Screening questions: pay, availability, legal status

Every application has a dull part that decides a lot: five to fifteen questions before the submit. Answering no to everything cuts the person out before any conversation. Rounding a checkable fact up is a lie; rounding a question of willingness down only erases you.

The six families of question

What goes in the expected pay box?

A number, always, because the field is usually required and an empty one freezes the form. On 8 September 2026, of the 19 applications stalled in our database, six were the same expected-pay box left empty and marked in red, on InfoJobs.

The order: if you wrote a pay floor on your profile, that is what goes; if not, the range published in the posting, which claims nothing about you; with no range, the question is asked once and the answer is kept. Write your floor before you start.

Availability, travel and on-call: the answer is yes

Willing to travel, comfortable with English in a meeting, fine with an on-call rota, able to start soon. None of it is checkable and none of it is a signed commitment, and a no here takes your name off the list before anyone reads your résumé. The exception is what you already wrote as a rule.

The optional questions about gender, race and disability are yours, and only yours. The robot answers with your profile declaration or, without one, a neutral answer from your profile, never "prefer not to say". Where a role is reserved, only your declaration counts.

Legal status is the one place where no is the safe answer

Work authorization, visa, needing sponsorship. Here the logic inverts: the no claims nothing, it is what the absence of a document means, and the yes would need proof. With no document on the profile, the answer is that you are not authorized. We learned that by getting it wrong. On 28 August 2026 one of our applications picked, from a menu, the option saying permanent work authorization for a country the profile said nothing about, and it reached a real employer. The fix was to measure: on 30 August, across 6,857 values typed into 421 applications, 5.31% had no origin and belonged to a protected class. Today the origin is settled on the server, and auto-apply describes the rest.

The order, from first to last resort

• 1. Your own approved answer. What you wrote and checked outranks everything, and nothing overwrites it.
• 2. The seed taken from your résumé. The document answered, with nobody supposing anything.
• 3. A fact on the profile. A professional registration, a language, a notice period already written down.
• 4. The conservative, truthful default. The no on legal status, a neutral answer on who you are.
• Never a guess. An identifier the profile does not have is left blank.

One trap: the library is searched by exact text, so “Authorized to work in the United States” and “Do you have authorization to work in the US” are two different questions to a program. On years with a technology, the honest way out is the real number plus the context: two years with Playwright and ten with automated testing.

Next to this one, the Greenhouse form and how a robot that applies works. Plans on Plans and pricing, questions on the FAQ. Create an account and paste one job link.