During a recent Risk Control Webinar, Fletcher Wimbush, CEO of Discovered.ai and IntegrityFirst Tests, presented research-backed strategies for reducing Workers’ Compensation (WC) claims through improved pre-employment screening and structured hiring practices.
Wimbush began the presentation by drawing a direct connection between employee turnover rates and WC claim frequency. Citing data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Gallup, he noted that U.S. organizations turn over an average of 41% of their workforce annually. That figure climbs significantly by industry:
Research from Travelers Insurance reinforced this pattern, finding that 34% of all WC claims across industries originate from employees with less than one year on the job, regardless of prior experience in the role.
“If we solve the turnover problem and improve the quality of hire, you’re automatically going to begin reducing the frequency and severity of claims your organization experiences,” Wimbush said.
Wimbush identified three root causes behind poor hiring outcomes:
According to Wimbush, these three factors allow candidates who lack integrity — those who may use drugs on the job, steal, or engage in disruptive behaviors — to move through the hiring process undetected. Drawing on assessments of millions of job applicants, Wimbush noted that roughly one in four candidates exhibit problematic behaviors. In high-turnover environments, that risk compounds, creating a continuous cycle of rushed, reactive hiring decisions.
“High turnover and high frequency of WC claims do not have to be just the way they are,” Wimbush said. “This is a solvable problem.”
Wimbush described pre-employment integrity testing as the single highest-impact tool available to organizations with high volumes of frontline or hourly hires. Tools such as IntegrityFirst Tests screen candidates for on-the-job drug use, theft, dishonesty, and hostility in under 10 minutes, returning a straightforward “qualified” or “unqualified” result.
Client impact studies across industries, including staffing, construction, healthcare, and manufacturing, show that integrity testing reduces WC claim frequency by 48%, claim severity by 19%, and turnover by 30% on average. A multi-year program tracking more than 5,000 WC claims and over $40 million in losses found that locations using integrity testing saw new-hire losses drop from 33% to 18%.
Wimbush advocated treating reference checks as a structured interview technique rather than a procedural formality. He recommended asking candidates directly during the interview whether their previous supervisors would be willing to speak with a hiring manager. A candidate’s inability or reluctance to provide a former supervisor as a reference, he noted, reveals more about that individual than almost any other screening method. When conducted effectively, reference checks improve predictions of hiring outcomes by approximately 10%.
Wimbush recommended implementing interviews with consistent, pre-determined questions and standardized scorecards to objectively compare candidates. Scorecards reduce bias by requiring hiring managers to document specific evidence supporting each evaluation, removing gut-feel decisions from the process. He emphasized focusing on past behaviors as a predictor of future performance.
Most frontline managers receive little to no formal training in hiring, Wimbush noted. Organizations that invest in equipping supervisors and HR personnel with evidence-based interviewing skills can eliminate poor hires at a significantly higher rate. Combining integrity testing, structured interviews, and reference checks, he argued, can eliminate 70% to 90% of bad hires.
Beyond screening, Wimbush noted that improving the quality of the applicant pool itself reduces claims risk. He recommended that organizations develop a strong employer value proposition by offering genuine growth opportunities and positioning themselves as an employer of choice. Employee referral programs, he added, produce candidates who are more likely to perform well and remain employed longer than those sourced through general job boards.
This presentation was part of Captive Resources’ Risk Control Webinar Series — regular installments of webinars to educate the group captive members we work with on topics like workplace safety, organizational leadership, and company performance. The thoughts and opinions expressed in these webinars are those of the presenters and do not necessarily reflect Captive Resources’ positions on any of the above topics.
