How Cork City Council Took Recruitment From Paper Forms to a Digital Platform

Cork City Council moved recruitment away from paper and emailed PDF forms by building vacancy-specific digital application forms on Submit.com, a platform already used elsewhere in the council. HR staff now screen, tag and route applications automatically, share secure folders with interview boards, and manage each stage from application to signed offer in one system.

Cork City Council is one of Ireland's largest local authorities, with around 1,300 staff delivering services from housing to fire and emergency response. Every one of those roles starts with a recruitment competition, and until recently, every one of those competitions started with paper.

What did recruitment look like before Submit.com?

Dave Norberg, who works in Cork City Council's HR team, describes the pre-digital process plainly: nothing was digital. Applications arrived on paper, then, once the Covid-19 pandemic made in-person collection impractical, as PDF forms attached to emails.

PDF forms solved one problem and created several others. Every vacancy needed its own customised PDF, which took time and effort to build. Competency questions had fixed text boxes with word counts, and candidates regularly found they couldn't fit their answers into the space provided, even when they'd stayed within the limit. Applications went missing in the post. Emails were missed or saved in the wrong folder. Candidates emailed HR to ask whether their application had arrived, sometimes after hearing that interviews had already been scheduled.

The knock-on effect reached candidates too. Before Submit.com, a driving licence requirement, for example, was handled with a simple yes or no question on the form. The council only asked to see the actual licence after interview, at the onboarding stage. Anyone who had answered yes but couldn't produce a valid licence found out at the worst possible point in the process.

Why did the council move to digital recruitment?

The change wasn't planned as a long-term digital transformation project. It came from pressure. The HR department was going through a period of change, with staff moving between roles, at the same time as it fell behind on two of its highest-volume competitions: Clerical Officer and Firefighter.

"We had no choice but to find a way of becoming more efficient," Norberg says. Management, he adds, were open to whatever the team suggested. That openness mattered, because what the team found next meant they didn't have to start from scratch.

How Cork City Council found Submit.com already in-house

Rather than running a fresh procurement process, HR discovered that other departments at Cork City Council were already using Submit.com, for fine payments, surveys and various public-facing forms. Because Submit.com was already an approved supplier, HR could bypass procurement entirely and approach the Submit.com team directly.

Submit.com's Neil O'Driscoll worked with the team early on to help set up a version of the platform for HR use, built on the shared council instance rather than a dedicated one. It was, in Norberg's words, "really, really new" for everyone involved, including for Submit.com, in what was an earlier version of the platform.

After running the first two competitions, Clerical Officer and Firefighter, the team debriefed on what had worked and what the HR function needed that the shared setup couldn't provide. That led to a dedicated HR-only instance of Submit.com, referred to internally as version two, which the council still uses today.

Building application forms for each vacancy

Every vacancy at Cork City Council has different requirements. Some need a level 8 qualification, some a driving licence, some five or ten years of specific experience. On Submit.com, HR builds each application form to match, and reuses templates across similar roles rather than starting from scratch each time.

The driving licence question is a small but telling example of what changed. Instead of a self-declared yes or no, candidates now upload a copy of their licence at the point of application. Norberg recalls one candidate who uploaded a photo of a learner permit rather than a full licence: "we were able to take it and send it back to them in the email saying, this is what you uploaded, it's a learner permit, you're not qualified." The disqualification happened at application stage, with a documented reason, rather than surfacing after interview.

For technical roles, forms go further still. When engineering qualification requirements changed, the team built a dedicated application form with a structured qualifications table, required fields for chartered status with Engineers Ireland, and file-type restrictions so candidates can only upload PDFs rather than photographs of certificates. Required fields stop an application being submitted until the necessary information is provided, so incomplete applications don't reach HR in the first place.

A live view of every competition, before it even closes

Once a vacancy is live, HR can see applications arriving in real time, along with how many are complete and what percentage of each draft has been finished. Hiring managers, directors or senior executive officers can be given visibility of a competition before it closes, so they can gauge the quality and quantity of applications as they come in rather than waiting for a final count.

Swipe left or right to see the full diagram on mobile.

How shortlisting works: tags, folders and restricted board access

Once applications come in, HR reviews them against the minimum requirements and applies tags, such as "qualified education" or "qualified experience". Some tags apply automatically based on how a candidate answers a question; others are applied manually by HR staff. Tagging an application as qualified can automatically move it into a folder built for that competition's interview board.

Board members, who are often not HR staff and sometimes not council employees at all, are added to the platform with just a name and email address, individually or via a bulk upload. They receive their own login and password and see only the folder they've been given access to, nothing else on the platform. HR controls exactly what they can do inside that folder too, including whether they can score, comment, or simply view.

"They only see what we put in the folder," Norberg explains. Job specifications, shortlisting sheets and interview notes can all sit alongside the applications in the same folder, so board members aren't working from a separate stack of paper or a different email thread. Norberg is careful about one setting in particular: making sure tags and notes are visible to the team only, and never to the candidate. "It's like, don't press the red button," he says, "because as we all know, no good deed goes unpunished."

Cork City Council still asks some interview boards to score using external spreadsheets, signed via DocuSign and saved into the relevant folder, largely for audit continuity on processes that predate the platform. Norberg is candid that this is a transition still in progress, not a finished state: "we're still trying to bring the team, and more importantly the management, around to the scoring system that Submit has."

Managing the process from application to signed offer

Submit.com's multi-phase structure lets Cork City Council move a candidate from an initial application, through a shortlisting phase, to an authenticated, two-step-verified signature for a contract or letter of offer, all within the same record. Office-use-only fields let interviewers score and take notes during a live interview, without switching to a separate document.

Communication with candidates runs through the same system. HR can message individuals or send templated group messages, for example reminding everyone still at draft stage a week before a deadline, with their first name and a direct link to finish the application pulled in automatically. As Norberg puts it, that "minimises the possibility of mistakes" that come with manually managing email threads, even if, as he's quick to add, no system removes human error altogether.

How is candidate and applicant data protected?

Submit.com stores data on European-based AWS servers. Councils remain their own data controllers and get a dedicated privacy dashboard to manage retention: data can be deleted by date or by tag, and inactive registered users can be removed from the platform. This matters in a sector where the General Data Protection Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2016/679) sets binding obligations on how personal data is stored, retained and deleted.

Board folders add a further layer of protection: external reviewers only ever see the specific applications shared with them, with the option to redact personal details entirely if a process calls for anonymised or blind review.

What happens when something goes wrong on deadline day?

No digital process is immune to a bad afternoon. Norberg shares two examples candidly, rather than glossing over them. During a high-profile Administrative Officer competition, several candidates received a "signature not verified" notification after clicking their confirmation email, minutes before the deadline. "You can imagine the panic that was causing," Norberg says. Submit.com's technical team confirmed within minutes that the signatures were valid and the issue was a notification fault, not a lost application, letting HR reassure anxious candidates immediately.

A second issue, during a Senior Staff Officer competition, saw an autosave feature intermittently clear competency answers as candidates typed them, sometimes after they'd written most of a response. Submit.com fixed it within the hour. Norberg's takeaway is measured rather than triumphant: bugs happen, but "our margin of error has dramatically decreased" since the council started using the platform.

What Cork City Council hasn't fully solved yet

The council is candid that its digital transformation has a boundary. Submit.com currently runs independently of Cork City Council's core HR and personnel system. When a candidate is successful, their information still has to be manually keyed into the council's internal recruitment and personnel modules to process onboarding and payroll, and the council's personnel files are, in places, still ultimately printed and kept on paper.

Norberg is open about wanting deeper integration in future, describing the remaining legacy system work as "a bigger mountain to climb." It's a useful reminder that digitising recruitment intake doesn't automatically digitise everything downstream of it, particularly in organisations running long-established HR and payroll systems.

Advice for other councils considering a similar move

Norberg's experience points to a few practical lessons for other local authorities weighing up a move away from paper-based recruitment.

Start with the competitions under the most pressure. Cork City Council didn't attempt a full switch on day one. It began with its two highest-volume, most time-pressured panels, then used what it learned to shape a dedicated setup.

Expect a learning curve, and treat it as normal. Norberg's own background in private-sector recruitment software helped, but he's clear that there's no single manual for tailoring a platform to one council's specific workflow. Testing settings, seeing what happens, and adjusting is part of the process.

Bring longer-serving staff and board members along deliberately. Some team members and interview board members were, in Norberg's words, used to doing things a certain way. Consistently highlighting the practical advantages, rather than assuming buy-in, made the difference.

Map what you need from a report before you build the form. Sarah O'Neal, Submit.com's Head of Customer Success, recommends working backwards: identify the reports and outcomes a council actually needs at the end of a competition, then build the application form and its tagging structure to produce exactly that data.

Frequently asked questions

Does Cork City Council use Submit.com for shortlisting?

Yes, after a competition closes. HR screens applications against minimum requirements, tags qualifying candidates, and routes them automatically into a folder shared with the interview board. Final scoring for some competitions is still done on external spreadsheets for audit continuity, though the council is moving more boards onto Submit.com's built-in scoring tools over time.

Can external interview board members access applications securely?

Yes. Board members, including people who aren't council employees, are added with a name and email address and receive their own login. They only see the specific folder shared with them, not the wider platform, and administrators control whether they can view, comment or score.

Does Submit.com integrate with core HR or payroll systems?

Submit.com offers API-based integration with existing HRIS and ATS platforms. At Cork City Council specifically, HR currently keys successful candidates' details manually into the council's core HR and personnel systems, as this integration hasn't yet been built for their setup.

How is candidate data kept GDPR compliant?

Data is held on European-based AWS servers. Councils act as their own data controllers and have a privacy dashboard to delete data by date or tag, remove inactive users, and publish their own privacy statements, supporting compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation.

Can a council move to digital recruitment gradually rather than all at once?

Yes. Cork City Council started with two of its highest-volume competitions rather than switching every vacancy at once, then expanded to a dedicated HR instance once the initial approach was working. A phased rollout, competition by competition, is a common approach for councils moving away from an existing system.

Watch the full conversation

Dave Norberg and Sarah O'Neal cover all of this in more detail, including a live walkthrough of the platform and audience questions on GDPR, CoreHR and bulk printing for interview boards, in the on-demand session below.