Clearer Bid Submission Feedback: Students Always Know Where They Stand

Bid submission is one of the highest-stakes moments in a student's recruiting experience. Getting that moment wrong, even once, erodes trust fast. We obsess over details like this because we believe the fastest shipping company in the legal talent industry should also be the most thoughtful one. This release fixes something that was quietly causing real problems for students, and we're glad to finally have it out the door.

The problem

Submitting bids is one of the most consequential things a student does during recruiting season. But the experience had a serious blind spot: things could change between the time a student built their bid list and the moment they hit submit. A job might get pulled from the program. A new required document might get added. When either of those things happened, the submission would fail, partially or entirely, and the student would have no idea why.

This was a broken experience at exactly the wrong moment. We kept hearing about this, and it was not acceptable.

What we shipped

From the moment a student hits "Submit", they are now guided through every possible outcome.

• While waiting: A loading screen reassures them that their bids are being processed.
  
• If everything goes through: They land on their My Bids page with a clear confirmation that their bids have been shared with their school.
  
• If something does not go through: They see a plain-language summary of exactly which bids submitted successfully and which did not, with a simple explanation for each one. No confusion, no dead ends.
  

Students who need to make changes are brought back to their bid list with clear warnings highlighting exactly what needs attention. Jobs that are no longer available are automatically removed. Jobs with missing documents are flagged so students know exactly what to upload. Once they have made their updates, they can resubmit with confidence.

Why it matters

Recruiting windows are short and competitive. A student who does not know their bid failed does not get a second chance to fix it. That is not a minor inconvenience. It is a real cost to the student and a real trust problem for the schools and employers relying on the process to work cleanly.

This change makes the system honest with students in real time. They know what happened. They know what to do next. And they can resubmit without second-guessing whether it worked. That is the standard we hold ourselves to.

Coming next: we are also working on surfacing these issues before a student submits, so they can resolve them proactively rather than discovering them after the fact.

This is a better experience, but it is also a foundation for catching more edge cases earlier in the flow. If you are seeing other moments where students are left without clear feedback or a clear path forward, keep telling us. That kind of specific, observed friction is exactly what drives what we build next.

If you're a Flo client and want to dig in, or you're new to Flo and curious how it works, book a demo and we'll walk you through it.