Helping New Hires Reach Productivity Faster
Greenhouse Software offers industry-leading solutions to help all companies become great at hiring. Using their recruiting and onboarding software, candidates experience a seamless and digital experience from the first touchpoint.
Understanding how customers use eSignatures
Greenhouse’s mission is to help every company become great at hiring. They designed their flagship product, Greenhouse Recruiting, for companies that need a customizable hiring solution to build a global team.
Most early Greenhouse customers were tech startups, but Greenhouse has expanded its customer base across industries and sizes. They launched Greenhouse Onboarding to help companies of all sizes streamline the process of starting work, so employees can hit the ground running on day one.
Greenhouse Onboarding is, by nature, a transitional system, streamlining the process from offer letter through employment documentation to welcoming a person on their first day. The data collected from this process goes on to live somewhere else: the customer’s HR information system. Managing the many integrations between platforms is one of Onboarding’s biggest challenges.
Starting at a new company involves signing a lot of employment documents—and giving a lot of personally identifiable information (PII). Greenhouse built Dropbox Sign into its Onboarding tool to create a cohesive, uninterrupted onboarding workflow. A new hire signs documents within this customized experience without ever having to create a Dropbox Sign account. Greenhouse’s customers don't need an account either; they can still automate different welcome experiences for different users through the Sign integration. The Dropbox Sign UI is easily visible, making users feel comfortable and secure with entering their PII.
The use of eSignatures took off, and now Greenhouse Onboarding facilitates 20,000 eSignatures a month through these welcome experiences. But they also needed a way to track usage. When a small number of customers started using a lot of signatures, Greenhouse Senior Engineering Manager Hugo Marcotte realized that they needed better visibility into signature use.
“We had to maintain our own dashboard based on our own data in our database,” Marcotte explains. “It was close enough, but not 100% accurate.” Rather than spending hours back-and-forth reconciling discrepancies with customers, Marcotte wanted to have better visibility to proactively address any concerns.
“When it comes to personal information, doing this under the Dropbox banner helps users feel comfortable and secure.”
Visibility makes onboarding seamless
When Marcotte raised the need for more visibility with the Dropbox team, it launched a collaborative process. Dropbox listened to Marcotte’s concerns, clarified his needs, and introduced him to the beta version of the Sign API Dashboard. This dashboard provides valuable insights into signature quota usage and request status, as well as integration health.
Marcotte and his team use the dashboard extensively, both to support Greenhouse Onboarding’s out-of-the-box templates and debug any workflow issues. These workflows can be complex—which is why issues took so long to untangle. The API Dashboard’s numbers are consistently accurate and up to date, allowing Marcotte’s team to pinpoint issues from error trends.
Now, the API Dashboard gives Marcotte’s team the visibility they need to quickly uncover any issues and ensure the process is seamless. “My team finds it extremely helpful to search for a specific document, view its status, and see what happened,” he says. “Then they can take action.”
“Our customers can define rules and the appropriate eSignatures are assigned to their new hires automatically because we integrate with Dropbox Sign.” – Hugo Marcotte, Senior Engineering Manager, Greenhouse
Greater efficiency for everyone
The Sign integration provides Onboarding customers built-in templates for commonly used forms, and also allows customers to effortlessly create their own templates with conditional rules defined for each instance. Automating document assignments this way saves Greenhouse customers a lot of time by avoiding repetitive, manual processes for every new hire.
Discrepancies with signatures are uncommon for Greenhouse, but workflow complexity made it difficult to locate any problems when they arose. The API Dashboard has effectively saved Marcotte’s team hours of work every month, since checking the signature status of a particular document now only takes a minute. “Because we have that much visibility, we can catch and fix issues on the fly,” Marcotte says.
Greenhouse Onboarding supports complicated workflows and has never had to second-guess their choice of Dropbox Sign. “My team always gets the support and documentation they need to ensure our customers have a reliable eSignature solution embedded in our application” Marcotte says. The Dropbox Sign UI is very intuitive, and it’s a crucial part of Greenhouse Onboarding. Greenhouse offers another onboarding product that doesn’t include eSignatures, Greenhouse Welcome, but 80% of Greenhouse customers use Dropbox Sign via Onboarding because they want the functionality of eSignatures. “It wouldn’t be complete without this piece,” Marcotte concludes.
What’s next for Greenhouse?
Marcotte was surprised by how much was possible with Sign API: pre-populating forms with data obtained through Greenhouse Recruitment, for example. “It’s the kind of thing people don’t notice because we have it,” he says—but they’d be annoyed if they had to manually enter that information again.
Greenhouse is now exploring taking that capability further, using Sign API to pull information from signed documents and automate even more processes, such as eVerify requests.
Interested in seeing results like Greenhouse?
Dropbox Sign is the easiest way to send, receive, and manage legally binding eSignatures for businesses. Voted #1 for Ease of Use from G2, two years in a row, our eSignature solution can make your most important workflows fast, easier, and more secure. Sign up for a free trial today to start digitizing your business.