For the longest time, the relationship between HR and tech has been a slow burn. As Enrique Rubio, Founder at Hacking HR puts it,

“In the business of HR, in my view, there had not been a significant imperative case for transformation. That’s made HR comfortable in its ways. There are many opportunities for automation to help HR teams with time-consuming yet significant tasks, interviews, paperwork, what happens once candidates apply and all that.”

But the pandemic has highlighted the advantages of technology for HR teams. And it shows with a $148 billion market of HR cloud solutions out there built to address the ‘future of work’. And a huge number of these solutions are improving and simplifying pains in existing HR processes.

The thing is, businesses often don’t need a powerful system to improve one bothersome process; they only need a simple fast-to-implement tool that’ll take care of the job.

That’s exactly what eSignatures are: a solution to automate the long-frustrating signing process. Here’s how eSignatures add automation to HR processes to eliminate repetitive manual tasks and deliver a better hiring experience.

1. Turn around hiring and onboarding documents faster

For HR professionals, there’s nothing more time-consuming and frustrating than managing onboarding documents. Not only do they require mind-numbing preparation and individual sending, but managing missing signatures, errors, and unresponsive candidates all eat up time that could be better spent on more complex tasks.

With eSignature technology, you can free your HR team from these unnecessary tasks. More sophisticated eSignature tools have built-in logic that manages the entire signing process for HR teams. For instance, sending reminder emails when a document is still waiting for

signature removes the administrative load of chasing candidates from your team’s plate.

But the bells and whistles don’t end there. Other internal documents, like training approvals, often need high-level sign-off from a range of people in a specific order. And smart eSignature tools can automate these complex processes, too. Dropbox Sign, for instance, has built-in logic that lets users define the signing order and then only sends the documents to the appropriate person when it’s their time to sign.

And when HR pros aren’t spending all of their time tracking down rogue signers and hunting approvals, they can spend more time on actions that improve your employees’ development and wellbeing.

2. Send documents for signature at scale

Speed is critical to the hiring process. The right offer at the right time to the right candidate can be the difference between the candidate you want and the candidate you settle for.

But more often than not, slow speed is actually a symptom of an overworked team, not an ineffective one. HR teams are juggling so many candidates, documents, and communications everything slows down.

It doesn’t have to be that way though. With eSignatures, teams can speed up their entire hiring process with contract automation. Simple time-saving actions like templating documents with editable fields, like name and address, means contracts only need minor tweaks before they go out. Advanced eSignature tools will even automatically fill in these fields with a simple mail merge. That way, HR pros can instantly insert personalized details like names and addresses into thousands of contracts fast. Then, send them all out with one single click.

Though this might not be a big deal if you’re only sending a couple of contracts a day, when you’re handling a huge number of requests every day, the time savings are massive.

3. Simplify the employee onboarding experience

Getting a candidate from ‘interested’ to ‘hired’ is often about speed. And while a faster hiring experience will no doubt increase your chances of locking down top-tier talent, one whiff of an outdated or difficult process can kill a candidates interest.

That makes a seamless hiring process a must-have for modern HR teams.

As soon as the offer letter leaves your desk, you want it signed and returned as soon as possible so you can get on with onboarding. And eSignature tools can automate many steps in the process by giving HR teams a huge speed advantage over competing offers.

Recruitment software like JobAdder speeds up onboarding by 97% with eSignatures. And a big part of its solution is eliminating the need to handle (or double-handle) paperwork. And a big part of its solution is eliminating the need to handle (or double-handle) paperwork.

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Using eSignatures to automate many of the document handling steps, JobAdder significantly reduced paperwork for its candidates leading to a faster time to hire.

As Tom Dyson, Product Manager at JobAdder says,

“Time-to-hire is incredibly important, particularly for recruiters in the high-volume or temp-worker space where they need to get candidates onboarded quickly. Now, with the Dropbox Sign integration, recruiters can get candidates onboarded in 30 minutes, which is 97% faster than the previous manual workflow.”

Discover the wide world of HR automation for yourself

eSignatures are just one part of the bigger HR automation picture. Find out how HR leaders are automating the entire stack in our latest guide, The HR automation toolkit: Essential tools for a well-oiled HR stack in 2021.

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