You can have the right resume and still never be read. Screening questions run before a human is involved, and many of them are pass or fail.
Knockout questions
A knockout question has a rule attached. Fewer than five years with the tool they named? Rejected. Requires sponsorship when the employer will not provide it? Rejected. No recruiter sees the outcome, and you get either silence or a same-day rejection email.
The ones that come up constantly
Years of experience with X
Usually numeric with a threshold. Answer for the skill as you have genuinely used it. Do not answer zero for something adjacent to real experience because the phrasing was odd, and do not inflate it either - it is trivially contradicted in a first interview.
Work authorization and sponsorship
Two questions, frequently confused. "Are you authorized to work in the country?" and "Will you now or in the future require sponsorship?" are not opposites. Answer both from your actual status; a mismatch here reads as carelessness at best.
Expected salary
When the field is required, a number beats a blank. A range or a market-rate answer keeps you in the pipeline. An empty required field ends the application.
Willing to relocate / on-site
Answer for the role as posted. If you filtered your search for remote work, this should rarely be in tension.
Veteran status, disability, ethnicity
Voluntary EEO questions. They do not feed screening. "Decline to answer" is a complete answer.
The blank field problem
The most common way an application dies is not a wrong answer, it is an unanswered required field. The form will not advance, and whoever or whatever was filling it in gives up. When you are applying by hand, you notice. When a tool is applying for you, you may never hear about it unless it tells you.
Answer them once
Every one of these questions has the same answer on every application. Writing them down once - authorization, sponsorship, experience, education, salary expectation, EEO responses - and reusing them is the entire trick. That consistency also matters if you apply to several roles at the same company. More detail on each question here.
Let an agent handle the applying
Flowgenn connects to your LinkedIn, applies to one-click apply roles that match your search, attaches your resume, and answers the screening questions from your profile. It records an application only when LinkedIn confirms it was sent, so the number you see is the number that went out. See how it works.
