Most application forms ask for a CV and then ask the candidate to retype it. That loses you good applicants, who have other options and limited patience, and it tells you nothing the CV did not.
The useful questions are the ones a CV cannot answer. There are not many of them, which is the point.
The ones you genuinely need
These are administrative rather than interesting, and they belong at the top where they are cheap to answer.
- What is your full name?
- What is your email address and phone number?
- Which role are you applying for?
- Where are you based?
- Do you have the right to work in this country?
- Will you need visa sponsorship, now or in future?
- Upload your CV.
- What is your notice period, and when could you start?
The ones that actually sort an inbox
These are the questions worth the candidate's time and yours. Each one produces an answer you can compare across applicants, and none of them can be lifted from a CV.
Two or three is the right number. Six turns an application into an assignment, and the strong candidates are the ones who walk away first.
- Why this role, and why now?
- What drew you to us specifically? (The answers divide instantly into people who looked and people who did not)
- Tell us about something you built or fixed that you are proud of.
- Describe a time you got something badly wrong. What happened next?
- What is a widely held view in your field that you disagree with?
- What would your last manager say you need to work on?
- What do you want to be better at a year from now?
- Is there anything we have not asked that we should have?
The practical ones, if they matter for the role
Only ask these where a wrong answer actually rules somebody out. Asking about a driving licence for a desk job is a field that costs you applicants and returns nothing.
- Would you work in the office, hybrid or remotely?
- Are you able to travel for the role?
- Do you hold a current driving licence?
- Which of these tools have you used professionally?
- Link to your portfolio, GitHub or published work.
- Are you applying for any other roles with us?
Salary, and why to publish yours
If you ask what somebody expects to be paid, publish your range on the same page. Asking a candidate to name a number against an undisclosed band is the single most cited reason for abandoning an application, and it is not a close contest.
It is also bad information. Candidates either anchor low and resent it later, or anchor high and get filtered out of a role they would have taken. Neither tells you what you wanted to know.
If you publish the range, the question becomes useful: "this role pays between X and Y, does that work for you" is a yes or no that saves everybody a conversation.
Asking a candidate to name a salary against an undisclosed band is the most cited reason for abandoning an application, and it is not close.
Equal opportunities monitoring
Collected properly, this data is how you find out whether your pipeline is losing people at a particular stage. Collected badly, it is a compliance exercise that makes candidates uneasy and produces numbers nobody trusts.
Four rules. Put it at the very end, after the application is effectively complete. Make every question optional with an explicit "prefer not to say". State plainly that it is separated from the application and not seen by the hiring manager. And then actually separate it, because if you do not, the statement is false and somebody will eventually notice.
The questions themselves are standard: disability, age bracket, gender, ethnicity, and whether any adjustments are needed for the interview. That last one is the only part the hiring team should see, and it should be asked separately for that reason.
What to leave out
In rough order of how much damage they do:
- Anything already on the CV you just asked them to upload. Employment history, education, previous employers.
- Date of birth. You need to know they can legally work, not when they were born.
- A cover letter as a required field. Optional is fine; required filters for people with spare time.
- "Describe yourself in three words." It measures nothing and signals a lot.
- Long competency questions at application stage. Those belong at interview, where you can follow up.
- Any question whose answer would not change whether you interview them.
How long the form should be
Ten minutes at the absolute maximum, and five is better for anything below senior level. There is a measurable relationship between application length and both completion rate and candidate quality, and the quality effect runs the wrong way: the strongest candidates have the most alternatives and the least patience.
A reasonable test is to fill it in yourself, honestly, on a phone. If you find yourself skimming your own questions, so will everybody else.
Also say how long it takes before they start, and let people save and come back. An application that needs a reference number from a previous employer is not something anybody finishes in one sitting, and a form that forgets their answers is a form they do not return to.
Scoring applications without turning it into a spreadsheet
If you get more than a handful of applications, deciding the criteria before the form opens is what stops the process drifting. The first application sets the standard otherwise, and everything after it is judged against whoever happened to apply first.
The practical version: pick three or four things that genuinely predict success in the role, score each answer against them, and sort by the total. It is not a hiring decision, it is a reading order, and that is all it needs to be.
The honest caveat is that scoring makes bias faster rather than removing it. If the criteria encode something that has nothing to do with the job, the score launders it into a number. Write them down and have somebody who is not hiring read them.
What candidates notice about your form
The application form is often the first real interaction somebody has with how you work, and they read it as evidence. A few things they consistently notice.
- Whether you publish the salary. The most commented-on thing in every candidate survey.
- Whether the form remembers their answers if they close the tab.
- Whether it works on a phone without pinching and zooming.
- Whether you ask for a CV and then ask them to retype it. This one gets screenshotted and shared.
- Whether anything acknowledges the application afterwards, and whether the timeline in it turns out to be true.