us reads a resume closely.⁽²⁾

What survives that moves into resume and profile review. We run this stage across LinkedIn, resume content, and contact details, comparing them against each other for the kind of mismatches that tend to signal something’s off: overlapping employment dates that don’t add up, a phone number that traces to a VoIP service instead of a real line, a LinkedIn or GitHub profile that doesn’t line up with the resume’s version of events.⁽¹⁾

None of these flags prove fraud on their own, and we treat them that way. A VoIP number could belong to someone who just moved. Overlapping dates could be a formatting mistake. But patterns matter, and a candidate whose resume, LinkedIn, and GitHub tell three slightly different stories is worth a closer look before we invest real recruiter time in them. Catching this early is what keeps our remaining stages focused on people who’ve actually earned deeper verification.

Stages 3 & 4: How Do We Test for the Real Person Behind the Resume?

With work built from the actual job, and a live session that confirms who’s actually doing it. We build structured assessment from the specific job description and team requirements, then deliver it as timed, hands-on challenges in a live coding environment, not a generic question bank a candidate could have memorized answers to in advance.

Video screening runs alongside it. Every candidate we screen goes through photo-based identity verification against a government ID (a driver’s license, passport, or residence permit), confirming the person applying is the person who eventually shows up to do the work. We verify location the same way, in real time: our sessions track IP address, device information, and timestamp data during the session itself, not just at sign-up.⁽¹⁾

This is also where most of our live fraud detection happens. We track more than 30 fraud signals during every session, including screen-sharing detection, deepfake detection, and monitoring for unauthorized use of AI tools mid-assessment.⁽¹⁾ A candidate quietly running an LLM in a second window while answering technical questions can look, on paper, like someone who nailed the assessment. Our monitoring exists specifically to catch what a transcript alone never would.

Stage 5: Why Does Fraud Risk Still Show Up This Late for Us?

Because a determined candidate doesn’t fail at the first hurdle we put in front of them. They fail at the last one, if our screening is thorough enough to catch it there. 23% of candidates who reach our late stages still present fraud-risk signals, which tells us that passing an early resume check or a first assessment is nowhere near the same thing as being clean.⁽²⁾

That’s exactly why we run fraud-risk review as its own dedicated stage rather than folding it into an earlier step. Every candidate who makes it this far gets an integrity report alongside their skills breakdown from us, so a hiring manager isn’t just seeing a score. They’re seeing whether that score can actually be trusted.

We’re not the only ones seeing this pattern, either. A Greenhouse survey of over 4,100 hiring professionals found that 31% have personally interviewed someone they suspected, or confirmed, was using deepfake technology.⁽³⁾ Technical hiring in particular gets targeted, since remote roles with high pay and thin verification are exactly the conditions fraud rings look for. If we cut this stage, we wouldn’t just shrink our process. We’d let through exactly the candidates the other five stages were built to catch.

Stage 6: What Actually Reaches Your Shortlist?

The 5.5% who cleared everything before it, and nothing else. By the time a candidate reaches this stage, they’ve survived eligibility screening, resume and profile review, structured assessment, video screening, and fraud-risk review, in that order, with no shortcuts between stages.⁽²⁾

That’s the entire point of running the funnel this way for you. Your calendar time is the most expensive resource in this whole process, and every stage we run before the shortlist exists to protect it. What lands in front of you isn’t a raw pool of applicants we filtered once. It’s the small fraction that held up under six separate, increasingly specific checks we ran on your behalf.

What Does All of This Actually Save You?

Roughly 33 hours of recruiter time per role, by our own estimate.⁽²⁾

That time comes out of work you’d otherwise have to do yourself: reviewing an ineligible applicant, chasing down an inconsistent resume, sitting through an interview with someone who wasn’t who they claimed to be. We absorb every one of those hours upstream instead, before a candidate ever reaches your calendar.

100% of the candidates we present go through all six stages before reaching a shortlist.⁽¹⁾⁽²⁾ Not most. Not the ones that seem like they warrant extra scrutiny. Every one, every time.

That’s really the whole value proposition. We can afford to build and run this process because screening candidates is our entire business, not a task competing with a hundred other priorities on someone’s plate. You get the output of that investment without having to make it yourself. The candidates who look fine early are exactly the ones worth checking all the way through, and we’re set up to do that checking so you don’t have to be.

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