FormFlow: how to build and share custom forms

This guide explains how to use FormFlow, Refari's custom form builder. You will learn where to find it, how to build a form by hand or by describing it to Refari AI, how to decide who a form is for, how to share it, and how to work through the responses that come back, including approving them and writing the answers into your ATS.

Idea: FormFlow was in beta with a limited group of companies. It is now switched on for everyone, so if you looked for it before and did not have it, it is on your account now.

What FormFlow is

FormFlow lets you build your own forms for anything your team keeps chasing by email: onboarding details after somebody signs, a compliance check, a reference request, an availability check-in, an intake survey, or a registration form for an event. You choose the questions, how they are grouped across pages, who the form is for, and what happens to the answers when it is submitted.

Questions come from your question bank, the shared library your company manages under Tools > Question Config. A question you write for one form is saved to the bank, so the next form reuses it rather than creating a near-duplicate that splits your reporting.

Note: FormFlow is separate from your job application, registration and referral forms. Those are built into your job board and follow their own rules, and they are covered in their own article. FormFlow is for everything else.

Where to find it

Go to Tools > Question Config and open the FormFlow tab. It has two views: Forms, where you build and share them, and Submissions, where the responses arrive.

The Forms list shows each form with its status, how many questions and pages it has, and how many submissions it has received. Under each name is a short line summarising how that form behaves, for example "Keep in Refari · open link" or "Review before ATS push · you choose who it is for". Those two halves are the decisions explained further down: what happens to the answers, and who the form is for.

Creating a form

1. Click Create form and give it a name and a short description. The description appears at the top of the form, so use it to tell the person filling it in what it is for and roughly how long it will take.
2. Add your questions. Pick existing ones from your question bank or write new ones as you go, then drag them into the order you want.
3. Group them across pages if the form is long. A page is just a group of questions with a heading, and it keeps a thirty-question pack from landing as one intimidating wall.
4. Mark anything the form should not be submittable without as Required.
5. Set a thank you message, shown after a successful submission, and add the email addresses that should be told each time a response arrives.
6. When you are ready, switch the status from Draft to Active. Only active forms accept submissions.

Idea: Every new form starts with first name, last name and email already on it, and already pointed at the right places on the candidate record. You do not have to add them, and you should not remove them: they are how a response finds the right person.

Question types you can use

Pages and the progress indicator

A long form is far more likely to be finished if it arrives in chunks. Split yours into pages and Refari shows the person how far through they are: as labelled steps, a filling bar, a percentage, or plain page numbers, whichever you choose. Left alone, the indicator appears automatically once a form is long enough to be worth pacing, and stays out of the way on short ones.

Building a form by describing it

You do not have to assemble a form field by field. Describe what you need in plain English and Refari AI drafts it with you, live, as you chat. It is the fastest way to get a long pack such as contractor onboarding off the ground.

• It writes questions with the right type for what you asked for, so "the earliest date they can start" becomes a date picker rather than a text box.
• It searches your question bank first and reuses what is already there, instead of inventing a second version of a question you have asked for years.
• It groups questions into pages, reorders them and adjusts the form's settings on request.
• It drafts the wording of the emails the form sends.

Nothing is published behind your back. You review the draft in the builder and change anything you want before the form goes anywhere.>

Idea: Paste the whole brief in one go rather than asking for questions one at a time. Something like "a form for contractors returning from leave: name, phone, the earliest date they can start, their updated CV and their current certifications" lays out the entire form, and you tidy it from there.

Who the form is about

In the builder this is Who is this form about?, and it decides how each submission finds its candidate. It is also the second half of the line under each form name in the list.

An open link, where people identify themselves

The default. Anybody with the link can fill the form in, and they tell you who they are as they do it, through the name and email questions every form starts with. This is what you want for a registration form, an availability check-in, or anything you are sending to a list.

A personal link, where you choose who it is for

Here you pick the candidate first, and Refari issues a link that belongs to that person alone. The response attaches to their record automatically, so whoever fills it in never has to type the candidate's details to be matched up correctly.

You can issue links to one person or to many at once, which is what makes this practical at scale: onboarding ten contractors for the same site is one pass, not ten copies of the form.

It also covers the case where somebody other than the candidate fills the form in. A reference check is answered by the referee, and asking a referee to type the candidate's email exactly as you hold it is how references end up attached to nobody. With a personal link they simply answer the questions.

Each personal link you issue is listed with a state, so you can see at a glance who still needs chasing.

Note: Treat a personal link like a password while it is live. Anyone holding it can answer as that candidate's referee, so send it to one person and revoke it if it goes further. If you genuinely want more than one answer through the same link, there is a setting to allow repeat responses, which turns off the single-use behaviour.

Sharing your form

As a standalone page

Every form has its own page hosted by Refari. Anyone with the link can open and submit it, and it arrives on a clean, branded page with nothing else around it. No website changes are needed, which makes this the right choice when you just need answers from somebody today.

The same panel gives you a QR code for that link. Save it and drop it onto a poster, an induction pack or a stand at an event, and it scans straight to the form on a phone.

Embedded on your website

Copy the embed code and paste it into any page on your site, the same way as any other Refari widget. The form renders in place and picks up the styling around it. If somebody else looks after your website, the snippet is self-contained: email it to them and they can drop it straight in.

Those two options are what Share offers on a form anyone can fill in. On a form where you choose who it is for, Share does a different job: it is where you pick the candidates and issue their private links, and where you see the ones you have already sent.

Success: Open the standalone link in a private browser window and you will see the form exactly as your respondents do. Send yourself a test answer: it should appear under Submissions within moments, and reach the notification addresses you set.

Working through submissions

Responses land in the Submissions view alongside Forms, which is the point: a form is somewhere you work rather than somewhere answers pile up. Open one to read every answer in full, page by page as the respondent saw them. If you added notification addresses, those inboxes also get a summary of each new response.

When a submission attaches to a candidate, Refari also writes a note on that candidate summarising what came in, so the next person to open the record sees it without going looking for the form.

Approving before anything reaches your ATS

You will not always want a raw response written straight into your system of record. Turn on Require approval and each submission waits until somebody approves or rejects it. That is the "Review before ATS push" you see under a form's name in the list. Approving can be done in the dashboard or straight from a link in the email, whichever suits how your team works.

Writing answers into your ATS

Note: Writing answers into an ATS currently requires a JobAdder connection. If your ATS is reached another way, everything else here still applies: you can build forms, share them, and read and approve responses in Refari. The export step simply does not run, so work from the submission itself rather than expecting the answers to appear in your ATS.

Any question can be mapped to a real field on the candidate record in your ATS. Turn on auto export and approved answers are written into those fields, so nobody re-keys a form by hand.

Two things cannot be written, and the report below names them rather than failing quietly. Application fields are not available, because a form response is not tied to a particular job application. And an uploaded file stays attached to the response in Refari rather than being pushed across.

Each submission then carries a report of what actually happened, field by field rather than one all-or-nothing tick. Every field Refari tried to write is listed by name as Sent, Failed or Skipped, with the reason when something did not land, so you can see exactly what went across and fix the one field that did not. That record stays accurate even if you later rename or remap the question.

Final Notes

Keep forms short and specific. Every extra question costs you completed responses, and because the question bank makes a second form cheap to build, it is nearly always better to run two focused forms than one catch-all. When a form has served its purpose, set it back to Draft: the link and the embed stop taking new answers, and everything already received stays exactly where it is.

Other articles you might be interested in:  Refari Forms: application, registration and referral forms explained  |  Using Refari forms with JobAdder: what gets created and how