A field experiment by Eline Moens (postdoctoral researcher, Ghent University) with 266 Flemish recruiters — each scoring five fictional candidates — finds that applicants who explicitly state a preference for working from home are significantly less likely to be invited to interview. For workplace, FM and HR teams, the result is a useful counterweight to the "flexibility wins talent" narrative: in Belgian and (by extension) wider European labour markets, asking is still penalised at the gateway — which has implications for how employer-branding and job ads frame remote work.