People & HR
Job application
Two short pages — who the candidate is, then what they have done — ending with the CV file itself.
Why this survey gets sent
“Forty applications arrive as forty attachments called cv-final-2.pdf. Half of them bury the phone number somewhere in the layout, not one of them says when the person could start, and I become the search engine.”
A CV is a document the candidate designed; an application is data you can sort. Asking for both is not duplication — six structured answers let you shortlist in an afternoon, and the attachment is there for the ten people who make the cut. The order matters too: identity first, experience second, the file last, because a candidate asked to upload before being asked their name assumes the rest of the process will be just as impersonal.
What is in it
- Page one — full name, email and phone number
- City of residence, and the earliest date they could start
- Page two — the position being applied for
- Years of experience, as five bands rather than a number
- Highest qualification, from school to doctorate
- Why they are a good fit for this role (long answer)
- The CV itself, attached — the one required file
About 5 min to answer
Job application
About 5 min
How to write this survey
Ask for structured answers and the file, not one or the other
A CV cannot be sorted: every candidate arranges it as they like and puts the phone number wherever it looks best. That is why this template opens with six structured fields — name, email, phone, city, earliest start date and the position applied for — and asks for the file at the very end. The fields let you line forty applications up in one table; the file is there for whoever survives the first pass.
The template is split across two pages for a practical reason. The first is about the person, the second about their experience. A candidate who sees one long page overestimates how long it will take and leaves; two short pages read as two steps. More importantly, the order is respectful — you ask for their name before you ask them to upload anything.
Keep the required fields few and deliberate
Every extra required field costs you candidates you will never know started and gave up. Five are required here: the name, the email, the position, the years of experience and the CV file. Everything else — phone, city, start date, qualification — is optional, because its absence does not stop you reading the application and judging it.
The working rule: make a field required only if its absence would make you reject the application or write back to ask. A missing name makes the application meaningless and a missing email makes it useless. A city improves your sorting without deciding it, and a phone number matters at the interview stage rather than the screening stage — so ask for it without insisting.
Bands beat a free-text number
Years of experience here is a list of five bands, not a number box: under 1 year, 1–3, 4–6, 7–10, more than 10. A band is answered in a second, sorts itself, and closes the door on answers that mean nothing — “two and a half”, “long experience”, “since 2019”. Because the bands are fixed, you can count candidates in each one without cleaning the data first.
The same holds for the qualification question: an ordered list from school to doctorate saves you an open text field that comes back with twenty spellings of the same certificate. Make sure the list genuinely covers everyone, though — a list that starts at bachelor's degree tells every diploma holder this job is not for them, even if that was never your intention.
One open question, and make it specific
The single open question here is “why are you a good fit for this role?”, and its wording is deliberate: it asks for a link between the candidate and the job, not for the CV rewritten in prose. The generic version — “tell us about yourself” — returns what is already in the attachment. The specific version returns the one thing the attachment cannot contain: the candidate's understanding of what you need.
One is enough. Every additional essay question adds two minutes to applying and several times that to reading, and you are reading forty of them rather than one. If you need an answer about a specific condition — a driving licence, willingness to travel, evening shifts — make it a clear choice question instead of hoping somebody mentions it in a paragraph.
What not to ask for
Do not ask an applicant for a photograph, a date of birth, a marital status or a number of children. None of it improves your decision, all of it opens the door to a bias nobody intends and nobody can later prove did not happen. If one of those details really is needed at a later stage — for a contract, say — its place is after an offer, not before the first read.
The same goes for the current salary. The useful question is the expected salary or the acceptable range — a question about the future rather than about the candidate's past — and it can wait until the first interview without costing you anything. The simple test: if you cannot explain to the candidate how a field will affect your decision, delete it.