brief-remote-friendliness

name	brief-remote-friendliness
description	Produce an honest Remote Friendliness research brief — does the company actually hire from the user's location, or is the "remote-first" claim marketing? Cross-references stated policy against live job postings, time-zone requirements, hiring entities, and existing employees in the user's region. Critical for non-US/EU users. Reads templates/research-briefs/remote-friendliness.md and writes to <WORKING_FOLDER>/research/companies/<slug>/remote-friendliness.md.
disable-model-invocation	false
allowed-tools	Read, Write, WebSearch, WebFetch, Bash(mkdir *), Bash(test *)

Brief — Remote Friendliness

The brief that reads against marketing copy. Many "remote-first" companies will not in practice hire someone outside US W-2 / EU EOR jurisdictions. This skill exists to surface that before the user invests time in an application.

Inputs

$ARGUMENTS:

• Required: <company_name>.
• Optional: --slug=<slug>.
• Optional: --user-location=<location> — overrides USER_LOCATION from config.

Procedure

1. Resolve config + paths

Read ${CAREER_DATA_DIR}/config.json. Get WORKING_FOLDER and USER_LOCATION. If USER_LOCATION is missing and not provided, prompt — this brief is meaningless without it.

Output: ${WORKING_FOLDER}/research/companies/${slug}/remote-friendliness.md.

2. Read template

${PLUGIN_ROOT}/templates/research-briefs/remote-friendliness.md.

3. Gather stated policy

Direct quotes from:

• Careers page "remote" / "how we work" sections.
• Engineering blog posts about distributed work.
• CEO/founder public statements (podcasts, posts, LinkedIn).

Capture URL for each quote. No paraphrase — quote verbatim.

4. Pull live postings

Fetch every recent job posting (last 90 days). Per posting record:

• Source URL.
• Stated location.
• Stated time-zone constraint.
• Stated entity / hiring jurisdiction (W-2, contractor, EOR-only).

5. Cross-reference against {{user_location}}

For the user's location, determine:

• Has any live posting accepted candidates from this location? (most decisive signal)
• Are there time-zone overlap requirements that exclude it?
• Does the company have a known hiring entity (Deel, Remote.com, etc.) that operates there?
• Are there existing employees on LinkedIn in the user's location? (≤5 examples with role + tenure.)

6. Write the verdict

Top of the file:

• Eligible for {{user_location}}? yes | conditional | no | unclear
• Confidence: high | medium | low
• Headline reason: one sentence.

Decision rules:

• yes requires: at least one live posting open to the user's location AND existing employees there OR explicit policy statement covering the location.
• no is the default if no live posting matches the user's location, regardless of marketing copy.
• conditional for time-zone overlap requirements that the user could meet only with shifted hours.
• unclear is a valid answer — say so rather than guessing.

7. Marketing-vs-reality gap

If careers page says "fully remote" but every recent posting is US-only: write a dedicated section quoting both, with both URLs.

8. Write output + update CRM

Standard pattern. Append +remote to the company row.

Guardrails

• Bias toward honest negatives over hopeful positives. The user has limited time; false hope wastes it.
• Live postings > marketing copy. Always.
• "Unclear" is acceptable.
• Existing employees in the user's region are the strongest positive signal — surface them when present.

Failure modes

• No USER_LOCATION config and not provided → bail.
• Company has no current open postings → fall back to last 12 months of postings; flag the cold-pipeline observation.
• Company explicitly does not have a public careers page (e.g. invite-only / stealth) → mark unclear with low confidence; suggest the user ask directly if they engage.

Idempotency

• Re-run prompts before overwrite.
• --refresh silently overwrites.