The screen filters on six things and five are administrative. Produces a one-page sheet: the six answers in the words you will say, a compensation position with a number, and a do-not-prepare list.
/plugin marketplace add mkhalid1/locul-skills
Then /plugin to install Resume and hiring, which includes this skill.
We have not measured this one. It is published untested. What it argues is that the recruiter screen is not a small interview, and that preparing for it as one is actively harmful rather than merely wasted, because the failure it produces is length, and length on a twenty-five minute call is itself a scored signal.
What it knows, concretely. First, a fixed catalogue of six checks the screen exists to run: level, compensation, logistics and authorisation, availability, coherence of motive, and whether you can describe your own work well enough that a hiring manager will give up an hour. Five of those six are administrative. The file gives each one a passing answer and a failing one, and a time budget, because the recruiter has roughly fifteen minutes of questions and six things to get through.
Second, an ordering claim that most preparation gets backwards: the level questions go before any compensation answer, because the level determines the band and the band determines whether your number is inside it. A candidate who names a figure before establishing which level the role is mapped to is guessing at a distribution they could have asked about.
Third, a compensation branch rule with a genuine "you cannot tell" arm, and a section of dated legal grounding underneath it. Colorado has required a pay range in postings since 1 January 2021. California's Labor Code section 432.3 has banned salary history questions since 1 January 2018. Virginia's SB 215, effective 1 July 2026, is the broadest yet, with no employer size threshold at all. The EU pay transparency directive had a transposition deadline of 7 June 2026. Every statute is named, dated, and flagged as varying by jurisdiction and as not being legal advice.
Who it is not for. If the band is published and you are happy with it, most of this collapses to one paragraph. If you are being recruited rather than applying, the asymmetry is already reversed and you should skip to the leaving-and-motive section.
Measuring one skill honestly costs about twenty model sessions: five runs with it, five without, on real material, each output graded alone by a session that is not told the other arm exists, against a rubric written by somebody who never saw the skill. We have not spent that on this one yet, so it ships labelled rather than ships silently.
How it would be measured. Tier A. Material: twelve invented postings paired with twelve recruiter briefs, six publishing a compensation band and six not, spread across jurisdictions with and without a disclosure rule, each carrying one disqualifying condition recorded in advance by an author who never saw the file, five runs per arm, graded blind. Objective spine: whether the level question is asked before any number is committed, whether the stated compensation position names a floor the candidate would accept, whether each of the six answers falls inside its stated time budget when word-counted at 140 words per minute, whether the leaving answer contains any criticism of the current employer, whether the planted disqualifier is surfaced as a question rather than missed, and whether the do-not-prepare list is produced at all.
The spine is unusually clean for anything conversational, because most of what this produces is countable from a text sheet without hearing a call. Whether the level question precedes any committed number, whether a stated floor exists, whether each written answer falls inside its time budget when counted at a normal speaking rate, and whether the leaving answer contains criticism of a current employer are all gradable by somebody who never saw the file.
The awkward part is the material. Fair postings have to be written by an author who does not know the six checks, or the planted disqualifiers drift towards the ones the catalogue names. The honest prior is that a strong model already writes a reasonable answer to "tell me about yourself". The narrower questions are whether it refuses to name a number before asking about level, and whether it produces a do-not-prepare list at all, since that is the instruction nobody gives themselves.
The rule that decides pass or fail was written down before any run was executed and it does not move afterwards. It is in the method note on the hub, along with the full results table including every skill that was tested and cut.
Stated plainly, because a skill that claims everything is useful for nothing.
name and description in the file's frontmatter, so you can also invoke it by name.A recruiter you already know, given twenty minutes and the posting, beats this comprehensively, because they can tell you the actual band for that actual company and this cannot. If you have that person, use them.
For the number, the compensation sites are the right tool and this is not competing with them. Levels.fyi is the best available view of internal levels at large employers, with the caveat that it is self-reported. Government wage statistics have the opposite profile: collected from employers, broad in category, roughly a year behind, and useful mainly for establishing a floor you will not go below.
The model with no skill at all writes a competent self-introduction and a sensible list of questions unprompted. What it tends not to do is refuse. It will happily produce a compensation answer without first asking what level the role is mapped to, it will not tell you to stop preparing your best project, and it will not warn you to write down what you said so the loop does not contradict it three weeks later. If you take one thing from this page, take the screen log.
---
name: recruiter-screen-prep
description: Prepares a recruiter screen or phone screen as a filtering conversation with six specific disqualifying checks rather than as a short interview, and settles the compensation answer in writing before the call. Carries the six-check catalogue with a passing and failing answer for each, time budgets derived from a normal speaking rate, a compensation decision rule with an explicit branch for when no band can be established, dated pay transparency and salary history statutes across several jurisdictions, and a taxonomy of leaving reasons with an honest framing for each. Produces a one-page prep sheet, not talking points. This skill should be used when a recruiter screen has been booked and the candidate has not yet decided what compensation number they will say out loud.
---
# Recruiter screen prep
## The claim this skill is built on
This produces a one-page prep sheet: six answers written in the exact words you intend to say, a compensation position with a number and a floor you would accept, the questions you will ask and when, and a list of what not to spend the evening on. It is a document, not talking points and not a script to read aloud.
The obvious approach is to prepare for the screen as though it were the interview, rehearsing depth on your strongest project. The screen is not looking for depth. A recruiter, frequently not a practitioner in your discipline, has twenty to thirty minutes to establish whether you are worth a hiring manager's hour. Depth is neither the evidence they can evaluate nor the evidence they are collecting.
Preparing the wrong thing is not neutral. It makes you long-winded, and on a call with fifteen minutes of questions and six things to get through, length is itself a signal about what you will be like in front of a hiring manager. The candidate who spends nine minutes on question one has not merely failed to answer questions two through six, they have answered a seventh nobody asked aloud.
## What the recruiter is filling in
The artefact the screen produces is not a memory of the conversation. It is a short written summary passed to the hiring manager, and across most applicant tracking systems it is a small set of fields: level assessment, compensation expectation, availability and notice, location and authorisation, a two-line background summary, motivation, and a recommendation to advance or not.
That is the design constraint. Everything you say either fills a field or does not, so prepare for the form rather than for the conversation. Two consequences follow. Anything that cannot be written into a field is decoration, however good it was. And a field left empty or marked unclear is the most common quiet rejection there is, because a hiring manager reading "compensation: candidate did not say" has been handed a risk rather than a candidate.
## Step 1. Establish the level before you answer anything
Do this first, inside the first five minutes, and before you commit to any number. The order is the whole point: the level determines the band, and the band determines whether your figure lands inside it.
Titles do not map across companies. A senior title at a forty-person company and the same word at a four-thousand-person company routinely sit two internal levels apart, and the smaller company is not always the lower one. Level ladders differ, and the same title can carry bands that differ by a factor approaching two.
Four questions establish it, none of them confrontational:
- **"What level is this role mapped to internally, and what does the level above look like?"** The second half matters more than the first, because the gap between the two is where the band lives.
- **"Is this a backfill or new headcount?"** A backfill means a real person did the job and the level was calibrated against their actual work. New headcount means the level is a guess in a planning document, and guesses move in both directions.
- **"Who does this role report to, and how many people report to them?"** Reporting depth is a better level signal than any title. The same title reporting to a director is not the same job as one reporting to a team lead.
- **"What would make somebody outstanding here rather than adequate?"** The level question disguised as an interest question, and the answer names the band you are measured against.
If the recruiter cannot answer the first two, note it. It usually means the role was posted before the level was settled, which widens what is available to you later and also means the timeline slips.
## The six checks
The screen runs these six. Give each a written answer and a time budget. At a normal conversational speaking rate of roughly 140 words a minute, a thirty second answer is about seventy words, a sixty second answer about a hundred and forty, and a two minute answer about two hundred and eighty. Write them out and count them. That is the only reliable way to discover your natural answer to question three is four minutes long.
**1. Level.** Passing sounds like scope in units: how many people, what budget, what surface area, what decisions you make without asking. Failing is a title repeated, or a claim of seniority with no example of the decisions it involved.
**2. Compensation.** Passing is a number or a tight range, delivered without hesitation, with a one-clause basis. Failing is silence that has to be chased, or a figure produced on the spot and revised upwards later, which reads as poor preparation or bad faith.
**3. Logistics and authorisation.** Work authorisation, location, time zone, on-site expectation, travel. Passing is one plain sentence, then stop. Failing is hedging, which forces the recruiter to write "unclear" in a field where unclear means no.
**4. Availability.** Notice period and earliest realistic start date. Passing is a date, plus one sentence on flexibility if any exists. Failing is "fairly soon", which turns an administrative fact into a doubt.
**5. Coherence of motive.** Why leaving, why this. Passing points forward and is consistent with your history. Failing points backwards at a person or a company, which has its own section below.
**6. Articulacy.** Can you describe your own work such that a hiring manager gives up an hour. Passing is two minutes, structured, ending in a question. Failing is a chronological walk from your first job, which is the commonest way this check goes.
## The compensation minute
This is the most consequential minute of the call, because the number entered in that field follows you through every later conversation, including the one where the offer is constructed.
Historically the asymmetry was total: the recruiter knew the band, you did not, and the convention was that you named a figure first. In a growing set of jurisdictions the law has partly reversed that. What follows is jurisdiction-specific, it has changed repeatedly since 2021, and **none of it is legal advice**. It is here because knowing a rule exists changes what you ask for, not because this file can tell you whether it applies to you. Verified against primary and official sources on 20 August 2026.
**Where the employer has to move first.** As of August 2026, sixteen states plus the District of Columbia require pay range disclosure in some form, either in the posting or on request: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia and Washington. Published counts run between sixteen and eighteen depending on whether the on-request-only states are included. The dated statutes worth knowing:
- **Colorado** was first. The Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, SB 19-085, has required a pay range in postings since 1 January 2021, amended by SB 23-105 effective 1 January 2024.
- **California.** Labor Code section 432.3 requires the pay scale on an applicant's reasonable request, and since 1 January 2023 in the posting itself for employers with fifteen or more employees. SB 642, effective 1 January 2026, narrowed "pay scale" to the good-faith range the employer expects to pay on hire, which makes a padded posted band harder to defend.
- **Washington.** RCW 49.58.110, added by SB 5761 effective 1 January 2023, fifteen or more employees: a wage scale or salary range plus a general description of benefits and other compensation.
- **New York State.** Labor Law section 194-b, added by S9427A, signed on 21 December 2022 and effective on the two hundred and seventieth day afterwards, which fell on 17 September 2023, for employers with four or more employees.
- **Virginia** is the newest and the broadest. SB 215, effective 1 July 2026, requires a pay range in every posting with no employer size threshold at all, reaches roles located outside Virginia, and adds a salary history ban.
- **Maine**, effective 29 July 2026, for employers with ten or more.
- **Connecticut** has required the wage range on request or before an offer since 1 October 2021 under Public Act 21-30. From 1 October 2026 the postings themselves must carry a good-faith range plus a description of benefits.
- **Delaware** joins on 26 September 2027 under HB 105, for employers with more than twenty-five employees.
**Cities frequently differ from the state around them.** New York City has required a salary range in advertisements since 1 November 2022, under Local Law 32 of 2022 as amended by Local Law 59 of 2022, for employers with four or more employees. Cleveland's Ordinance 104-2025 took effect on 27 October 2025 for employers with fifteen or more. Cincinnati and Toledo have banned salary history questions since 13 March 2020 and 25 June 2020, in a state carrying no such rule of its own. Check the place the role sits in, which is not necessarily where you sit.
**Salary history.** Nineteen states plus the District of Columbia prohibit private employers from asking, California since 1 January 2018 under the same Labor Code section 432.3, Virginia since 1 July 2026. Alabama's is narrower than the rest: it bars refusing to interview or hire somebody for declining to answer, rather than banning the question. Asking what you are *expecting* remains lawful everywhere, and that is the question to be ready for.
**The European Union.** Directive (EU) 2023/970 of 10 May 2023 gives applicants a right to information on the initial pay or pay range for an advertised position before the interview, and prohibits employers from asking about pay history. Member States were required to transpose it into national law by 7 June 2026, so the operative question in the EU from 2026 onwards is what your specific member state enacted, not what the directive says.
Three operational consequences, whatever your jurisdiction:
1. **Read the posting before the call.** If a band is published, "what are you looking for" is not a trap, it is an invitation to confirm you are inside a range you already read. Answer inside it and move on.
2. **Where disclosure on request exists, asking is the mechanism, not a confrontation.** "Before I give you a number, could you tell me the range budgeted for this role?" is a normal sentence. Say it early and without apology.
3. **If you are asked about current pay where that question is restricted, do not make it a legal moment.** Redirect: "I would rather not anchor to my current employer's decision. For this role I am targeting X." The redirect works whether or not the rule applies, and it avoids a conversation about the rule.
## The decision rule for what number you say
- **A band is published, in the posting or by law.** Read it. Give a specific number in its upper portion, with a one-clause basis. Do not give a range wider than the published band, which reads as though you did not read it.
- **No band is published, but the role sits somewhere with a disclosure-on-request rule.** Ask, plainly, before answering. Then follow the branch above.
- **They state a band on the call.** Respond inside it, towards the upper end. The basis is one clause about scope, not about need: "based on the scope you have described and where comparable roles at this level sit."
- **They refuse to state a band and you have credible market data.** Give a range roughly fifteen to twenty per cent wide, name the basis, and offer flexibility on structure rather than on total. Structure flexibility is free. Total flexibility is the thing you just gave away.
- **You cannot tell what the band is.** The common case, and it needs its own rule. Give a range whose **bottom** is a number you would genuinely accept today. The bottom is what survives: it goes on the form, the offer is built from it, and no later conversation moves upward from it easily. Never state a bottom that is aspirational, or one you picked because it sounded reasonable out loud.
This rule exists to prevent being asked cold. If you have not decided the number before the call, you will decide it during a pause you are trying to fill, and a number invented under time pressure is almost always low.
## The reason for leaving
There are only so many real reasons, and each has an honest framing that points forward.
- **Growth ceiling.** "The next level up is occupied and is going to stay occupied." Frame as scope you want, not a person in the way.
- **Compensation.** Sayable, but never the only reason offered, because a candidate whose sole motive is money is a candidate who leaves for money.
- **Reorganisation or a new manager.** State the structural fact and stop. "The team was folded into a different organisation and the work I was hired for is no longer the work."
- **The work changed.** The strongest, because it is verifiable from your own history. "I joined to build the thing. It is built and now it is maintained, and I want to build again."
- **Redundancy or layoff.** Say it plainly and early, with the scope attached: "the team went from forty to twelve in March, and I was in the twenty-eight." Vagueness reads as concealment of something worse.
- **Managed out or dismissed.** Short, factual, one sentence on what you took from it. Do not volunteer detail nobody asked for.
- **You are not leaving, they approached you.** Say so. It changes the dynamic of the call and there is no reason to hide it.
One hard rule sits above all of them: **never criticise the current employer.** Not because the criticism is untrue, but because the recruiter cannot verify it. An unverifiable negative claim about a third party gets recorded as a data point about you, not about them, and you have spent your credibility on something nobody can check.
## The two minute self-description
Structure, with a budget. Two minutes is roughly two hundred and eighty spoken words.
- **Fifteen seconds.** Where you are now and what you own. Scope in units.
- **Forty-five seconds.** The one thing you have done that is closest to what this role does, with a number in it.
- **Thirty seconds.** The arc. Why the moves you made make sense in sequence, which pre-empts the job-hopping question before it is asked.
- **Fifteen seconds.** Why this role specifically, naming one thing from the posting so it is clear you read it.
- **Then a question.**
It ends with a question because the screen is a conversation the recruiter has to be able to steer, and an answer that stops on a full stop makes them restart the call. Make it a level question, which is how step one gets done inside the answer to question one.
## The questions you ask, and the do-not-prepare list
Four questions is right. More than six and you are interviewing them, which is a later privilege. The four that pay: the level question you have not yet asked, the process question ("what are the stages after this and roughly what timeline"), the calibration question ("what would make somebody outstanding here rather than adequate"), and the honest one ("is there anything in my background that would give the hiring manager pause, so I can address it now"). The last is the most valuable and the least asked, because it converts an objection you would never have heard into one you get to answer.
**What not to prepare.** Written on the sheet, because it is the instruction nobody gives themselves:
- Not depth on your best project. It has no landing place at this stage.
- Not a portfolio walkthrough, a system design, or a code sample.
- Not an argument about a requirement you do not meet. Note it, answer if asked, do not litigate.
- Not a weaknesses answer. It is not a screen question.
- Not the negotiation. Different conversation, different person, weeks away.
## The prep sheet
One page. Six blocks:
1. The six answers, written in the words you will say, each word-counted against its budget.
2. The compensation position: one number or one range, the basis in a clause, and the floor written down separately so you can see it.
3. The level questions, and where in the call each one goes.
4. The four closing questions.
5. The do-not-prepare list.
6. **The screen log**, which is blank until the call ends. Immediately afterwards, write down what you actually said: the number, the start date, the reason for leaving in the words you used, and any commitment you made. This is the only defence against contradicting yourself on the loop three weeks later, when you will not remember which of your three prepared framings you used.
## Worked example
A mid-size logistics company is hiring a senior backend engineer, remote within one stated country, and the posting carries no compensation band. The candidate is at a payments company whose platform team was reorganised in March. The screen is booked for twenty-five minutes. Everything here is invented.
**Level, established first.** In the first four minutes the candidate learns the role is mapped to the company's fourth engineering level of six, it is a backfill, and it reports to a team lead who manages seven people. That is materially below what the title suggested, and it reframes the compensation answer before any number is said.
**Answer to "tell me about yourself", written out and counted at two hundred and seventy-one words.** Opens with scope in units: owns the settlement service, three engineers, roughly eleven million transactions a month. Forty-five seconds on a migration that cut a nightly batch from six hours to forty minutes, the closest thing in their history to the reliability work in the posting. Thirty seconds on the arc from support engineering into backend into platform. Closes on the posting's warehouse events pipeline, then a question about level.
**The compensation exchange, scripted.** The recruiter asks what they are looking for. The candidate asks first: "Before I give you a number, could you tell me the range budgeted for this level?" The recruiter says it is not something they share. That is the "cannot tell" branch, already narrowed by the level information. They give a range roughly eighteen per cent wide, name the basis in one clause about scope and comparable roles, and stop talking. The bottom of that range was written on the sheet an hour earlier as genuinely acceptable, not invented in the pause.
**Reason for leaving.** "The platform team was folded into infrastructure in March and the roadmap I was hired to deliver was closed. I want to be building a system again rather than maintaining a boundary." Structural, forward-facing, no person named, twenty-nine words.
**Verdict.** The candidate advances, not because any answer was excellent, but because all six fields are filled and none says unclear. The level check produced a downward surprise absorbed before the number was said rather than after, which is the whole value of the ordering. The near miss was the floor: the first draft had a bottom chosen because it sounded reasonable, and rewriting it as "the number I would accept today" moved it up before it was said aloud.
## Failure modes
**Depth dumping.** A fifteen minute answer to a two minute question. From the outside it looks like enthusiasm. What the recruiter writes is that the candidate is hard to steer, and the remaining five checks go unfilled.
**Number anchoring down.** Asked first, unprepared, the candidate names a figure below the band. Nobody corrects them, because nobody is obliged to, and the offer eight weeks later is built from it. The tell is that answering felt like a relief.
**The band never asked.** A number is given before anybody checks whether a range was published, mandated by law, or available for the asking. The cheapest failure here to avoid, and the most common.
**Salary history answered.** The candidate states current pay to a question the employer may not be permitted to ask where the role sits. The damage is not legal, it is that the conversation is now anchored to a previous employer's decision about a different job.
**Employer criticism.** A true, specific complaint about a manager or a company, offered as the reason for leaving. Recorded as a risk about the candidate, who is the only party in the story the recruiter can assess.
**Level mismatch unspoken.** Nobody asks which level the role maps to, and the discovery arrives in week three, or worse, in the offer. Symptom: the title matched, so nobody thought to check.
**Availability vagueness.** "Fairly soon" and "I would need to check my notice." Two administrative facts turned into two doubts, in a field that could have held a date.
**Question void.** Asked whether they have questions, the candidate says no or asks about the office. Read as indifference, and it is the last thing heard before the recommendation is written.
**Screen amnesia.** Three weeks later on the loop, the candidate gives a different reason for leaving and a different start date from the ones on the recruiter's form. Nobody accuses them of anything. The recommendation quietly weakens, and the cause is that nothing was written down after the call.
## What this skill does not do
- It cannot tell you the band. It works from the posting, from any applicable disclosure rule, and from data you supply, and where those are silent it produces a defensible position rather than a correct number.
- It is not legal advice. The statutes named above are dated and sourced, but they vary by jurisdiction, change without notice, and often differ between a city and the state containing it. A qualified adviser or the relevant labour department is the authority, particularly on work authorisation, where the stakes are far higher than a compensation figure.
- It does not prepare the interview loop. Behavioural evidence, technical assessment and design discussion are a separate exercise, constrained by coverage across competencies rather than by the six checks here.
- It cannot repair a fixed disqualifier. If the employer cannot sponsor your authorisation, or needs someone in three weeks against a three month notice, this surfaces the mismatch in the first call instead of the fifth. That is worth having and it is not a solution.
- It does not negotiate. The screen records a range, it does not move one. Moving it happens later, against a written offer, with different information and a different counterparty.
- It does not rewrite your resume, and it assumes the document that produced the call already exists.
These skills all ask your assistant to check things against your actual codebase, your actual schema, your actual design system. Locul keeps that context current on its own, from the files you already have, on your machine. Mac and Windows, free to start.