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Telling a recruiter things you'd like usually leads to them telling you to fuck off, so this advice is very good for getting zero jobs. If you get through a whole interview process (i.e. you like them) and the fact that they don't want to sit in your (virtual) office for five days a week is still a complete deal breaker you have a poor process. If you feel like that realisation wastes your time, I think you have some growth to do as a team lead.

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Actually telling things you like is a good thing. Why would it be a bad thing? Getting zero job offers is mostly, at least from my experience, a result of lacking the needed soft or hard skills (sadly errors can occure here - false negatives) or someone who doesnt meet organizational requirements (like the things we discussed here). In my process I tell in the first contact, that I am looking to fill a full time position in my team. If the candidate neither at the end of this call or in the organzation process for the second meeting says, that working full time is not an option, well sorry, thats just unfair. My opinion.

Telling this first is a good way to have every company think that 5 days/week is an organizational requirement and brush off the candidate. Having the candidate wait until after the interview puts them in a much stronger negotiating position, namely it forces the company to assess whether or not 5 days a week is a legitimate requirement or not. Many parts of the interview process are unfair to candidates, such as not advertising salary ranges in advance, forcing candidates to take vacation time to attend interviews, etc. This is merely a way to balance the scales away from the company, which generally holds almost all of the power in a negotiation, especially at the start, before an offer is made.

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