Electrical hiring carries a credential that is not a licence and is easy to get wrong on an application form: NFPA 70E arc-flash training. OSHA 1910.332 requires training for employees who face a risk of electric shock, and NFPA 70E is the consensus standard used to meet it — it is what makes someone a "qualified person" for energized work, and it is retrained at least every three years. A yes/no "70E trained?" box tells you almost nothing, because the answer everyone gives is yes and the answer you need is whether it is current. So this form asks current, expired, or never trained.
Most employment application templates in circulation are a liability. The typical one prints a date-of-birth box, a "are you a US citizen?" checkbox, a bare "have you ever been convicted of a crime?" line, and a background-check consent paragraph tucked in above the signature. Every one of those is a documented problem. The EEOC states plainly that most employers should not ask whether an applicant is a United States citizen before making an offer — the lawful question is whether they are authorized to work in the United States. The ADA prohibits any disability-related question or medical examination before a conditional offer, including questions that sound harmless like "have you ever filed a workers' compensation claim?" or "how many sick days did you take last year?". The ADEA does not flatly ban asking for a date of birth, but the EEOC closely scrutinises application forms that ask, and if you genuinely need it you can collect it after hire. Graduation years are the same problem wearing a different hat, which is why the education block here asks "completed?" and not "when?".
Then there is the background check, which is where the money actually gets lost. FCRA section 604(b)(2)(A)(i) requires that before you obtain a consumer report for employment purposes, you give the applicant a clear and conspicuous written disclosure "in a document that consists solely of the disclosure". Solely. Not the disclosure plus a liability waiver, not the disclosure plus an at-will acknowledgement, not the disclosure printed at the bottom of the application. That single word has produced class actions and eight-figure settlements against employers who thought a paragraph in the application was enough. So this builder exports the disclosure as its own page — a separate page in the PDF and Word file, a separate sheet in the Excel one — and it does the same for the voluntary self-identification sheet, which must be voluntary, confidential, and kept away from whoever makes the hiring decision. An MVR pulled through a consumer reporting agency is a consumer report too, so the driving block points at the same page rather than collecting consent inline.
Where the law genuinely varies, this form prompts instead of asserting. There is no federal private-sector ban-the-box rule — but most of the US population lives under a state or city one, and they differ on whether you may ask after the first interview, after a conditional offer, or not on the form at all. Salary history is banned in roughly twenty states and a long list of cities, lawful elsewhere, and at least one state pre-empts its own cities from banning it. Pre-employment drug testing is mandatory for CDL drivers in safety-sensitive roles under 49 CFR 382.301 and is state law for everyone else. So all three of those blocks are optional and switched off by default, each with a note naming the variation rather than a national claim we would have to be wrong about somewhere. Finally, keep what you collect: 29 CFR 1602.14 requires applications — including from people you did not hire — be preserved for one year from the hiring decision, and federal contractors get two years under 41 CFR 60-1.12, cut to one below 150 employees or a $150,000 contract.
Licensing is the other half of it, and it varies more than people expect. Some states licence the individual, some licence only the contractor, some cities licence separately from the state, and journeyman hour requirements and reciprocity differ everywhere. So the form asks for level, number, issuing state and expiry as four fields, and most states tie renewal to continuing education on the current NEC cycle — which means an expired card usually means outstanding CE, not just a missed payment. Working at height, energized-work tasks and 75-pound lifts go in the essential-functions block, where the ADA question above it can actually be answered.