How to elect position of new item output in a dropdown when using add_filter

You can achieve this by using the array_splice() function in conjunction with array_merge(). Here is an example:

function add_new_job_application_status( $statuses ) {
  return array_merge(
    array_splice( $statuses, 0, 1 ),
    array( 'example' => _x( 'Example', 'job_application', 'wp-job-manager- 
applications' ) ),
    array_splice( $statuses, 1, -1 ) 
  );
}
add_filter( 'job_application_statuses', 'add_new_job_application_status' );

This function takes the first item in the $statuses array, your custom example field, the rest of the items in the array and merges it together. You need to do it this way as splice doesn’t support inserting a multi-dimensional array at a specific point in an array. Hope that helps.