Overview
The last thing to do before you launch is stop being an administrator for ten minutes and become one of your own applicants.
This is the step people skip, and it is the one that catches the problems your admin view cannot show you. This article is for administrators who have built a journey and are about to publish it.
1. Why can I not just assign myself and click through?
Because assigning yourself skips the part most likely to be broken.
When you assign a profile from the admin side, you bypass the form, the automation that reads the answers, and the routing that follows. Those three are exactly where journeys fail. A test that starts after them tells you the sequence renders, which was never in doubt.
Come in through the front door instead.
2. What do I test with?
A mock account that is not your admin login.
Use a personal email address, or a plus-address such as yourname+test@yourorg.org if your mail provider supports it, which most do. That keeps the test profile obviously fake and easy to find afterwards.
Do not reuse the email on your admin account. Vome will recognise you and you will end up testing the wrong experience.
3. Which door should I come in through?
Whichever one you are actually going to publish. There are four, and they behave differently.
- A form link you share directly. The one you put in an email, a newsletter or a poster.
- An opportunity landing page. The link to one specific opportunity.
- Your organization page, via Get Involved. The general front door for somebody who found you and does not know what they want yet.
- Clicking an opportunity from your organization page. Someone browsing your list and picking one.
If you are publishing more than one of these, test each. They can route to different forms and different recruitment workflows, so passing one proves nothing about the others.
4. What should I check as I go?
Follow the whole path and stop at each handover.
- The form. Do the questions read the way you meant, and is anything required that should not be?
- The automation. After submitting, did you land in the sequence or the opportunity you expected, without an admin touching anything?
- The sequence. Do the steps arrive in the right order, and does each one ask for what you intended?
- The review steps. Switch to your admin account and confirm the completed step is sitting on My Tasks where somebody would find it.
- Approval. Once the sequence finishes, are you approved for the right opportunity, and only that one?
- The calendar. Can you now see shifts and reserve one? An empty calendar here means the opportunity has no upcoming shifts.
5. What am I most likely to find?
Three things, in order of how often they turn up.
- An automation that was never set, so your test profile just sits in the Forms module.
- A step set to wait for admin review that you did not mean to set, quietly stopping the whole sequence.
- An opportunity approved correctly, with no upcoming shifts behind it, so the person arrives at an empty calendar.
All three are invisible from the admin side and obvious within two minutes as a user.
6. What do I do with the test profile afterwards?
Archive it, so your database stays a list of real people.
Do not leave it active. A mock profile in an active list turns up in your counts, your reports and potentially your mass emails. If you plan to test again after changes, archive it between runs rather than deleting it, and remember a second submission from the same email may behave differently from a first.
Summary
- Test as an applicant, not as an admin. Assigning yourself skips the form, the automation and the routing.
- Use a separate email, ideally a plus-address, never your admin one.
- Four doors: a shared form link, an opportunity landing page, your organization page via Get Involved, and clicking an opportunity from that page.
- Test every door you intend to publish, because they can route differently.
- Check the form, the automation, the sequence, My Tasks, approval and the shift calendar.
- Archive the test profile afterwards so it never counts as a real person.
Where to go next