What is your notice period, are you open to relocating, and how many days a week can you be in the office?

Logistics are screening criteria, not negotiation

The recruiter asks these in the first ten minutes for the same reason they ask about your must-have technologies: any one of them can end the process, and ending it early is cheaper for everybody. A team that needs someone in six weeks cannot use a candidate on a three-month notice period. A role written as three days on site in Bengaluru cannot take someone who will not move. That is the frame to answer in — you are supplying facts against a checklist, not opening a negotiation, and treating a checklist question as a negotiation makes you look evasive over something trivial.

So answer plainly and quickly. The place for negotiation is later, once the team wants you specifically, and at that point some of these items genuinely do move. The notice period may be shortened by agreement or bought out. A start date can usually shift by a few weeks. Attendance is sometimes a team norm rather than a policy. Relocation support is almost always discretionary. None of that flexibility appears in the first call, and asking for it there is what gets you filtered.

Notice period: give the real date

State your contractual notice and the earliest realistic start date, and make sure the second is not optimistic. Candidates routinely say four weeks when the contract says two months, on the theory that they will negotiate an early release, and then spend the week before joining explaining that the date has moved. A start date that slips after an offer is signed is one of the few things in this process that genuinely damages trust, because a manager has already told the team, planned the sprint and sometimes turned down another candidate.

Two details are worth volunteering if they apply. If your notice is long by local norms — three months is common in parts of Europe and India — say so in the first call, because it is exactly the sort of thing that gets discovered late and derails an offer. And if you have a retention bonus, a pending vest, a training bond or any repayment clause tied to leaving, that is money and it belongs in the compensation conversation rather than the logistics one, but it must be raised before the offer is drafted rather than after. Asking to be compensated for a bond you have known about for two years, three days before signing, is a bad look and often simply too late in the approval chain.

Relocation and remote: get it into the contract

Location is the item where a soft answer causes the most damage later, because "we are flexible" is spoken by people who have no authority to be flexible on your behalf. A hiring manager who is genuinely relaxed about attendance can be replaced, and a company-wide policy change can override every verbal assurance given during a hiring process. This has happened at large scale several times since 2020, and the candidates hurt by it were, without exception, the ones who had a conversation rather than a clause.

So the question to ask is not "is this role remote", it is "what does the contract say about my work location, and who can change it". Ask whether the hybrid expectation is company policy or team practice, how it is measured, and whether the offer letter names a specific office. If your arrangement is unusual — fully remote in a hybrid company, a different city, a compressed week — get it written in. A recruiter will not be offended by the request; it is a normal thing for a candidate to want and an abnormal thing for them to refuse.

Relocation has its own vocabulary worth knowing before you discuss it, because the difference between the terms is real money.

Term	What it means	The question to ask
Lump sum	A fixed payment, you organise the move	Is it paid gross or net of tax?
Managed move	The employer's vendor handles shipping and paperwork	What is capped, and what is not covered?
Temporary accommodation	Housing for an initial period	For how many weeks, and then what?
Clawback	Repayment if you leave within a period	How long, and is it pro-rated?
Immigration support	Visa and dependants	Who is the sponsor, and what happens if I change role?

The clawback row is the one candidates skip. Relocation assistance is frequently repayable in full if you resign within twelve or twenty-four months, which converts a benefit into a constraint on your next move. It is not a reason to decline; it is a reason to know the number.

Background checks are routine, and surprises are not

Background verification in engineering hiring typically confirms employment dates and titles, education, and sometimes a criminal record check, depending on the jurisdiction and the sector. Financial services, healthcare, defence and anything touching payments tend to go further, including credit history and regulatory registers. The process is usually run by a third-party vendor after the offer, and it is administrative rather than investigative.

The practical rule is that anything a check would find should have been said by you first. Not because employers are unforgiving about a conviction, an inflated title or a course not completed — many are, in fact, forgiving — but because the offer is withdrawn for the discrepancy rather than for the fact. An employment date you rounded, a designation on your CV that differs from what HR at your last employer will confirm, a degree listed as completed when the final paper was not: these are small things that become disqualifying at the moment a vendor reports them as mismatches. If something on your CV will not verify exactly, correct it before the check runs, and say so in one sentence.

Timing: what to raise when

Sequencing is most of the skill here, and it comes down to distinguishing a fact the recruiter needs in order to screen you from a term you want in order to accept.

FIRST CALL (volunteer, unprompted, in one line each)
  Contractual notice period and earliest honest start date
  Whether you will relocate, and any hard constraint on location
  Any visa or work-authorisation status that affects eligibility

AFTER THE LOOP, BEFORE THE OFFER IS DRAFTED
  Bonds, clawbacks, retention payments or a vest you would forfeit
  A non-standard working arrangement you need written into the contract
  A start date later than they have assumed
  Anything a background check would flag

AT OFFER, IN WRITING
  Named work location and attendance expectation
  Relocation amount, what it covers, and any repayment clause
  Probation length and notice during probation
  Confirmed start date

NEVER LEFT VERBAL
  Any of the four items above

The one thing that consistently goes wrong is the middle block. Candidates hold back an inconvenient constraint through the whole process, hoping it will become easier to raise once they are wanted, and then discover that the offer has been approved by three people at a specific level with a specific start date and reopening it costs a week and some goodwill. Raising it the day after the final interview costs nothing at all, because nothing has been written down yet. Recruiters do not mind constraints; they mind constraints that arrive after they have committed.