Employer guideRead at source, 9 September 2026
Pre-Screening Questions: What to Ask, What Not to Ask, and Why It Is a Legal Question
Pre-screening questions are the short set of questions an applicant answers before anyone reads their application — and under federal law they are not administrative housekeeping. The Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures define a selection procedure as “any measure, combination of measures, or procedure used as a basis for any employment decision,” which is exactly what a knockout question is. That means a screening question which filters groups out at different rates has to be defensible as job-related, and a handful of common questions cannot lawfully be asked before a conditional offer at all. This page covers the questions that work, the ones that quietly do not, and how to tell the difference.
Why a screening question is a legal instrument
Most employers think of pre-screening questions as a convenience: a way to avoid reading applications from people who cannot work the shift. Federal law thinks of them as something else.
The Uniform Guidelines define a selection procedure as “any measure, combination of measures, or procedure used as a basis for any employment decision,” and a selection rate as “the proportion of applicants or candidates who are hired, promoted, or otherwise selected.” A knockout question is a measure used as the basis for an employment decision. It is squarely inside the definition.
The consequence follows in 29 CFR 1607.3(A): “the use of any selection procedure which has an adverse impact on the hiring, promotion, or other employment or membership opportunities of members of any race, sex, or ethnic group will be considered to be discriminatory and inconsistent with these guidelines, unless the procedure has been validated in accordance with these guidelines.”
And the threshold for “adverse impact” is the familiar four-fifths rule at 29 CFR 1607.4(D): “a selection rate for any race, sex, or ethnic group which is less than four-fifths (4/5) (or eighty percent) of the rate for the group with the highest rate will generally be regarded by the Federal enforcement agencies as evidence of adverse impact.”
Read those three together and the practical rule is simple. Every question you use to filter applicants should be one you could explain in terms of the work. “Five years of experience” usually cannot be explained that way. “Can you lift 50 pounds repeatedly through a shift” can.
The pre-offer line
Separately from adverse impact, the Americans with Disabilities Act draws a hard line at the conditional offer. EEOC guidance states that at the pre-offer stage “an employer cannot ask questions that are likely to elicit information about a disability,” and that this holds even if the employer intends to consider the answers only after making an offer. What an employer may ask is “whether applicants can perform any or all job functions, including whether applicants can perform job functions ‘with or without reasonable accommodation.’” The distinction is between the job and the person.
Where the screen becomes a scored test rather than a question, a second body of rules applies: any selection procedure with adverse impact has to be validated. Our guide to pre-employment assessments covers the four-fifths rule, the three validation routes and the ADA line on medical examinations.
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The questions worth asking
A good pre-screening set is short, specific, and made entirely of things that are true about the job rather than things you hope are true about the applicant. Four questions is usually enough; six is the point at which completion rates start to fall.
The same logic applies to anything you stack after the questions. A recorded video interview is another completion event, and in Illinois, Maryland and New York City it also carries notice, consent or audit duties — worth reading before you add it rather than after.
The shift, stated exactly
Not “what is your availability,” which is a trap the applicant has to guess their way out of, but the actual hours: “this role is Monday to Friday, 6am to 2:30pm, with occasional Saturdays. Can you work that?” It filters accurately, it is not a proxy for anything protected, and it tells the applicant something they wanted to know.
The physical or environmental reality
Lifting, standing, crawl spaces, cold rooms, heights. Ask about the ability to perform the function, with or without reasonable accommodation, and phrase it as the job rather than the body.
The credential the job actually requires
And ask it usefully: which certifications, and when do they expire, rather than a yes or no. In licensed trades the expiry date is the answer that matters.
The one thing people quit over
Every role has one — the on-call rotation, the drive, the crawl spaces, the sixth day in summer. Naming it as a question costs you the applicants who would have left in week three, which is the cheapest saving available in hiring.
Nothing else
Every additional question reduces completed applications and adds a filter you will eventually have to justify. If a question would not change your decision, it is not a screening question, it is friction.
The questions that quietly cost you
Three deserve particular attention because they are common, they feel harmless, and they do most of the damage.
Years of experience. This is the most-used knockout question in frontline hiring and the least defensible. It is a selection procedure under the Uniform Guidelines, it is rarely derived from any analysis of the work, and it excludes the entire population you could have trained — which, in occupations whose typical entry route is on-the-job training, is most of the labour market. Ask what someone can do, not how long they have been doing it.
The résumé upload. Not a question, technically, but the single largest filter on most application forms, and one that removes people by their filing habits rather than their ability. In frontline and trades hiring the population that applies from a phone at half five in the morning does not have a current CV, and never will.
Anything asked “just for our records.” If the answer will not change a decision, collecting it creates a record that the information was available to the decision-maker and gains you nothing. That applies to photographs, graduation years, and most demographic fields collected outside a properly separated voluntary self-identification process.
Test your own set against the four-fifths rule
If you screen at any volume, you already have the data to check yourself. Take the last few hundred applicants, count how many passed your screening questions, and compare the pass rates across whatever groups you can lawfully observe. A pass rate below 80% of the highest group's rate is what the federal enforcement agencies generally regard as evidence of adverse impact — which does not automatically make the question unlawful, but does mean you would need to be able to show it is job-related. Most employers have never run this check, and the ones who do usually find one question doing all the work.
Where the screening question sits in the process
The sequence matters as much as the wording, because several things that are prohibited before a conditional offer are permitted after one, if applied to everyone in the job category.
Before the offer: ability to perform job functions, availability, credentials, and the honest description of conditions. After the offer: medical examinations where the job requires them, respirator medical clearance and fit testing, substance testing, background checks, and driving records — each applied consistently to everyone hired into that job, not to a selected subset.
Putting a question in the wrong stage is the most common failure we see, and it is usually accidental: someone adds a helpful-seeming question to an application form and nobody reviews where in the process it now sits.
Once the questions are right, the next problem is volume — a screening set can only sort the people who applied. Our guides to the candidate pipeline and to the WOTC tax credit cover what comes before and after the form.
What this page cannot do
It cannot tell you whether a specific question is lawful in your state. Salary history, criminal history and several other categories are governed by state and city rules that differ substantially and change often, and the federal position described here is a floor rather than the whole answer.
It also cannot validate a selection procedure for you. If a question of yours has adverse impact and you intend to keep it, the Uniform Guidelines require validation in accordance with the guidelines — a real exercise, not a paragraph in a policy document. The realistic advice for most employers is to remove questions that cannot be explained in terms of the work, rather than to defend them.
Frequently asked questions
What are pre-screening questions?
Pre-screening questions are the short set of questions an applicant answers as part of applying, before anyone reviews the application in detail, usually used to filter out people who cannot meet a basic requirement such as the shift or a licence. Under the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures they count as a selection procedure, defined as any measure, combination of measures, or procedure used as a basis for any employment decision.
What should you ask in pre-screening questions?
Ask about the exact shift rather than general availability, the ability to perform the physical functions the job actually requires, the specific credential the role needs and when it expires, and the one condition people most often quit over. Four questions is usually enough. Every additional question reduces completed applications and adds a filter that has to be justified if it screens groups out at different rates.
What can you not ask before making a job offer?
EEOC guidance states that at the pre-offer stage an employer cannot ask questions likely to elicit information about a disability, and that this applies even if the employer intends to consider the answers only after making an offer. Examples given as prohibited include asking whether the applicant needs a reasonable accommodation, how many sick days they took last year, what medications they take, and whether they have been treated for drug addiction. Employers may ask whether applicants can perform job functions, with or without reasonable accommodation.
Can I ask how many years of experience someone has?
You can ask, but using it as an automatic knockout is the riskiest common screening question. It is a selection procedure under the Uniform Guidelines, so if it screens any race, sex or ethnic group out at a rate below four-fifths of the highest group's rate, federal enforcement agencies generally regard that as evidence of adverse impact, and the procedure must then be validated as job-related. Years of experience is also rarely derived from analysis of the work, and it excludes candidates the occupation itself expects to be trained on the job.
What is the four-fifths rule?
It is the standard in 29 CFR 1607.4(D): a selection rate for any race, sex or ethnic group which is less than four-fifths, or eighty percent, of the rate for the group with the highest rate will generally be regarded by the federal enforcement agencies as evidence of adverse impact. Smaller differences can still be significant in some circumstances, and larger differences may not be where the sample is too small to be statistically meaningful.
Can I ask about salary history or criminal record?
There is no blanket federal prohibition on either, but both are heavily regulated at state and city level. Many jurisdictions ban salary history questions outright and require a pay range in the posting instead, and fair-chance laws commonly restrict when criminal history may be asked and require an individualised assessment of the offence against the job rather than an automatic exclusion. Check the rules for every jurisdiction you hire in before either question goes on a form.
How many pre-screening questions should an application have?
Fewer than most forms have. Each question is both a filter you may have to justify and a point at which applicants abandon the form, and in frontline hiring the largest single filter is usually not a question at all but a résumé upload requirement, which excludes people by their filing habits rather than their ability to do the work. If a question would not change your decision, it is friction rather than screening.
A screening question can only sort the people who applied.
Getting enough of the right ones to apply is the harder half. We write and run the recruitment ads that put your open roles in front of people already scrolling Facebook and Instagram, and report what each applicant costs with the management fee inside.
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