Your members can now filter roles by work rights

Members of a Spacewalk job board can now filter roles by work rights, from citizen or permanent resident only through to student visa friendly. Every role carries a work rights setting and the Work Rights Interpreter fills it in on job stream and imported roles, so people stop applying for roles that were never open to them.

What changed on every role

The Work Rights Interpreter is an add-on that reads job stream roles and roles added by pasting a posting or a link, then records the work rights the employer expects. Alongside it, work rights became a standard part of every role rather than a line left in the description.

• Every role now has a work rights setting in Key Facts, so employers say who is eligible to apply without burying it in the small print.
• The default is not specified, which leaves existing roles exactly as they were.
• The setting travels with the role everywhere it appears.
• With the Work Rights Interpreter switched on, sourced roles are classified automatically. Roles already in a marketplace were classified as part of the rollout.
• Roles added by pasting a posting or a link have their work rights read from the text. Any choice the employer has already made is left alone.

Each role sits in exactly one of five states. Citizen or permanent resident only, full working rights with no sponsorship, sponsorship available, student visa friendly for part-time or casual work and work rights not specified. Those states are what members see in the Work Rights filter. The first two are deliberately kept separate.

What it means for your community

For members, the change is fewer dead ends. An application sent to a role that was only ever open to citizens goes nowhere. It costs the member time they could have spent on a role that was open to them. Filtering by work rights puts that information in front of the application rather than after it.

University careers services see this most clearly. Their students and graduates include people on student visas. Those people scatter across job boards where the institution has no visibility and no way to help. On a careers hub with the Work Rights Interpreter switched on, an international student ticks student visa friendly and sees the part-time and casual roles employers have said are open to them. Because filter selections persist in the page URL, an adviser can send that group a link with the filter already applied, the same way shareable filtered links work for any other view. Careers services supporting university graduates can then see engagement, applications and outcomes rather than guessing.

Training providers face the same problem with higher stakes. Placement rate is the metric funders, learners and accreditors judge a provider on, so a learner spending weeks applying for roles that require permanent residency is a placement that was never going to happen. A registered training provider in Australia can point learners on a mix of visas towards roles that suit their situation, while right-to-work checks stay with the hiring employer as they always have.

What it means for your team

Nobody on your team tags roles by hand. The Work Rights Interpreter is applied automatically to every job stream role, so a board full of roles arriving through the job stream stays classified without anyone reading each listing. The information is not limited to newly sourced listings either, as the rollout note for sourced roles explains.

Roles your team or invited employers post themselves get the same setting in Key Facts. When someone uses the AI importer to paste a posting or a link, the Interpreter reads the work rights from the text and fills in the field, but it never overwrites a choice the employer has already made. The admin guide walks through adding a single role with the AI importer. The knowledge base explains how the job stream is set up for your board. Work rights on imported roles only fill in automatically where a marketplace has the Interpreter switched on.

Does filtering by work rights confirm someone can legally take a role?

No. Filtering by work rights shows what the employer stated in the role, sorted into one of five states. It does not determine anyone's legal eligibility to work. Right-to-work checks remain the hiring employer's responsibility. What the filter does is let members skip roles the employer has said are not open to them and focus on the ones that are. Roles where the employer said nothing about work rights sit under work rights not specified, so members can still find them.

Getting started

The Work Rights Interpreter is an add-on that works with the job stream, priced at £50 per month flat whatever number of job stream categories you run. The add-on pricing in five currencies sets out the detail and the note on recording work rights on every role covers the Key Facts setting. Spacewalk runs a 14-day free trial with no credit card required and a 30-day money-back guarantee. A board goes live in about an hour.