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What WorkWingman Still Needs to Ask You — In Plain English

(Plain-language twin of profile-data-gaps.md. Same list, no jargon. For why applications ask any of this, start with application-question-taxonomy.)

When you set up WorkWingman, it asked about your work history, your skills, and what you're looking for. That covers most of a job application. It doesn't cover all of it.

Every so often an application asks something your profile has no answer for — "how did you hear about us?", "are you bound by a non-compete?", "what's your notice period?" — and the app has to stop and ask you mid-application. This page is the running list of those gaps, and what the app now stores so it can stop asking twice.

The rule underneath all of it: answer once, reuse forever. A question you answer in WorkWingman is a question you don't retype on the next fifty applications.

The new answers, and why each one is its own question

References. Names, relationships, companies, phone numbers, emails. This wasn't in the original profile for a reason worth saying out loud: references are someone else's contact details, not yours. Handing another person's phone number to an employer deserves its own deliberate step, not a silent autofill.

Salary history — and why it's kept apart from your salary expectation. These look like the same question and are not. Your expectation is what you're asking for — a different question entirely, and the one you actually want to answer. Your history is what you used to make, and many US states and cities now restrict or ban employers from asking for it, because it lets old underpayment follow you into every new offer.

The details vary a lot — which jurisdiction, which kind of employer, and whether you brought it up yourself — so treat this as "worth knowing about," not legal advice. WorkWingman keeps the two in separate boxes so it can treat them differently, and so it can eventually warn you when a job's location is one of the places the question isn't allowed.

Willingness to relocate. You may already have written something like "open to Austin or Denver." Lovely for a cover letter, useless to a form that wants a checkbox. So there's now a plain yes/no/not-set answer as well — the form gets the checkbox, your cover letter keeps the nuance.

Certifications and licenses. Your skills list holds words like "AWS." A certification is not a word — it has an issuer, an ID, and often an expiry date, and some employers check the ID. An expired cert and a current one are different facts, so they get real structure.

Security clearance — active vs. lapsed. There was already a free-text note about clearance. The problem: "do you hold an active clearance?" has a different honest answer if yours lapsed last year. Storing the level and the expiry date means the app can answer that precisely instead of guessing from a sentence.

Notice period. Different from your earliest start date. A start date is a day on a calendar; a notice period is what you owe your current employer — "two weeks," "a month." Some forms want one, some want the other.

"How did you hear about us?" Almost every application asks. Almost nothing did with the answer. Now it has a home, with a default you can override when a specific referral matters.

Have you worked here before? Common at bigger companies, because a returning employee routes through a different process than a new applicant.

Non-compete / non-solicit. Asked more and more as companies get cautious about hiring from competitors. It can knock an application out, so it's worth having a considered answer ready rather than improvising under time pressure.

Are you at least 18? Asked nearly everywhere. Better to state it once than to have the app assume it about you.

Convictions you're required to disclose. This is the hardest one, and the app treats it carefully: a yes/no, plus — only if it applies — your own explanation in your own words. The point of storing it is consistency. If you're going to disclose, the wording should be something you chose once and stand behind, not something you rewrote at 11pm on the fifth application of the night.

Portfolio links. Your GitHub, your site, your publications — the things that aren't in the resume file.

Desired title and employment type (permanent vs. contract). Some forms ask what you're looking for as its own question, separate from the job in front of you.

What it still can't answer for you

Being straight about the edges:

  • Years of experience per skill. Forms ask "how many years of Python?" The app knows you list Python; it doesn't know for how long. Capturing that properly means a whole skills matrix at setup, which is a bigger question than this pass answers. Until then, it flags it for you rather than guessing.
  • Why you left each job. The honest answer differs per employer, so a single profile-wide answer would be wrong somewhere. It needs to live per-job, and doesn't yet.
  • Whether the salary-history question is legal where this job is. The app stores the answer, but doesn't yet know which state each posting is in, so it can't suppress the question where it's banned. That's coming, and it's a different piece of machinery.

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