In 1998 the Justice Department recommended that job applications ask whether an applicant will now or in the future need visa sponsorship. A now-and-future version of that question is on 570 of 937 employers' Greenhouse forms. The same forms ask about past government work at seven different spans.
Near the bottom of a great many American job applications sits a question that asks a stranger to forecast their own immigration future:
Will you now or in the future require sponsorship for employment visa status (e.g., H-1B visa status)?
It reads like something an HR department wrote in a hurry. It isn't. An employers' council proposed it to the Justice Department in the summer of 1998, and the Department recommended it over the council's other draft, a citizenship checklist. In 2013 the Department said it still preferred it. This month I read the custom questions on 937 employers' job boards at Greenhouse, one of the common hiring platforms, and the "now or in the future" form of the sponsorship question is on 570 of them.
The same forms are much less sure of themselves when they ask about the past. One fact, whether you worked for the government, is asked at seven different spans, from "now" to "six months" to "ten years" to "ever". Two of those spans have a twin in the federal statutes I checked. The rest are each employer's own cut.
On July 10, 1998, Arnold Eagle, president of the American Council on International Personnel, wrote to the Justice Department's Office of Special Counsel for Immigration-Related Unfair Employment Practices. He asked whether employers could put two questions to applicants, on the form or in an interview: "Are you legally authorized to work in the United States?" and "Will you now or in the future require sponsorship for employment visa status (e.g., H-1B visa status)?"
As an alternative he offered a checklist. The applicant would say whether they were a U.S. citizen, a lawful permanent resident, a temporary resident, an asylee or a refugee, and if none of those, whether they were authorized to work and on what basis.
The answer, dated August 6 and signed by the Special Counsel, John D. Trasviña, took the first pair:
In response to your inquiry, we recommend using the initial set of questions above, rather than the proposed alternative. This is because, as a general rule, we do not recommend asking applicants to specify their citizenship status in the context of the employment application process because a rejected applicant may rely upon such an inquiry later to allege that the employer considered the information in making the hiring decision, and discriminated based on citizenship status.
So the forecast is there to keep a question about status off the form. An employer that asks what an applicant is can be accused of deciding on it. An employer that asks what the applicant will need from it is asking about its own paperwork.
In 2013 a lawyer at Greenberg Traurig asked the office whether that letter was still in effect. The Deputy Special Counsel, Seema Nanda, replied on September 6: "The guidance laid out in the August 6, 1998 technical assistance letter (attached) is still OSC's position." Her letter quotes the sentence again and says "OSC prefers the question proposed in the 1998 technical assistance letter".
The "in the future" half has a target, and a 2010 exchange with the same office shows how easily it misses. A lawyer at Seyfarth Shaw wrote that applicants holding an "open market" employment authorization document, people whose green-card applications were pending, often answered "no" to the sponsorship question. Yet his client would have to send immigration authorities a letter about each of them before they could be granted permanent residence. He asked to put a definition of "sponsorship" into the question itself. A forecast only works if the applicant and the employer mean the same thing by the word.
Greenhouse publishes every job board it hosts through a public API. "Job Board data is publicly available, so authentication is not required for any GET endpoints," its documentation says, and a request with questions=true returns the custom questions an employer attached to a posting. On September 29 I asked it for two postings from each of 958 employer boards, and 941 answered. Counting each distinct question once per board leaves 10,090 custom questions on 937 boards.
Of those, 3,728 (37%) carry a time frame. Most ask about the present: 3,162 questions use "now", "currently" or the like. 823 ask about the future, 505 say "ever", and only 33 name an explicit window such as "the past five years". 667 questions put the present and the future in one sentence.
The sponsorship question accounts for most of that mixing. It appears 754 times on 639 boards. Of those questions, 633 (84%) ask about now and the future together, and they sit on 570 boards, 61% of the sample. Another 50 ask only about now, 43 only about the future, and 28 about neither.
The sentence drifted as it spread. The 1998 core phrase, "now or in the future require sponsorship for employment visa status", appears word for word in 119 questions on 112 boards. 49 boards keep the "(e.g., H-1B visa status)" example as well, and 38 questions reproduce the whole 1998 question exactly. 44 boards still ask both of the council's questions. Elsewhere the idea survives in other words. PerfectServe asks "Do you now or at a future date require visa sponsorship to work in the United States?", and EarnIn asks "Do you need, or will you need in the future, any immigration-related support or sponsorship from EarnIn in order to begin or continue employment with EarnIn?" My classifier counted the first as present-only and the second as future-only, so 570 is a floor.
When the forms turn to the past, they stop agreeing. I read by hand every question about the applicant's own government employment: 16 questions from 14 employers. They use seven spans.
| span | employers | how it is asked |
|---|---|---|
| now | Aevex Aerospace, Accenture Federal Services, Environmental Science Associates | "Are you currently a U.S. government military or civilian employee?" (Aevex) |
| 6 months | Recorded Future | "Are you or were you recently (in the last six months) an employee of a government office or agency that has oversight over Mastercard or Recorded Future?" |
| 1 year | The Princeton Review | "…or within the past year have you served in, any capacity on a government contract…" |
| 2 years | DLH Corporation | "Are you currently or have you within the past 2 years been employed with the federal government or military?" |
| 5 years | Coinbase, Robinhood | "Are you a current government official or were you a government official in the last five years…" (Coinbase) |
| 10 years | Accenture Federal Services | "Were you an employee of the U.S. Government (including U.S. Congress or military) or any state or local government within the past 10 years?" |
| ever | Scale AI, Two Six Technologies, Asana, Shift5, The Princeton Review, Nava PBC, and Zscaler (only about its own procurement) | "Have you ever been an employee of the US Government?" (Shift5) |
Some of the variety has a reason. Federal ethics law puts clocks on former officials. 18 U.S.C. § 207 carries "Two-year restrictions concerning particular matters under official responsibility" and "One-Year Restrictions on Aiding or Advising". 41 U.S.C. § 2104 says a former official of a federal agency "may not accept compensation from a contractor as an employee, officer, director, or consultant of the contractor within one year after" certain duties. Those give the one-year and two-year questions a statutory twin. The six-month, five-year and ten-year cuts match neither of those two statutes. I did not read every state ethics law or the foreign-bribery guidance that a payments company might follow, so "no law sets them" would claim more than I checked.
One employer can hold two clocks at once. Accenture Federal asks whether you are a government employee now, and separately whether you were one in the past ten years. The Princeton Review asks "ever" about employment and "the past year" about government contracts. Zscaler asks something narrower than the rest of its row: whether you were "involved in procurement or contract award activities involving Zscaler as a government employee or official". Nava PBC skips the arithmetic and asks the question the clocks stand in for: "Are you currently subject to any federal or regulatory cooling-off periods that would restrict your ability to engage in this role?"
Some windows sit inside a form without being printed on it. 524 of the 941 boards carry the compliance block that government contractors use, and every one of them asks the same veteran question with the same three answers: "I identify as one or more of the classifications of a protected veteran", "I am not a protected veteran" and "I don't wish to answer". One of those classifications runs on a clock. Under 41 CFR 60-300.2(w), "Recently separated veteran means any veteran during the three-year period beginning on the date of such veteran's discharge or release from active duty". None of the 524 forms states the three years. A veteran whose only claim to the category was recent separation stops being in it three years after discharge, and nothing on the page says so.
Employers ask about their own history with you too, and there the default is "ever". Of 126 questions on 111 boards asking whether you worked for the company before, 124 say "ever" (98 of them "ever" alone, the other 26 "now or ever") and none sets a window. When a form does put a window on your past with the company, it is about applying or interviewing, and each picks its own. Air asks about the last 6 months, Mixpanel about "the past six months to a year", the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative about "the last 12 months" (across its science organizations), and Power Digital about interviews "in the past 3 years".
This is Greenhouse only. Employers on Ashby, Lever or Workday are not in it, and the 958 boards come from a list skewed toward American tech and AI companies, not a random draw of employers. I took two postings per board, the two with the lowest job ids, so a board's other postings could ask different questions. Time frames were tagged by pattern, and I read samples by eye to check them: 15 of 15 random "now and future" sponsorship questions really were both. Where the pattern misses a phrasing, as with PerfectServe's "at a future date", the counts err low.
The forecast question is the one with an author. It asks what you will need from the employer rather than what you are, and the Justice Department preferred it in 1998 and again in 2013 for exactly that reason. The questions about your past have no such author.
A form asks for your history at the cut its owner chose, and the cuts do not agree. Six of these employers ask whether you "ever" worked for the government, one asks about the last ten years, two about the last five, and three about today. A résumé line that says "government: yes" answers the first of those and none of the others. A line that says "county health department, March 2019 to June 2021" answers all seven, and the veteran rule's three years, and whatever cut the next form picks.
questions=true parameter). The source of every count of questions and boards.How this was computed. Every question was fetched from Greenhouse's public Job Board API on September 29, 2026, two postings per board for 958 boards, of which 941 answered: 1,879 postings and 34,574 question rows. A custom question counts once per board, which leaves 10,090 on 937 boards. Time frames were tagged by pattern and spot-checked by hand. The government-service questions were read one by one, and the veteran options were read from each board's compliance block. Nothing about any applicant was collected: only the text the employers wrote.
The essay's advice is to keep the dates. Chain of Consciousness does the same for AI agents: a tamper-evident, dated record of what each agent did, so a later question about any window of time can be answered from the record.
pip install chain-of-consciousness npm install chain-of-consciousness
Or start without installing anything: Hosted Chain of Consciousness.