What this application asks

A job posting tells you what the work is. It tells you nothing about what applying costs. One role wants your CV and an email address. The next wants fourteen answers, three of them essays, your salary expectations and a visa declaration — and you find that out after you have clicked through, made an account, and started typing.

Open a job now and, under the description, you will often see this:

What this application asks                                        Greenhouse

  First Name, Last Name, Email, Phone, Resume/CV, Cover Letter
  LinkedIn Profile                                          optional
  Please share a link of your website/portfolio
  What is your salary expectation in CHF?
  Are you currently located in Zurich?
  Do you have the legal right to work in Switzerland
    without visa sponsorship?                               choose one
  Do you have working proficiency in German?                choose one

Those are the employer’s own questions, as they wrote them, read straight off the application form. The word on the right is the shape of the answer — written answer for the ones that want a paragraph, choose one, choose any, yes / no, upload. That word is the whole difference between a question worth a minute and one worth twenty.

What we found looking at a hundred thousand of them

Two thirds of applications ask nothing at all beyond a CV and your contact details. The rest range from mild to punishing:

  one click, no questions      67%
  light        1–4 questions   16%
  heavy       5–14 questions   16%
  punishing     15+ questions    1%

More than a quarter of the applications on Greenhouse demand three or more written answers. The longest form we have seen has ninety-nine fields.

None of that is visible from a listing, and all of it decides where a week’s worth of effort should go.

What it does not do

It does not guess. Everything shown is read from the form itself — we count nothing, estimate nothing, and infer nothing about what a question “really” means. If an employer’s question is ambiguous, you see the ambiguity rather than our interpretation of it.

It leaves out the equal-opportunity survey and the data-consent boxes. Those are the hiring platform’s boilerplate, identical on every posting, and they tell you nothing about this job.

And it is not everywhere. We can read application forms from Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workable and Recruitee. Workday, Oracle, SmartRecruiters and UKG keep theirs behind a candidate account or a bot wall, and where we cannot read a form we say nothing rather than guess at one. Coverage is still filling in — a posting that shows no block today may show one tomorrow.