‘Do I have to make separate forms if my application process has multiple stages?’
No, of course not!
The team at Submit.com understand the importance of keeping everything together in one convenient location. Using phased submissions are an excellent way of screening your applicants and ensuring that you get the best quality submissions. We know that both creating and filling out an application form can be intimidating but Submit.com makes it easy for you.
So why use phased submissions?
Here are a number of benefits to using our Phased Submission functionality:
1. Approachable forms and screening candidates
Phase submissions are beneficial for not only you but for candidates as well. Long forms can be very time-consuming and off-putting for an applicant. Breaking your application form into different phases or stages can help improve your workflow and get better responses from your applicants as you eliminate ineligible submissions along the way.
2. For better business grant management.
You can request progress reports from your grant recipients by employing a phased submission approach to your application. By doing this you are able to ask your candidates for updates on budgets, finances, project reports and outcomes for beneficiaries. In addition to this, using additional phases to your form, you can keep all of their original data you collected and the newly collected data in the one convenient location.
3. Request a video interview
For many, having a video interview question in the first stage of the applications can be off-putting for an application which can result in many draft applications. By introducing a phased submission format to your workflow, the likelihood of candidates completing their forms is increased. In addition to this, introducing a video interview as the second stage of your phased submissions is a fantastic screening process.
How to set it up
So now that you know about our process, you might be asking yourself "how do I go about getting up this on my system?". It’s simple to do!
On the application you want to add a phase, you must go to the Overview page of your application by editing your form:
Once on the overview page, the steps to setting up a phased submission are easy.
At the top of the page click on the "+ Add Phase" button at the top of the page.
You will be presented with a pop-up box where you enter in the details of your next phase. First, you must give a name to phase one (the original application created) such as ‘Initial Application’ and then you can name your second phase with a title relevant to the purpose of the phase, e.g. Interview Stage.
You can add questions similar to the way you did when initially creating the form, which can be read here. Alternatively, you can use a pre-existing application you have already created as a template for your new phase.
Once you have your new phase ready to go, you can invite applicants to it by using the invite button on the manage application menu on the right of the submission.
Selecting Phases
We understand that sometimes certain candidates can jump a stage or two of your process. With this in mind, we have made it easy for you to skip applicants to their next phase. When you invite the candidate to the next phase, we provide you with a drop-down menu of the phases in your application process to choose from.
Once you've chosen your desired phase, the text box will populate the email template found in that specific phase's Email Templates section for you to further edit.
Customising Invitation email templates
At Submit.com, we are all about you putting your own stamp on your Submit workspace and this includes the emails candidates receive once invited to the next stage of their application.
In the phase you wish to invite your applicants to, go to Edit Form > Settings> Email Templates and it is under 'Application Invitation Email' that we will edit. For example, if we want to invite our applicant to the second stage of our process, we will go to edit the form of Phase 2 and edit the Invitation Email under Email Templates there.