What ATS application forms actually ask for
The short answer
Every online job application, no matter which company posted it, asks for the same handful of things. Six identifying fields, a resume, a short run of screener questions, and a cover letter almost nobody is required to write. We read the real form definitions behind 20 live openings at 7 companies, Affirm, Stripe, Brex, Mercury, Block, Everlaw, and Capital One, and that shape held every time.
That consistency is the useful part. Once you know what a form is going to ask before you open it, you stop re-deciding the same answers on every single application.
Six fields that never miss
First name, last name, email, phone, resume, LinkedIn. All 20 of the jobs we measured asked for all six, across every company, every role, every system running underneath the page. Nothing else in the form came close to that hit rate. Company-specific questions came and went. These six did not miss once.
That is the floor, not a coincidence. A system cannot route you to a recruiter without a name and a way to reach you, and it cannot show that recruiter your background without a resume. Everything past this floor is the employer asking about you specifically, not asking to be able to find you at all. We cover what to have ready for all six, and how to stop retyping them, in the six fields you fill in every time.
Then a short run of screener questions
Past the basics, most forms move into a set of qualifying questions: are you authorized to work in this country, will you need sponsorship now or later, where are you located and would you relocate, how did you hear about this role, have you worked here before, and a closing set of EEO and demographic questions. Every company phrases these differently. A dropdown here, a free text box there, a state selector in place of a zip code. But the questions underneath are the same seven, over and over, on board after board. We lay that pattern out in full in the seven screener questions you keep answering.
What employers add on top
Some forms stop at the floor plus the seven. Others add one or two questions specific to the role: a portfolio link, a short answer about why this team, a certification number. These extras are usually easy to spot, since they read like something a hiring manager actually wrote rather than something pulled from a template, and there are rarely more than one or two of them. In practice they are also almost always optional even when the label does not say so outright, since a generic form field is a poor place to gate a decision a human is going to make by reading your resume anyway.
The cover letter is not the gate you think it is
Here is the finding that surprised us most. Across all 20 jobs, a cover letter was required on exactly zero. It was optional on 19 of them, and the form did not include the field at all on the last one. Not one employer in the sample made it a hard stop. That does not make a cover letter worthless when the box is sitting in front of you. It means treating it as mandatory is a habit left over from paper applications, not something the actual form is enforcing. Whether it is worth writing anyway, and when the twenty minutes pays off, is its own question, answered in do cover letters still matter.
Some forms let you look before you leap
One more difference separates these systems from each other: how much of the form you can see before you commit to filling it out. Greenhouse, which ran a meaningful share of the boards in our sample, publishes its complete form definition on a public endpoint. Every field, its type, and whether it is required, all readable before the page ever loads in your browser. That means the questions, the required flags, even the exact wording, are knowable in advance instead of discovered one screen at a time. We walk through what that actually looks like in Greenhouse shows you the form before you apply.
Why the same shape shows up everywhere
Affirm, Stripe, Brex, Mercury, Block, Everlaw, and Capital One do not compete with each other, are not hiring for the same roles, and are nowhere near the same size. What they share is the plumbing underneath the careers page. Almost no company builds its own applicant tracking system from scratch, so nearly everyone runs on one of a small number of platforms, and those platforms ship with a default form. Employers layer their own questions on top of it, but the floor is set by the platform, not the company, and that floor is what you are actually filling out again and again no matter whose name is on the page.
This is also why a posting's form rarely tells you much about the company culture, and why comparing forms across employers is mostly a comparison of platforms rather than a comparison of how much each company respects your time. A short form is not necessarily a sign of a lean, modern employer. It is often just Greenhouse's default with nothing added on top.
What this means for the next form you open
Knowing the floor changes how you treat it. You are not solving a new problem each time a new application loads, you are filling in the same six fields and answering some version of the same seven questions, one more time, in a slightly different order. The parts worth thinking hard about are the one or two questions that are actually specific to that job, not the parts that are identical to the application you filled out yesterday. Write good answers to the recurring parts once, and save your actual attention for what is new.
iapplyai.app reads a job's real form before you apply, matches it against your resume, and fills in the parts that never change, so the only thing left for you to decide is the part that is genuinely new.
