Job application form questions: what to ask and what to skip

Plenty of job application forms still in circulation ask for a date of birth, a marital status or a photograph. None of the three tells you whether someone can do the job, and all three sit on a regulator’s list of things not to ask before an offer. They survive because forms get copied, and nobody re-reads the copy.

The fix is to hold every question to one test: would a different answer change the shortlist? If not, it belongs in the interview, in the offer paperwork, or nowhere.

What the form should decide before interview

An application form is a filter, not a file. It has four jobs.

Can we contact them, and are they real? Name, email, phone. Three fields.

Are they eligible? Work rights, sponsorship, and any licence or registration the role legally requires. This is where forms most often go wrong, because eligibility questions are easy to word as something else.

Do the basics match? The role they want, the contract type, when they could start, roughly what they expect to be paid. These are the four ways a promising applicant turns out to be unavailable, and finding out on the form saves two calendars a week of interviews.

Is there evidence? A CV, some work history, one or two written answers that show how they think.

Everything else is interview material. Notably, “tell us about yourself” is not a screening question, and neither is a personality prompt that every applicant answers the same way.

The field list, and what each field screens for

The table at the end of this article is the complete field list from the example application on this site, with the screening purpose of each field and a note on whether it is safe to ask before an offer. Twenty fields, seven of them required.

Two structural choices in it are worth copying.

Work history and education are table fields, with named columns, rather than five text boxes labelled “Employer 1” through “Employer 5”. The applicant adds as many rows as they have jobs. On export the table arrives as one column, so plan to read it in the response view rather than in a spreadsheet.

Availability is a date field, not free text. “Earliest date you could start” with a real date picker gives you something sortable. The same question as a text box gives you “ASAP”, “4 weeks notice” and “flexible”, which are three answers to three different questions.

Questions to leave out

This is general guidance, not legal advice, and the rules differ by country and often by state.

In Australia, government guidance for employers lists the attributes you must not discriminate on when hiring: race, colour, national extraction, social origin, sex, gender identity, intersex status, sexual orientation, experience of family and domestic violence, age, physical or mental disability, marital status, family or carer’s responsibilities, pregnancy, breastfeeding, religion, political opinion and industrial activities. The instruction that follows is to evaluate candidates purely on their suitability for the job. A question on the form that collects any of those attributes is hard to justify afterwards, because you cannot show you ignored something you deliberately asked for.

In the United States, the EEOC’s position is that information requested through the pre-employment process should be limited to what is essential for determining whether a person is qualified. It advises avoiding questions about clubs, societies and lodges, and any other question that would reveal race, sex, national origin, disability, age, religion, colour or ancestry. It also says an employer should not ask for a photograph before an offer is made and accepted.

Disability has its own rule. Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, an employer may not conduct a medical examination or ask a job applicant whether they have a disability, or about its nature or severity, before an offer. What it may do is ask about the applicant’s ability to perform job related functions. That is the distinction to write into your form: not “do you have a condition that affects your work”, but “this role involves lifting 20 kg repeatedly, can you perform that function with or without adjustments”.

Work rights follow the same pattern. Ask whether the applicant is legally entitled to work in the country and whether they will need sponsorship. Do not ask where they were born, what passport they hold, or when their visa expires.

Uploads: CV, cover letter and the file rules

The upload field takes between 1 and 10 files, with a per file cap you set between 1 and 100 MB, defaulting to 10. Allowed types are two toggles: images and PDF. There is no way to allow an arbitrary extension, which means a .docx CV cannot be uploaded. Say so on the field.

That is one of the few places where helper text actually appears. On a published classic form, a field description is rendered for file upload and photo fields only, and every other field silently drops it. The example uses that: “PDF preferred.” sits under the resume field and is visible, while a description on a text field would not be. Anything else the applicant must read has to be a paragraph block above the field.

Ask for the CV as required and the cover letter as optional. Most good applicants attach both; making the second one mandatory mostly filters for people with time on their hands. There is a maker page for the file upload field with the settings laid out.

Availability, notice and salary, worded well

Three questions where the wording does most of the work.

Availability. “Earliest date you could start” beats “notice period”, because notice period asks the applicant to do arithmetic and you still have to do it again.

Contract type. Offer the options you actually have. A single choice between full time, part time, casual and fixed term is a real screen. An open text box is not.

Salary. Ask what they expect, never what they currently earn. Say whether the number should include superannuation or benefits, and accept a range. The example labels it “Expected annual salary, including super” and marks it optional, which is the right combination: you get a number from most people, and you do not lose the ones who would rather discuss it.

The example, annotated

The form below is 20 fields across five sections: your details, the role, work rights, experience, and attachments with referees. Seven fields are required, and they are all identity, role, work rights or declaration.

The declaration at the end is a checkbox group with two ticks, one confirming the information is true and complete, one agreeing to the details being held for this recruitment process. Two separate ticks are better than one bundled agreement.

What it does not have is any conditional logic, so an applicant who selects casual still sees the salary field. Keep that in mind when you write option lists.

Variants: restaurant, retail, volunteer

For hospitality and retail, cut hard. Contact details, right to work, availability by day and shift, one line on experience, and a resume upload if you want one. Ten fields, filled in on a phone between shifts.

For volunteering, the eligibility questions change rather than disappear: working with children checks, availability, emergency contact. Salary and notice period go entirely.

For internships and graduate roles, work history becomes education and projects, and the written answers carry more weight because there is less to verify.

If you are building from scratch, describe the role and the screen in plain sentences and let the form builder draft the fields, then fix the required flags by hand. The same discipline about what not to ask applies to tenancy screening, covered in what to include in a rental application form.