The same questions, every time
Applications differ in layout and almost nothing else. Under the branding there is one set of questions, asked in a slightly different order by every employer you write to.
Most of them are easy. A few are not, and the awkward ones are awkward in a specific way: they look like one question and are really two, or they name something close to what you have without naming what you have. Those are the ones worth slowing down for, and they are the ones below.
Each page says what the question is asking and what a careless answer costs. None of them tells you what to put. You are the only one who knows that.
The awkward ones
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“Are you authorized to work here?” and “will you need sponsorship?”
Two questions that look like one. For plenty of people the honest answer to both is yes, and software that treats them as a pair gets one of them backwards.
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Series 7, Series 63, and a checkbox that names two
Financial applications ask about registrations in bundles. Ticking a bundle claims every registration in it.
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Nursing license questions
Single-state, compact, in good standing, in a named state. Four different questions that all read as “are you a nurse?”
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Current pay and desired pay
Adjacent boxes, opposite meanings. One is a statement about what you earn now.
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A degree you haven't finished yet
“MBA Candidate” is a true sentence. What a keyword reader keeps of it is the part in the middle.
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The voluntary questions at the end
Race, gender, veteran status, disability. The form says they are voluntary and it means it.
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Which application system is this?
Greenhouse, Lever, and Ashby are three of the systems behind these forms, and a form rarely says which one it is.
Why they repeat
A handful of systems supply almost every employer's form, which is why the twelfth application of the week feels like the first one again. How to tell which one you're looking at →