Submission Lifecycle

Candidates can only submit to published opportunities, giving you the flexibility to put the finishing touches on your call in complete anonymity.

Your submissions will open and close automatically based on your schedule. Candidates can make and edit their applications during that time.

You can find more about the life-cycle of an opportunity here.

If the candidate applying doesn’t already have an account on Zealous, we will require them to fill out a very short registration form with basic details such as their name, email address and password.

This will allow them to save their submission and come back to it at any time, enabling them to submit previous projects to future calls. As part of our community initiatives, we also give candidates the opportunity to publish their projects on their own public portfolios and sign up to recommendations for opportunities they might have an interest in.

Candidates can remove their profiles at any time, removing access to their private information in line with GDPR. This will replace their work with shadow profiles, allowing you to identify a submission was made and keeping your analytics accurate over time.

As soon as candidates show an interest in applying to your opportunity, we’ll prompt them to read and accept the content in your guidelines.

This clarifies what is needed from them, and allows you to include links to additional resources (such as terms and privacy policies).

A draft submission, which you will see on your dashboard, is created as soon as the candidate accepts your guidelines.

The submission step is what makes Zealous so unique.

Unlike regular application forms – the submission step contains any number of media items embedded directly into the page. This allows for submissions to be very visual and gives you the option to keep it as structured as you would like, or a little more creative. 

Should you wish to publish the results of some of your rounds, or run a public vote – the submission will be the only element made public (contents of the application form will be private).

Candidates can add the following items to the submission step:

• Uploaded files (such as images, documents, videos..)
• Embedded media (such as YouTube, Soundcloud…)
• Rich text elements

The form allows for structured answers to specific questions you might have about their application. None of the information on the form is made available publicly (even when you publish your results) so this is the best place to keep any questions which contain private information.

Answers can be shown or hidden from judges. This is useful for diversity data, which shouldn’t be used to inform the selection of candidates.

Zealous allows you to request a fee from candidates before they submit, these can be set to be optional to allow candidates to donate money to your organisation. If you have no fees, this step will not be shown.

Fees can be structured to give candidates special deals such as “3 for the price of 2” and can be disabled to allow for early bird style strategies.

You can view a complete breakdown of payments raised from your dashboard at any time.

As soon as the candidate completes the submission they will be presented with a pop-up to let them know they have successfully submitted. They will also be sent an email with a direct link to edit their application.

If you have allowed candidates to submit multiple times, they will also be prompted to submit again. This will start the cycle again, but to save them time, Zealous automatically allows them to reuse a project on the submission step and reloads all the information in the application form for them to edit. If the candidate has prepaid for a submission, they will also skip this step.

Candidates have access to all the submissions they have made on their “My Submissions” page and can edit them at any time until your opportunity closes.