Six Questions That Decide Your Application Before Anyone Reads Your CV
Most cross-border application forms carry six screening questions. Answer any one carelessly and your CV is never opened. Here is what each is really asking.
You spend three hours on a CV and eleven seconds on the form around it. The form is where most applications die.
These six appear on nearly every cross-border application. Each is a filter, and a wrong answer removes you before a human sees anything.
1. Are you legally authorised to work in this country?
Not whether you are willing. Whether you already hold the right to work in that specific country. If the role is genuinely remote and hires contractors or uses an employer-of-record arrangement, the question is often present anyway because the form is generic.
Answer truthfully. If there is a comment box, one sentence: that you are based in Nigeria and available to engage as a contractor or through their employer-of-record provider, and that you are not seeking sponsorship or relocation. That sentence converts a hard no into a routing question.
2. Will you now or in future require sponsorship?
For a remote role you are not relocating for, the honest answer is usually no. You are not asking them to sponsor a visa. Saying yes here when you mean I am not a citizen is the single most common self-inflicted rejection we see. Read the question as written.
3. Where are you located, or what is your time zone?
State it as a fact and add the overlap as a number: West Africa Time, UTC+1, which gives four hours of overlap with US Eastern and full overlap with the UK and most of Europe. Your time zone is a number, not an apology. Never write flexible; flexible reads as unquantified.
4. What are your salary expectations?
An empty box is a delay. A bad number is an ending. Do thirty minutes of band research before you fill any form for that market and produce three numbers: a floor you would decline below, a target, and a reach. Give a range with your target at the bottom, in their currency. Open, based on scope is acceptable once, not on every form.
5. Notice period, or when can you start?
Give a real date. Immediately, from someone currently employed, reads as either untrue or as a person who leaves badly. One month, four weeks, a specific date. This is a durability signal disguised as logistics.
6. Have you worked remotely before?
If the honest answer is no, do not leave it there. Answer no and immediately name the evidence: work you owned end to end without supervision, a written artefact somebody else used, and your tenure. The question is a proxy for risk, and you are allowed to address the risk rather than the proxy.
The two-minute audit
Open the last three forms you submitted. Most systems email a copy or keep a candidate portal. Read your own answers to these six. In our experience about half of people find at least one answer that was disqualifying and unnecessary, and it is usually question two.
Then fix the pattern rather than the instance, because you will fill this form another forty times. Write your six answers down once, in a file, and paste them.
The wider point
This is the supply and aim leak wearing an administrative costume. The role was real, the company could have hired you, and the application ended at a dropdown. It is the cheapest failure in the process to fix and the one nobody teaches, because it is not glamorous and there is nothing to sell in it.
Take the free five-question diagnostic if you are unsure whether this is your leak. Everything we give away with no payment involved is on Free For You, including the WhatsApp channel where roles are checked for exactly the conditions in questions one and three.