first off

use strict;
use CGI;
[download]

The first will help you catch a lot of prgramming errors, and the second will handle all the CGI interaction.

Aside from that....instead of using an if elsif construct, use a foreach over a set of required keys. With the if/else you'd only be able to report 1 error, when you'd really want to report them all. Try something like this.

my $query = new CGI;
my %FORM = $query->Vars;

my @required_fields = qw{candidate position education status hired};
my @errors;
foreach (@required_fields) {
    if (!defined($FORM{$_})) {
         push(@errors,$_);
    }
}

if (@errors) {
    foreach (@errors) {
        print "$_ is a required field\n";
    }
}
else {
    # everything is good, do the work
}
[download]

HTH

/\/\averick
perl -l -e "eval pack('h*','072796e6470272f2c5f2c5166756279636b672');"