One Form, One Submission
It's Thursday, and a candidate who filled in the onboarding form on Tuesday gets a third message asking for one more document.
Every one of those messages is a small tax on somebody who has not started yet. Tick what your own form already collects and read what is left over.
Whatever sits on the chasing side is what an officer goes looking for once the candidate has already submitted, and every trip back out is another day of silence.
A follow-up is the first impression arriving in instalments.
What one submission has to hold
Settle the list once, before the intake opens, and the form stops growing by a field every year.
Full name, address, and the two ways they would rather be contacted
An emergency contact who is named and reachable
Every attachment the department has to hold, uploaded inside the same form
The consent lines your department needs on file, ticked and dated
The officer who owns this candidate from here on
What happens after they submit, and roughly when
The line most halls skip is the owner. A submission with nobody's name against it lands in a shared inbox and waits for whoever opens it first.
Acknowledge receipt the same day, even where nothing else can move yet. A tidy form settles what you collect and settles nothing about who ought to be joining.
Check yourself
Two situations. Nothing is kept, and no answer follows you anywhere.
A candidate's submission arrives with one required attachment missing. What is the cheapest repair for the next intake?
Make the attachment a required step inside the form itself
Send every candidate a reminder message two days after they submit
Ask the candidate to start again from the beginning
A missing attachment is a design problem in the form. Repairing the form costs one afternoon and repairs it for everybody who comes after this candidate.
Two officers ask the same candidate for the same document in the same week. What broke?
The candidate replied too slowly
Nobody was named as the owner of that intake
The form was collecting more than it needed
Two people doing one job is what happens when the job belongs to nobody. Name the owner inside the form itself, before an officer has to go and ask who has it.
Where this lesson's claims come from
The six lines above are this course's own framing rather than a legal or regulatory list, and every department has obligations of its own to check them against. What your form has to hold is a question for your officers and for whoever holds your department's policies.