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Having a great onboarding program is one of the best things you can do for your company. iCMIS reports that a strong onboarding program can reduce employee turnover from 44% to 14%, while improving new hire time-to-productivity by approximately ⅓. Talk about time and money saved! One way to improve onboarding is to make the administrative portion of onboarding as simple as possible. Luckily it’s easy to do when you take employee onboarding paperwork online.

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Digitizing documents like W-9s, NDAs, employee handbooks means you can eliminate things like double-handling of employee paperwork, manual data entry, and printing and scanning documents. New employees will get through the administrative stuff quickly and on to their work faster. HR professionals will be saved the headache of wrangling paperwork.

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Here’s how to go about it.

Onboarding Employees Online Using DropboxSign & Dropbox Forms

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You have several options when it comes to onboarding employees online:

1. Initiate and complete employee onboarding paperwork using a Dropbox Sign team plan
2. Initiate and complete onboarding paperwork on your own site or application by integrating the Dropbox Sign API
3. Create fulling automated, embedded, and intelligent onboarding workflows with Dropbox Forms

All three options provide a fast and easy onboarding experience for everyone involved. Let's take a look at all three options indepth below. 

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Option #1: Initiate and Complete Employee Onboarding Paperwork Using a Dropbox Sign Team Plan

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The most immediate way to begin onboarding online is by creating a Dropbox Sign team account. With this account, you (or your HR professionals) can create re-usable templates for onboarding documents (like W-9s, employee handbooks, and more), easily disperse information among team members, and begin sending new employee documents for signature immediately.

It’s super easy to get started!

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Simply sign-up for a team account and upload your first onboarding document. Format the document with special fields like “signature” and “text box.” Once formatted, your document is ready for your employee to view and complete.

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Your new employee will receive the document via email and be prompted to sign online. They won’t be required to open a Dropbox Sign account and can sign easily from their email account.

For effortless repeatability, create templates for your frequently-used documents. Templates give you the power to format a document once and then re-use it again and again for future use. You can also share document templates with other team members and control permissions for templates.

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Other benefits of using Dropboxsign.com for online employee onboarding:

• Real- time activity notifications for documents. You’ll immediately know when an employee has opened, viewed, or signed a document. This gives you instant insight into when you need to step in to assist or follow-up on a document that’s slipped through the cracks.
  
• Automatic secure storage of completed documents. All documents are securely stored in your Dropbox Sign account. A completed copy is also sent to signers.
  
• Basic team features like “cc.”. It’s simple to keep everyone in the loop. Include “cc” email addresses so all relevant stakeholders are in the know at every step.

Option #2: Initiate and Complete Employee Onboarding Paperwork on Your Site or Application by Integrating the Dropbox Sign API

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You can also embed the onboarding flow directly into your website, application, or workflow by integrating Dropbox Sign’s API. This allows you to plug paperless onboarding flows right into your existing systems.

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For example, say you’d like your employees to complete  their onboarding paperwork on your company’s employee portal. An API integration is also particularly appealing option for companies who employ a large volume of contract workers. Instacart is an excellent example of this. Integrating an embedded onboarding flow using Dropbox Sign even allowed them to scale their business.

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Other benefits of integrating an onboarding flow with the Dropbox Sign API:

• Automated data entry. Data entry is one of the most time-consuming parts of paperwork. Make it faster and easier for participants. You have the option to auto-fill information into the relevant fields, saving you the time expense of tedious data entry.
  
• The signing experience can be customized. The best thing about the API is that it’s incredibly flexible. You can create the exact look and feel of the onboarding flow of your dreams. Recruiting platform JobAdder is a great example of the power of customization.
  
• Easy to setup and test. The Dropbox Sign API was built for testing. If you’re technical, take a look at our documentation. No technical background? No problem! Here’s a great guide to getting started.

Option #3: Create Fully Automated, Embedded, and Intelligent Onboarding Workflows with Dropbox Forms

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HR-related forms are a pain to fill out. They’re also a pain to process. They often show confusing terms and lock away an employee’s information in a PDF. That’s exactly why companies struggle to get it right.

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Onboarding already has a boring reputation. People perceive onboarding paperwork as tedious and unpleasant in large part because we make them think about it too hard. And when they’re forced to think about it, it becomes a dreaded task.

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Dropbox Forms changes that by giving your employees and contractors intelligent mobile-first solution that automates time-consuming onboarding processes.

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Standard paper-based onboarding processes are transformed into intelligent online forms consisting of no PDFs. Dropbox Forms includes several advanced features that make filling out onboarding forms extremely simple. Information entered auto-populates to any duplicate fields on the form, conditional logic will change questions based off of previous answers, and data validations checks real-time that information entered is accurate.

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Simultaneously, this data flows directly to the database HR has indicated so they can access and share it as needed without having to manual reenter information or circulate non-secure PDFs.

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What’s more, it does all this from any mobile device and every operating system so all that wasted time and cost associated with remediation and redundant data entry can be put to better use elsewhere in your HR department.

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Dropbox Forms also has a simple interface that caters to both no-code users and developers. Drag-and-drop functionality lets you build and launch multi-form workflows in a matter of minutes with no code. But f you want to dive into the code and customize your workflows, there is a “Code View” where the possibilities are endless. Dropbox Forms workflows are built on JSON code and supported by an extensive documentation library and SDKs.

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Once Inside Dropbox Forms, you’ll build your form and map it to an underlying PDF (if applicable). Next, you will assign the steps in your workflow and launch it out for completion. Finally, you can track the status of launched workflows and automatically integrate data from completed workflows into third-party systems.

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The end result looks like this:

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The benefits to automating onboarding in this way is pretty incredible. You get to achieve onboarding scale faster and eliminate revenue-draining process friction. But here are a few things that make Dropbox Forms especially unique:

• Dropbox Forms is easy to use. You will be building and launching onboarding workflows in a matter of minutes.
  
• Dropbox Forms is intelligent. Workflows adjust based on previous inputs and never ask for the same information twice.
  
• Dropbox Forms is fully embeddable. Embed workflows into your application or website with full white-labeling functionally. ‍
• Dropbox Forms is mobile first. Your employees or contractors will never leave their phones when completing your forms.

Which Online Onboarding Option is Best for You?

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All three options will provide a superior signing and storage process for your new employees. If you’re still unsure which fits best with your needs, here are a few things to consider: 

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Choose a Dropbox Sign Team Plan if you:

• Hire at low volume
• Have a small HR team (or no HR team)
• Want to enjoy all the great benefits of Dropbox Sign without technical intervention

Choose the Dropbox Sign API if you:

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• Hire high volumes of new employees or contractors
• Want users to have a seamless experience completing and signing their onboarding paperwork on your website or in your app
• Want to integrate your onboarding flow into existing applications

Choose Dropbox Forms if you:

• Hire high volumes of new employees or contractors
• Want to simplify lengthy and complex document-centric onboarding processes
• Prefer that your new hires never see the the PDFs they are completing
• Want to eliminate the back-and-fourth of dealing with data entry errors in onboarding documents
• Want a personalized and dynamic form-filling process for your new hires
• Want data to flow more freely to-and-from new hire forms
• Need your onboarding process to be completed on a mobile device
• Want to fully embed the workflow into your existing processes

Ready to Build Your Best Onboarding Experice?

Sign-up for a Dropbox Sign account, poke around the Dropbox Sign API, or explore Dropbox Forms to experience the benefit of paperless onboarding yourself.