How ECLARO Turned Candidate Integrity Risk Into a Competitive Advantage

6 months. 2.5X placement rates. 1 in 3 candidates flagged or dropped before touching a client interview. This is what ECLARO's pipeline looks like now.

Within 6 months of deploying Ropes:

• 1 in 3 candidates self-selected out before reaching a single client interview
• ~20% of test-takers flagged with integrity issues
• 2.5X improvement in interview-to-placement ratio
• Ropes integrated with JobDiva ATS across Philippines and U.S. operations
• Clients now refuse to interview candidates who haven't taken the Ropes assessment

"It really comes down to quality. Ropes allows us to save time, save our clients time, which is the most important thing, and we're adding value because we're bringing quality candidates consistently." - Paul Sheridan, Co-founder, ECLARO

About ECLARO

ECLARO is an award-winning professional services firm headquartered in New York City, operating across the U.S., Canada, and the Philippines. They deliver talent solutions through strategic staffing, custom outsourcing and offshoring, and permanent placement for clients ranging from innovative startups to Fortune 50 companies. Through three global services delivery centers in Metro Manila, ECLARO provides dedicated IT and business professionals across a range of industries - combining superior talent with lower costs and full operational control for clients.

ECLARO's mission is simple: the Right People are the Answer. That mission has earned them recognition including Best of Staffing Talent and Client (ClearlyRated), the IAOP Global Outsourcing 100, and the OA Outsourcing Impact Award for Education.

The Challenge: "They All Look the Same"

The staffing world has changed. ECLARO's leadership team had been in the business long enough to watch it transform. Finding the right candidate used to be the differentiator. Today, every firm has access to a global talent pool. Resumes are polished. Profiles are optimized. And with AI, anyone can look like a rock star on paper.

"We all have access to the world of candidates," says Tom Sheridan, Co-founder of ECLARO. "It's now about getting to the right candidate quicker. As Paul likes to say, it's finding the needle in the needle stack."

For ECLARO's global delivery operations in the Philippines, this problem was especially acute. Hiring managers were spending hours on interviews only to realize within the first two or three minutes that a candidate wasn't a fit. But professional courtesy meant those calls still ran their full course. One bad interview could cost a hiring manager more than an hour once you factor in prep time and the 25 minutes it takes to get back into a flow state afterward.

Beyond time, integrity risk was growing. Fraud has been part of staffing for decades - fake references, embellished resumes, stand-ins for interviews. But remote work made it dramatically harder to catch. When ECLARO's own U.S. clients began surfacing concerns about foreign IT workers infiltrating their contractor pools, the urgency became impossible to ignore.

"Everybody's concerned about fraud and security now," says Tom Sheridan. "This is a tool that's been terrific at making sure the person is the person - geo-locating them through the testing. It's very powerful in giving comfort to clients."

The assessment tools they'd relied on before weren't built for this moment either. Rigid, off-the-rack platforms that couldn't flex to a specific client's tech stack. If a client needed someone who knew SQL, AWS, and Snowflake together, there was no clean way to test all three. Assessments had to be built manually, which meant coordinating schedules and delays that dragged out the whole pipeline.

The Solution: Bespoke, Not Off-the-Rack

ECLARO deployed Ropes starting with their Philippines delivery operations, where the pressure on quality and speed was highest. Results came fast enough that expansion to U.S. staffing and direct hire followed quickly.

The key differentiator wasn't just fraud detection - it was customization.

"Ropes is really a bespoke testing platform," says Paul Sheridan. "It really drills into the job requirement. We needed to stop buying an assessment tool off the rack."

Generating an assessment became simple: drop in a job description, do light tailoring for any client-specific nuances, and the platform handles the rest. ECLARO's account managers could send assessments without pulling in technical staff. The integration with JobDiva made it seamless - assessments went out in a fraction of the time that scheduling a screening call used to take.

Before Ropes, screening candidates meant coordinating schedules, pulling staff off other work, and watching pipeline velocity slow to a crawl. With Ropes, candidates complete assessments on their own schedule - no coordination required.

"We're getting a lot more candidates quicker through the pipeline because they can take the assessment at their own convenience," says Tom Sheridan. "We're saving money and getting them through faster."

Results: Numbers That Win Business

The outcomes across ECLARO's Philippines and U.S. operations told a consistent story.

One-third of candidates who received a Ropes assessment never completed it - self-selecting out before touching a client interview. Of those who did complete the assessment, roughly 20% were flagged with integrity issues. That's a significant volume of risk that would have otherwise moved through ECLARO's pipeline undetected.

For the candidates who passed: the downstream numbers were dramatic. Interview-to-placement ratios improved 2.5X. In accounts where ECLARO had deep client relationships, Ropes-tested candidates became close to a guaranteed placement.

"Some of our U.S. clients don't want to interview anyone who hasn't taken the Ropes test," says Paul Sheridan. "It's not worth their time. They've seen the value - it becomes almost a guaranteed placement."

The scorecard also changed how ECLARO's own recruiters work. Before Ropes, a recruiter whose candidate didn't get selected had no concrete explanation. Now there's an objective score. Recruiters can see exactly where a candidate fell short and use that data to qualify the next submission more effectively.

"It's a subjective way to say, 'Look, your person did not score well enough,'" says Tom Sheridan. "And they get that. It helps them qualify the next candidate better."

On the business development side, Ropes became a door-opener. When prospects ask what makes ECLARO different, the answer is now concrete: custom assessments, fraud detection, and numbers that prove it. "We show them how things have improved for other clients," says Tom Sheridan. "And they say, 'Great, let's give it a try.'"

Looking Ahead

ECLARO's path with Ropes started as a solution to a specific operational problem in one geography. It became something bigger: a trust layer across their entire candidate-facing process.

"The testing piece has been going on since the eighties," says Paul Sheridan. "Those other assessment tools never kept up. Ropes answers all the major questions. It's a game changer in how we do business."

For a firm whose reputation is built on delivering the right people - not just available people - that's the point. The staffing firms that win in the AI era won't be the ones with the biggest candidate pools. They'll be the ones whose clients can trust every single submission.

"Ropes helps drive that trust," says Paul Sheridan. "You're demonstrating the quality. That person is the person you're presenting."