Set clear qualification standards for your applicants and include all your criteria for eliminating risk. The purpose of screening is to find reasons to reject applicants not to find those that will qualify. The ones that qualify will be left when all others are rejected. Every applicant has secrets and will lie.
Do not waver on your standards, be very strict, do not consider any one that does not qualify. Do not try to make a applicant fit your criteria.
As a example I do not accept self employed regardless of their qualifications, I do not accept any applicant with a credit score below 650 etc. Many landlords would compromise those standards depending on the individual but when you do you open yourself to higher risks. There are valid reasons for setting standards so compromising is the same as not having standards.
Your biggest hurdle is deterring what is a risk. Surprisingly most landlords are reluctant to reject those of risk out of fear. Always place your business needs ahead of all applicants personal needs. Applicants are not people only a collection of information. You need to understand for example that first time renters or young couples renting together for the first time are terrible candidates, recently separated or single young mothers also very high risk. Many landlords will accept those risks out of fear or worse not even realise they are high risk that should be rejected. This business punishes landlords that give applicants a "chance". You could learn from experience but that is extremely unprofessional. Instead learn from the screening mistakes the landlords on these forums have made. Many, possibly most, do not understand how to identify risks and maintain their standards when they see risks. Most will make compassionate decisions that will come back to bite them. You do not want to be one of the landlords on here that post with tenant problems. The vast majority of those problems are self inflected and easily avoided.
Once you have a tenant you then transition into tenant training. Your responsibility as a landlord is to train every tenant to be the perfect tenant, some are not trainable in which case you get rid of them. Start your tenant on M2M leases to give yourself the power to control them. Good tenants do not require term leases.