FlexFiles Documentation
Product guides, tutorials, and operational reference
Guest Uploads and Intake
Operations teams10 min read

Submission Inbox and Structured Intake

The submission inbox turns guest uploads into manageable review queues, with metadata, notes, auditability, use-case filtering, and downstream actions across the workspace.

What the inbox is for

  • Review new external submissions quickly.
  • Inspect attached files and metadata before moving them onward.
  • Add notes, decisions, or operational context.
  • Route submissions into workspaces, AI workflows, or hiring pipelines.

Submission inbox statuses and actions

  • The inbox supports statuses such as New, In Review, Approved, Rejected, Needs Info, and Shortlisted.
  • Teams can bulk-update statuses, assignees, and tags across selected submissions.
  • An AI review prompt can be run against inbox content when a submission needs quick triage support.

Filters and visibility

  • Filter the inbox by status, tags, assignee, date range, file type, and use case.
  • Use use-case filtering to separate general intake, business proposals, and HR recruiting flows without creating separate products for each team.
  • For HR-ingested submissions, the inbox can link directly to the candidate record so recruiters do not lose context between intake and evaluation.

Design structured intake flows

If the process needs later screening, extraction, or approval, capture enough structured context at the intake step to avoid manual cleanup later.

The best inboxes are not passive storage areas. They are decision queues. That means the team should know what each new item is waiting for: assignment, status decision, AI review, export, or routing into another domain.

Triage principles

  • Make the next internal owner obvious.
  • Use tags only when they drive sorting, assignment, or reporting.
  • Escalate repeated inbox actions into workflow automation when possible.

Shortlisting and special-case handling

Shortlisting in the general guest-upload flow is a lightweight intake decision, useful when teams want to mark promising submissions before deeper review. For HR recruiting links, however, shortlisting belongs to the Hiring Suite because candidate ranking, evidence review, recruiter prompts, and lifecycle rules are handled there.

  • General and proposal links can use shortlist actions directly in the guest-upload review model.
  • HR recruiting links should hand shortlist decisions to the Hiring Suite instead of forcing recruiter actions through the generic intake surface.
  • If a team sees confusing shortlist behavior, first confirm which use case the link was created with.

Operational best practices

  • Create links with explicit titles so inbox operators can tell one external process from another quickly.
  • Use the link-specific submissions view for first-pass diagnosis when one link seems to behave differently from the rest.
  • Keep form fields lean. Every intake question should support triage, routing, compliance, or reporting.
  • Promote repeated inbox actions into workflows or hiring playbooks instead of relying on memory.

Common inbox and intake questions

Why does the inbox have use-case filters?

Because the platform supports more than one kind of external intake. The filters help operations teams keep proposal, general, and recruiting submissions separate while still using one shared intake system.

Should HR teams manage everything from the submission inbox?

No. The submission inbox is still part of the intake picture, but recruiter workflows such as structured candidate comparison, AI fit scoring, and final shortlisting should happen in the Hiring Suite.