What job applications actually ask

We read every question on the application forms of 212 companies — 31,470 questions in total, taken from the employers' own public job-board APIs rather than from anybody's recollection. This is what they ask.

There is no standard application form

The common advice is to prepare a set of stock answers and reuse them. We can now say how far that gets you, and the answer is: through the contact details, and then it stops.

Counting each employer once per question — so a company with hundreds of open roles does not get hundreds of votes on what "employers ask" — here is how much of everything asked is covered by the most common questions:

The curve flattens almost immediately. Going from the top 10 questions to the top 40 buys 5.9 more percentage points, because the first few are name, email, phone and CV — the things a browser already fills in for you.

61% of everything asked is asked by at most 2 of the 212 companies. Of 3,382 distinct questions in the corpus, the vast majority appear at a single employer. The median company asks 13 questions that are effectively its own.

What most employers do have in common

A handful of themes recur often enough to be worth preparing once, even though the exact wording differs every time.

The most common questions that aren't contact details

Excluding name, email, phone, CV and cover-letter upload — the fields every applicant tracking system ships with — these are the questions asked by the most employers.

One question, every employer that asks it

The company pages answer "what will THIS employer ask me". These answer the question people actually search for mid-application — what a given question looks like across every form that asks it, and the exact options those forms allow.

The companies measured question by question

Every company below has its own page listing that employer's questions in the form's own wording, with the answer options and which fields are required. These are a fixed sample of the 212 employers in the corpus — the sample is held still on purpose while we measure whether anyone is looking for this, so the list does not grow day to day.

How this was measured

Every figure on this page is computed from the corpus when the page is built, so it cannot drift from the underlying data. Questions come from the public job-board APIs that employers themselves publish — the same endpoints that render their careers pages — read once and stored as the schema of the form: the wording, whether an answer is required, and the options offered. No candidate's answers are collected, and no application is ever submitted.

Counting is by employer, not by job posting, and duplicate wording within one employer is collapsed, so a company with many openings counts once per distinct question. "Asked by at most 2 companies" is the test used for employer-specific throughout.