New hire workflow modification

We have attempted to build a new hire workflow a couple of times and have not been satisfied so far. Our latest attempt is to utilize custom triggers to get the information from the original request and use API scripting to pull the custom fields and create the appropriate requests with the information required by that group to perform the task.

So far we have created a Self Service Catalog template that gathers all the information required (this is filled in by the HR dept). We then use the custom trigger to pass the Request Number to the script and the script is able to get the request and read all the custom fields.
The script than creates a new request for each tech. with the appropriate data in the Description field.

The issue we have run into is that some information is not know ahead of time and we need to get the information from the hiring manager. We tried sending an email to the manager asking for the information, but then I don't know how to access that information.

Is there a way to get the additional information in a way that it can be processed by script?

We use Python for scripting.

Thanks
Sal