Cadient's analysis found that weak career pages, applicant tracking systems (ATS), and application experiences create friction that may prevent qualified candidates from being hired.

NEW YORK, July 3, 2026 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- A new Cadient analysis of 1,386 employers found that many companies are trying to hire at scale using hiring infrastructure too weak to support it. This is creating friction that may be turning qualified candidates away before recruiters ever evaluate them.

Using HiringScorecard.ai, Cadient's public hiring-funnel assessment platform, Cadient analyzed 1,386 employers across 12 industries, drawing on publicly available hiring information, including career pages, job postings, application workflows, employer review sites, and company-published information. Each employer was evaluated against a standardized framework covering five areas of the hiring journey: Career Page, Applicant Tracking System (ATS), Hiring Volume, Employer Brand, and Application Flow. The analysis drew on more than 1,500 hiring assessments, achieved a 93.9% audit success rate, and generated a scorecard in approximately 90 seconds per employer.

The findings challenge the common assumption that hiring struggles are mostly a talent-shortage problem. Instead, the same three areas — Career Page performance, Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), and Application Flow — repeatedly ranked among the weakest parts of the funnel, even as Hiring Volume ranked among the strongest. In other words, employers are generating interest but lack the infrastructure to convert the influx of applications into completed applications, interviews, and ultimately hires.

Among the findings:

• Career Page, ATS, and Application Flow consistently ranked as the weakest parts of the hiring funnel, even as Hiring Volume ranked among the strongest.
• Approximately 75% relied on manual or unstructured screening.
• Approximately 70% showed signs of high turnover or early-stage attrition.
• Approximately 65% appeared vulnerable to losing candidates to faster-moving competitors.

To help employers identify what Cadient calls "candidate leakage"—qualified applicants lost to friction before recruiters ever evaluate them—the company today launched HiringScorecard.ai, a free diagnostic platform that evaluates an organization's hiring funnel using publicly available hiring information. HiringScorecard.ai is available free of charge at https://hiringscorecard.ai.

"The surprising finding wasn't that companies need more candidates," said Bill Mastin, CEO of Cadient. "Many already have them. What they're missing is the infrastructure to convert them. Again and again, we found organizations trying to hire at scale through systems that create friction at the exact moment a candidate is ready to apply."

As one example of how the assessment works, HiringScorecard.ai evaluates Career Page, Applicant Tracking System (ATS), Hiring Volume, Employer Brand, and Application Flow to identify where candidates experience the greatest friction. Across the organizations analyzed, Career Page, ATS, and Application Flow consistently received the lowest scores (typically between 2 and 5 out of 10), while Hiring Volume consistently scored much higher (7 to 9 out of 10). Employers are benchmarked using the same standardized framework and publicly available hiring information, including career pages, job-board listings, employer-review sites, and company-published materials.

Staffing and healthcare employers — which face some of the highest hiring volumes, turnover, and workforce pressures in the economy — represented nearly 80% of the organizations analyzed.

Unlike traditional recruiting audits, HiringScorecard.ai requires no access to internal HR systems and generates a hiring scorecard in approximately 90 seconds. Employers can assess their own hiring experience, benchmark against competitors, and identify opportunities to improve candidate conversion, recruiter productivity, and hiring outcomes. The platform is free and requires no registration, subscription, or integration.

Cadient plans to continue publishing benchmark insights generated through HiringScorecard.ai to help employers better understand the evolving state of talent acquisition.

About Cadient

Cadient is the pioneer of the intelligent, high-volume hiring platform. With over 18 years of experience and more than 500 million applications processed, Cadient helps enterprise employers hire faster, reduce turnover, and improve workforce quality across distributed, high-volume environments.

Built on deep recruitment technology expertise, including Cadient's legacy connection to Kronos, now part of UKG, the company combines proven hiring infrastructure with modern AI-powered decisioning to help organizations outsmart hiring chaos and predict workforce success. Cadient serves employers across retail, healthcare, hospitality, logistics, transportation, and franchise operations throughout North America.

Media Contact

Teena Minhas, Cadient, 1 9174994303 +1, Teena@basisvps.com, https://cadienttalent.com/

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SOURCE Cadient