Finance, sales, and marketing are all strategic divisions of your company. But what about HR?

“We've realized over the last five to six years that talent is the most important factor in a successful organization. You get the right mix of A, B, and C players, and you're more likely to be successful, to have a better profit margin. These are reasons we need to measure and understand what HR is doing and why. It shouldn't just be checking boxes,” says Craig Fisher, founder of employer brand and recruitment marketing strategy firm TalentNet Media.

But for HR to become a strategic partner to your business, you need to free up your team to think and operate strategically by automating the manual work that takes up so much of your time—and that starts with one of the most labor-intensive tasks: hiring.

Last year, on average, the time-to-hire across all US industries was 3-4 weeks. And during that time, HR bears the brunt of the slog work: from managing new hire requests to advertising positions and screening resumes to arranging and managing interviews, administering checks and assessments, and, finally, making an offer, getting a contract signed, and bringing the new hire on board. Phew!

So how can HR teams claw back time and streamline the hiring process? Here are five ways to improve the hiring process with eSignatures.

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1. Automate manual HR tasks

HR managers lose an average of 14 hours a week by completing tasks manually that could be automated—28% waste 20+ hours. That’s valuable time that could be spent on engaging staff and retaining your top performers.

A lot of this time is spent on recurring paperwork like NDAs, background-check permissions, job contracts, W9s, and staff onboarding forms.

Using eSignature tools, you can templatize these so that the bulk of the editing is already complete, you just need to update relevant fields.

Often, you might need a senior manager or even the CEO to sign the contract last. That’s simple to do by creating a signer order, which lets you choose the exact order people need to sign a document and then automates the sending process so those people are only emailed the contract when it’s their turn to sign. This keeps the contract moving and reduces the amount of admin you have to manage.

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2. Make signing easier on candidates

When candidates have to juggle PDFs, email attachments, or print-sign-scan processes just to sign an offer letter or NDAs, it makes signing harder for candidates.

The good news is, eSignatures offer a fast and easy solution. With sophisticated eSignature tools, you can simply send a link, and candidates can sign important documents directly in their internet browser—no need to juggle attachments, third-party software, or printer-scanners. What’s more, because everything is digital and requires no special tools, candidates can fill in forms and sign contracts online using any device.

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3. Increase productivity with integrations

Professionals only spend an average of 1 minute and 15 seconds on a task before an interruption. Worse, it takes workers up to 25 minutes to pick that task back up again. One of the biggest reasons for distractions is switching between different windows and applications.

But if you can minimize these distractions with integrations that let your team carry out multiple functions for their favorite tools, you can tap into a whole new level of speed and productivity.

Sophisticated eSignature tools like the Dropbox eSignature product called Dropbox Sign, integrate with popular apps like Gmail, Google Docs, Mircosoft Word, and Slack so you can prepare and send documents out for signature eSignatures directly from your favorite tools. For instance, if you’ve prepared an offer letter in Google Docs, rather than exporting it, attaching it to an email, and sending it, you can use the Dropbox Sign integration to send it directly from the original document—saving the effort of moving information back and forth between two systems.

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4. Cover your legal and compliance bases

From background-check permissions to actual job contracts, HR paperwork has laws and regulations to meet. So, for starters, eSignatures are recognized as legally binding. In fact, they have an advantage over your standard ink-on-paper signatures: they come with a traceable and court-admissible audit trail, so you can see who signed what and when—and you can also see if anyone has tampered with a document.

Internally, templating important HR documents means your legal team can review a reference document once and the hiring team can use it confidently, knowing it covers all the legal and compliance bases.

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5. Impress your new hires

Hiring doesn’t end with a signed job contract—it’s just the beginning! Only 12% of staff strongly agree their company excels at onboarding new hires. The result? 20% of employees quit within the first 45 days of starting a new job.

“For most companies, the first thing you're going to have to do is sign like 87 documents. HR teams should do whatever they can to get this out of the way because new hires are never gonna be more excited than they are in that first moment,” explains HR analyst Ben Eubanks.

And he’s right, companies can improve employee retention by 82% if they deliver a great onboarding experience.

With eSignatures, it’s easy to digitize your whole onboarding pack. That way, your new staff member gets all the information and forms they need in one go and they can sign it fast.

Fast hiring is effective hiring

Hiring new staff should be an exciting, positive experience for everyone involved—not a drain on your time and resources. And with the right digital tools hiring can be. You can cut back on manual admin and meet applicants where they are—online—and deliver a legally secure and robust hiring experience.

But this is just a fraction of the ways hiring teams can speed up their hiring process. Learn how to improve your hiring process and make it agile enough to secure top candidates in our latest e-guide, Antidotes to slow hiring for time-starved HR managers and teams

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