Last week a sales candidate I'd been working with lost a role in roughly fifteen minutes. Not on his track record, which is a good one. He lost it on a single sentence.
It was an introduction call with HR at a German B2B software company, the first step before he'd meet the head of sales. I'd offered thirty minutes to prepare; he felt a fifteen-minute chat didn't need it. Partway through, he mentioned that he'd like to work from home. The role was a regional sales job built around office hubs. HR told him there and then that it wasn't a fit.
Nobody behaved badly. The company knew what it needed, and he knew what he wanted. The trouble was timing. Both facts had existed for weeks, and they met for the first time in the one conversation where a mismatch ends everything.
What the first call is really for
Candidates tend to treat the screening call as a warm-up. Recruiters and HR teams treat it as a filter. In fifteen minutes they are checking a handful of things: can you tell your story clearly, is there evidence behind it, and do the practicalities line up. Location, working pattern, salary range, notice period and, for cross-border roles, whether you're allowed to work where the job sits.
The first two you can recover from with a strong second interview. The practicalities you usually can't. A mismatch on working setup or salary rarely gets negotiated in round one. It gets closed.
Remote is growing, but it still isn't the default
This matters especially if you're a South African applying both at home and abroad, because the signals are mixed. Pnet's July trends report, covered in Business Day, showed remote roles in South Africa up 28% in the first half of 2026 against the same period a year earlier, and spreading well beyond IT into finance, sales and admin. Remote work is still, the same piece added, a small slice of the market.
Look at Germany, where much of my search work sits, and the picture is flatter still. The ifo Institute's August survey put home working at 24.9% across the economy, a share that has barely moved in years. In services it reaches 35.1%; in industry it's 16.4%.
So remote is real, but it belongs to particular roles rather than coming as a general expectation. And when an advert abroad does say "remote", it often means remote within that country, because employing someone elsewhere raises payroll and tax questions of its own. If you're in Johannesburg or Cape Town and the job is in Munich, assume nothing until someone has said it to you plainly.
The five-line test
Before your next screening call, open a note and write five lines, one sentence each.
Where I'll work from. The city, and whether you need remote, hybrid or can be in an office. If hybrid, how many days.
What I'm aiming for. A salary range, gross and annual, in the currency of the job.
When I can start. Your real notice period, not the one you hope to negotiate down.
Whether I can work there. Citizenship, permit or visa status for the country of the role.
One number from my last job. A deal size, a system you shipped, a team you grew, and how long it took.
Now hold lines one to four against the job description and anything the recruiter has told you. Wherever a line clashes, or the advert says nothing at all, you have found your question. It goes to the recruiter in writing before the call, not into the call itself. One short email does it: "Before we speak, I'd like to check one thing. I'm looking for a mostly remote setup. Is that possible here?"
If the answer is no, you've saved everyone an afternoon. If it's "possibly", you walk in knowing where the edges are.
Line five is for the call itself. When you're asked to introduce yourself, finish on it. A number gives the interviewer something to write down, and what they write down is very often what carries you into round two.
A word on looking flexible
Some people worry that raising a condition early makes them look difficult. In my experience it does the opposite. Recruiters remember candidates who are clear about what they need, because they don't fall over later. What reads badly is a condition that turns up late, once everyone has already put time in.
And if a line isn't a hard requirement for you, say that too. "I'd prefer two days at home, but I'm open" is a perfectly good answer. The point isn't to be rigid. It's to make sure nothing on your list arrives as a surprise.
The candidate from last week has a record worth talking about, and the right role will come. But the condition you care most about deserves an email, not a mid-call mention.
If you'd like a second pair of eyes on how your CV sets up that first conversation, the free CV score takes a few minutes. And if you want the whole document rebuilt around the roles you're targeting, that's what CV Architecture is for.
Poloko Ntshatsha · Founder, Protodigy · Strike Day
