Short answer: the typical online job application in 2026 asks 10 questions beyond your name, email and phone number, and 6 of them are mandatory. Across 9,401 live application forms from 780 employers on Greenhouse, the questions that most often stand between a candidate and the Submit button are visa sponsorship (asked by 64% of employers), work authorization (57%), how you heard about the job (33%), salary expectations (32%) and willingness to relocate or work on-site (32%).
A cover-letter slot appears on 84% of forms, but only 3% of employers make it mandatory.
Key findings
- The median form has 10 questions beyond the four contact fields; the mean is 10.7 and 1 in 7 forms (15.2%) has 16 or more. A median of 6 are required.
- Sponsorship is the most common hard filter. 64.1% of employers ask about visa sponsorship and 62.4% make the answer mandatory. On US-based roles the share rises to 70.0%.
- Cover letters are optional almost everywhere. 83.5% of employers include a cover-letter field; 3.0% require one. No job family or seniority level we checked required one more than 4.4% of the time.
- Salary expectations are asked by 31.7% of employers, and 28.0% require an answer before you can submit.
- The written answer has moved into the form. 32.1% of employers include at least one open-ended text question other than the cover letter, and 5.6% require a "why do you want to work here?" answer.
- 7.7% of employers disclose that AI tools score or rank applications, typically Greenhouse's Talent Matching, and link to an opt-out. Only 1.3% make candidates certify they did not use AI themselves. (What forms say about candidates using AI.)
- LinkedIn is asked for by 82.7% of employers, but required by only 20.2%. A portfolio or website is asked for by 45.1% and required by 2.5%.
What we analyzed
Greenhouse, one of the most widely used applicant tracking systems (ATS) among US technology employers, publishes every live job and its application form through a public Job Board API. On 12 October 2026 we pulled the full list of open jobs for 780 employers, then sampled up to 15 jobs per employer and downloaded each job's application form: every question, whether it is required, and what kind of answer it accepts. That produced 9,401 application forms.
Every figure below is reported per employer: each employer counts once, however many roles it posts, so one company running hundreds of identical requisitions cannot decide the result. The share of individual forms is almost always within two points of the employer figure, and both are in the published data. Full method and limitations are at the end of this article.
How long is a job application?
Not counting first name, last name, email and phone, the median application form asks 10 questions. The middle half of forms ask between 7 and 13, and the longest tenth ask 17 or more. That count excludes the optional equal-employment-opportunity (EEO) survey that 47.3% of employers attach as a separate section, and the voluntary demographic questions 18.3% add.
| Questions on the form | Share of forms |
|---|---|
| 0–3 questions | |
| 4–6 questions | |
| 7–10 questions | |
| 11–15 questions | |
| 16 or more questions |
A median of 6 of those questions are mandatory. The required ones are usually the resume upload and the sponsorship and work-authorization pair, plus a few employer-specific questions such as where you live, whether you'll work on-site, salary, and how you found the job.
The questions employers ask, ranked
Each question was assigned to a category by matching its wording. "Will you now or in the future require sponsorship for employment visa status (e.g., H-1B)?" and "Do you need immigration sponsorship to work for us?" both count as a sponsorship question. The full matching rules and example wordings are published with the data.
| Question | Employers asking | Employers requiring |
|---|---|---|
| Resume / CV upload | 81.8% | |
| Cover letter | 3.0% | |
| LinkedIn profile URL | 20.2% | |
| Visa sponsorship, now or in future | 62.4% | |
| Legal authorization to work | 54.9% | |
| Preferred first name | 6.9% | |
| Personal website or portfolio | 2.5% | |
| How did you hear about this job? | 27.4% | |
| Salary or compensation expectations | 28.0% | |
| Willing to relocate / work on-site or hybrid | 30.0% | |
| Where you live (city, state, country) | 23.8% | |
| Previously employed by this company | 18.6% | |
| Privacy notice or data consent | 16.3% | |
| Referred by an employee? | 5.3% | |
| Education (degree, school, GPA) | 11.8% | |
| Earliest start date / notice period | 9.1% | |
| Years of experience | 8.3% | |
| Are you 18 or older? | 6.8% | |
| “Why do you want to work here?” | 5.6% | |
| Non-compete or prior-employer agreements | 6.4% | |
| Text-message (SMS / WhatsApp) consent | 5.9% | |
| Background check acknowledgement | 5.8% | |
| Security clearance | 5.8% | |
| GitHub profile | 1.2% | |
| Pronouns | 1.3% | |
| Export-control / U.S. person status | 3.8% | |
| Certify you did not use AI on the application | 1.3% |
The questions that can end an application
Most of the table is information an employer would collect anyway. A smaller set are yes/no questions that are almost always required: sponsorship (62.4% of employers require it), work authorization (54.9%), on-site or relocation willingness (30.0%) and location (23.8%). Because the answers are structured, an ATS can sort or filter on them before anyone reads a resume. These questions decide whether you are seen at all.
Two practical consequences:
- Answer them the same way every time. Sponsorship is phrased dozens of ways ("now or in the future", "for this role", "to work for any employer"). A candidate on a time-limited visa can truthfully answer "no" to one phrasing and "yes" to the next. Read the exact wording each time. Our guide to work-authorization questions covers how US and Canadian forms differ.
- Treat "willing to relocate" and "in-office" questions as literal. 30.0% of employers require an answer about on-site, hybrid or relocation, and many name a specific schedule, such as "three days per week in our Denver office".
Salary expectations
31.7% of employers ask for your expected salary, and 28.0% won't let you submit without one. This happens even as job postings increasingly publish a pay range. In a separate analysis of the same snapshot, 70% of US postings stated pay, rising to 82% in states with pay-transparency laws. When a posting states a range, the safest answer is a number inside it that matches your level. When it doesn't, a range you'd accept is more defensible than a single figure. How to answer the salary question goes through the wording, the formats and what employers show alongside it.
Cover letters: everywhere, rarely required
A cover-letter field appears on the forms of 83.5% of employers, but just 3.0% make it mandatory. When the field is present it is required only 2.8% of the time. The rate is low in every job family we checked: 0.8% for design roles, 2.1% for engineering and data, 2.8% for marketing and content, and 4.4% at most for internships. The full cover-letter breakdown covers when an optional letter is still worth writing.
Written questions have replaced the cover letter
32.1% of employers include at least one open-ended text question that isn't the cover letter. Common prompts are "Why are you interested in this role?", "Describe a project you're proud of" and "What would you bring to the team?". 5.6% require a "why us" answer specifically, rising to 10.6% for internships. These answers sit inside the form, next to the knockout questions, which makes them harder to skip than an optional upload. How to answer "why do you want to work here" covers the wording and what to write.
LinkedIn, portfolio and GitHub links
A LinkedIn URL field appears for 82.7% of employers and is required by 20.2%. Personal websites and portfolios are asked for by 45.1% and required by 2.5%. GitHub has a dedicated field at only 4.7% of employers, including engineering-heavy ones: most expect a GitHub link in the generic "website" field or on the resume itself.
AI in the application form
AI appears on application forms in two ways:
- Employers disclosing their own AI use. 7.7% of employers show an AI notice on the form, typically "We use Greenhouse's AI-powered Talent Matching tool to compare your application against our job requirements", with a link to request that a human review your application instead. If you see that notice and would rather not be scored by the tool, the opt-out link is on the form itself.
- Employers restricting candidates' AI use. 1.3% of employers require you to certify that you wrote the application yourself, with wording such as "I agree to use only my own words" or "this application was not filled out, in whole or in part, by AI". A further handful ask about AI experience as a job skill. In total, 5.7% of employers mention AI somewhere in their questions.
So far, employers using AI to read applications outnumber those forbidding candidates from using it by about six to one.
What this means if you're applying
- About a dozen answers cover most forms. Sponsorship, work authorization, current location, relocation and on-site willingness, salary expectation, earliest start date, notice period, how you heard about the role, LinkedIn URL, portfolio URL and previous employment with the company. Write each once and reuse it word for word.
- Prepare one strong paragraph about why this role, not a full cover letter. The required written answer is far more common (5.6% "why us", 32.1% with some open-ended question) than the required cover letter (3.0%).
- Read the knockout questions every time. They are short, structured and filterable, which is exactly why a careless answer costs more there than anywhere else on the form.
Methodology
Source. Greenhouse's public Job Board API (boards-api.greenhouse.io/v1/boards/{company}/jobs/{id}?questions=true), which serves the same form a candidate sees on the employer's careers page. No login, scraping or candidate data was involved.
Employers. Board names were taken from the application links in two widely used public job lists for early-career US tech applicants (SimplifyJobs' New-Grad-Positions and Summer2026-Internships repositories on GitHub). Of the 840 Greenhouse employers listed, 780 had a live board on 12 October 2026, with 55,975 open jobs between them.
Sampling. Up to 15 jobs per employer, chosen at random with a fixed seed, giving 9,401 forms. Figures are employer-weighted: the mean, across employers, of each employer's share of forms containing the question.
Classification. Questions were assigned to categories by regular expressions on their label and checked by hand against the most common wordings in each category. A question can belong to more than one category. Name, email and phone are excluded from question counts.
Limitations. The sample leans toward US technology companies that hire early-career staff, and covers Greenhouse forms only. Workday and iCIMS, which dominate large enterprises, publish no equivalent public API. Category matching is keyword-based, so unusual wordings may be missed and counts are slightly conservative. The snapshot is a single day.
Data and how to cite
The aggregated results are free to reuse with attribution: question categories (CSV), all figures (JSON), and the wordings matched to each category.
Frequently asked questions
How many questions are on a typical job application?
The median online job application asks 10 questions beyond name, email and phone, of which 6 are required, based on 9,401 Greenhouse application forms from 780 employers in October 2026. About 15% of forms ask 16 or more.
What percentage of job applications ask about visa sponsorship?
64% of employers ask whether you need visa sponsorship now or in the future, and 62% make it a required question. For US-based roles the share is 70%.
Do most job applications ask for salary expectations?
About a third do: 31.7% of employers ask for your salary expectations, and 28.0% require an answer before you can submit.
Do employers use AI to screen job applications?
7.7% of employers in our sample disclose on the application form that AI tools compare applications against job requirements, typically Greenhouse's Talent Matching, and provide an opt-out link. Employers that do not disclose may still use AI elsewhere in hiring.
Can I use AI to fill out a job application?
Only 1.3% of employers in our sample ask candidates to certify they did not use AI on the application. Where an employer does ask, answer truthfully. Elsewhere, review anything AI-drafted so it is accurate and reflects your own experience.
Ten questions per form, every form. Answer them once.
ApplyCandid fills the standard fields from your saved profile and drafts the open-ended answers from your real resume, on Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workday and LinkedIn Easy Apply.