The questions every job application asks, and how to answer them once

Under the custom questions, nearly every application form asks the same dozen things, in nearly the same words. Not similar words — the same ones, because recruiting teams build their forms from the same template libraries and copy them from each other. "Will you now or in the future require sponsorship to work in the United States?" appears verbatim on hundreds of boards.

That repetition is why answering these once is possible. It is also why answering all of them once is a mistake: three of them mean something different at every employer, and one of them is not a question at all.

We know the wordings because we read employers' published question sets to pre-fill them. What follows is what those forms actually say.

The two authorisation questions, which are not one question

This is the pair people get wrong, and getting it wrong looks like lying.

"Are you legally authorized to work in the United States?" asks about right now. Can you start on Monday without the company doing anything?

"Will you now or in the future require sponsorship for employment visa status?" asks about later. Will the company ever have to file something for you to keep working there?

A US citizen answers yes then no. Somebody on an H-1B answers yes then yes — they can work today, and the employer will have to transfer and eventually extend the petition. Somebody on OPT with a STEM extension usually answers yes then yes for the same reason. A student who needs CPT before day one answers no then yes.

The failure mode is answering the second question "no" because the first one was "yes". It reads as the applicant not knowing their own status, or worse, and it is the single most consequential checkbox on the form. Employers filter on it directly — on Rippling, these arrive typed as KNOCKOUT questions, which means the board is configured to reject the application on that answer alone, before a person sees it.

Neither answer is remembered between applications in Crossing. Both are read from your profile every time, so if your status changes you change it in one place and the change is live on the next form.

The one with no answer until you know the country

Some boards ask: "Are you authorized to work in the country for which you applied?"

That question names no country. Its correct answer changes with the posting, so a stored "Yes" from a US role is a false claim on a Berlin role. We refuse to remember this one — the classifier returns "ask every time" rather than a key — and if you are filling forms by hand, treat it the same way. Read which country the job is in first. The posting title often does not say.

We do recognise and answer the country-specific wordings: US, UK, EU and Canada, including the ones that name no authorisation at all. Lever boards print "Do you have the unrestricted right to work in the United States?", which used to fall straight through our classifier because it never uses the word authorized. That was a real bug, found by reading real forms.

"How did you hear about us?"

The same question on every board and a different set of options on every board.

Underneath, each employer's options are ids minted for that employer. Greenhouse uses integers, Ashby uuids, Workable strings like QA_1039_1. "LinkedIn" is one number at one company and a different number at the next, so there is no such thing as storing this answer as a value — the only portable thing is the words the option was printed with. That is what we store, and we match it back onto the next employer's option list by wording.

Practically, for you: pick the option that is true, and if there is a free-text box under it, use it. A referral is worth naming as a referral, and "a friend who works there" is a weaker version of a name. If none of the options fit, the honest answer is usually the last one in the list.

Salary expectations

Most boards type this as a plain text box with no validation, which tells you it is read by a human.

Two things are worth knowing. It is asked early, before you know anything about the role's band, which is a real information asymmetry and not one you can argue your way out of on a form. And in a growing number of US postings the employer has already published a range in the ad, in which case the useful move is to say so rather than invent a number.

We fill this from your profile because it is the same answer everywhere until you change it. We do not offer to guess it, and we do not compute one from the posting's range. That would be putting a number in your mouth on a form with your name on it.

Notice period and earliest start date

Same question, four wordings — "notice period", "when can you start", "earliest start date", "how much notice do you need to give". Answer it once, in weeks, and remember to change it when you resign.

The consent box is not a question about you

Near the bottom of most forms sits something like:

• Lever: consent[marketing]
• Workable: gdpr_consent
• Greenhouse: opt_in_talent_community

Worded as "may we keep your details for future roles", "join our talent community", "I accept the privacy policy".

These are permissions, and a permission granted to one company is not a permission granted to the next one. Crossing never remembers them and never pre-ticks them. They arrive blank on the employer's page and you decide there, which is where a permission should be given.

Deciding is worth ten seconds. A talent-community opt-in is a standing agreement to be emailed by a recruiting team you have not met yet. Sometimes that is exactly what you want. It should not be a thing you discover you agreed to forty times.

The written question

"Why do you want to work here?" "Tell us about a project you're proud of." "What interests you about this role?"

These are the ones we will not carry across, on principle. The classifier drops any long-form answer, anything over 300 characters, and anything naming the employer — "Why Notion?" is not the same question at the next company even though it normalises to a colliding key.

A replayed answer here is the generic cover letter, and it is the most visible way an application reads as automated. If you are going to write three sentences of substance on one application today, write them here.

The demographic block

Race, gender, veteran status, disability status. These are a separate matter with a separate history, and we wrote about them at length in should you answer the voluntary demographic questions.

The mechanical part: Crossing never infers any of them from a résumé, a name, or a location. There is no code path from your file to those fields. The default is to ask you, every time, and "decline to answer" is a first-class stored choice rather than a blank we fill in for you.

Which of these are actually answerable once

Answer once, reuse everywhere:

• Name, email, phone, location, links
• "How did you hear about us" — as words, re-matched per board
• Salary expectations
• Notice period
• Most employer-specific short questions, keyed on the question's wording rather than the board's field id

Re-read every time:

• The two authorisation questions
• Anything asking about "the country for which you applied"
• Every consent box
• Every written answer

That split is the whole design of the remembered-answer system. How the run queue works covers what you see on screen; why nothing can press Send for you covers why the last click is still yours.