“Are you willing to work in the office?” — how employers actually ask it
The wording carries the policy: what a form offers as options says more about the arrangement than the advert usually does. We read the application forms of 135 employers that ask it — 1,592 instances in all — from their own public job-board APIs. This is what the question looks like in practice.
What it is checking
Asks how often you would work from an office. Answers are usually a fixed list matching the arrangement the role is advertised under.
The shape of the answer
74% of these forms give you a fixed list rather than a text box, and 61% of what those lists offer is nothing but yes and no. There is usually nowhere on the form to explain a situation, so the choice is the whole answer. 97% are marked required.
| Option offered | Times it appears |
|---|---|
| Yes | 789 |
| No | 782 |
| Canada | 106 |
| Other | 103 |
| Florida | 99 |
| Massachusetts | 99 |
| New Jersey | 99 |
| North Carolina | 99 |
| Oregon | 99 |
| New York | 98 |
| Virginia | 98 |
| California | 97 |
348 distinct options appear across the corpus.
446 ways of asking the same thing
The wording matters more than it looks: two forms can ask about the same fact and accept different answers. These are the most common, with the number of employers using each — the form's own words, not a paraphrase.
| Question, as the form words it | Employers |
|---|---|
| In which City and State do you currently reside in? | 3 |
| What City do you live in? | 3 |
| What state do you currently live in? | 3 |
| Are you based in Singapore? | 2 |
| Do you currently live in the United States? | 2 |
| Do you currently reside in Arizona? | 2 |
| From where do you intend to work? | 2 |
| What City do you currently live in? | 2 |
| What US state do you reside in? | 2 |
| What city do you currently reside in? | 2 |
| Which US state do you reside in? | 2 |
| Which state do you reside in? | 2 |
Employers whose exact wording we have
Each of these pages lists every question on that employer's form, including this one.
8am · Adyen · Affirm · Airbnb · Airtable · Alpha 9 Oncology · Alphasense · Ambiq Micro · Amca · Amyris · Anthropic · Asana · Ascend · Assemblyai · Astranis · Avant Arte · Axial · Axon · Bevi · Bill · Bitgo · Blockchain Com · Boku · Boulder Care · Box · Brex · Bringg · Bybit · Calendly · Carbon Direct · Carbonchain · Carvana · Centrum Health · Chime Financial · Circleci · Cloudflare · Cockroach · Culture Amp · Databricks · Daybreak Health · Degreed · Dropbox · Elastic · Enova International · Eve · Figma · Fin · Fireblocks · Flock Homes · Galileo · Ghx · Ginkgo Bioworks · Gitlab · Gocardless · Gofundme · Grafana · Harness · Headspace · Headspace Providers · Hippo Insurance · House Rx · Instacart · Kiwico · Knock · Komodo Health · Lab37 · Layerzero · Legion · Lithic · Ltse · Mercury · Mixpanel · Modern Health · N26 · Natera · Netlify · New Relic · Newsela · Nourish · Nuro · Omada Health · Optimal Dynamics · Oshi Health · Ownwell · Pacaso · Pagerduty · Pave · Peregrine · Pinwheel · Podium · Prodigal · Prolific · Razorpay Software Private · Recursion · Robinhood · Roofstock · Runwise · Samsara · Sidecar Health · Smartsheet · Sourcegraph · Sovrn · Squarespace · Stockx · Stripe · Stubhub · Sumo Logic · Syndio · Tanium · Techstars · Tenable · Udacity · Upgrade · Upslide · Urban Sports Club · Vercel · Verisign · Viam · Wonderschool · Wrike
What this page does not tell you
It does not tell you what to answer. What is true for you is not visible from a job board, and a confident steer on a question about your right to work — or on a contract you have signed — would be worth less than nothing. What is here is what the form will put in front of you, so that nothing on it is a surprise.
Nor does it say whether any employer filters on the answer. Whether a form's answers are used that way is not published by any of these job boards, and the honest position is that we cannot see it.