How Using Electronic Signatures Can Slash HR Workload And Improve Efficiency
Posted: 2 yrs ago
Read time: 8 mins
Businesses across the world are aggressively trying to find efficient ways to recruit, manage, and retain talent. Finding, and keeping top talent is often a tedious process that involves a lot of paperwork, which can in turn negatively impact the ability to recruit effectively. This is the fundamental reason why HR professionals find it expedient to select a reliable electronic signature partner, on which they can offload tedious but mission-critical tasks. In this paper, we discuss some of the ways in which electronic signature companies help organisations with the critical role of human resource (HR) management.
While there are many facets to the role of managing people, it can be said that the typical team member goes through three phases in their interaction with an organisation. Each person that joins a team has to go through an onboarding, ongoing employment, and an exit phase. For each of these phases, there is a myriad of documents that have to be filled out, signed, submitted, printed, and stored. These tasks, if done through traditional methods, impose huge unnecessary costs on human resources, and often restrict their ability to carry out their core functions effectively.
When companies have thousands of people under their employ across multiple countries the paperwork can become a nightmare. Why not simplify the entire process with a turnkey solution that anyone can use with no technical training or experience? This is the question that many in executive leadership ask, and the obvious answer is electronic signatures. DocEndorse has the capability to fully digitize your internal document management processes, and provide immediate operational efficiency. In one step, you can consolidate the need to print, sign, scan, mail, and communicate into a single action. Let us look at how this is done.
Often during team members’ recruitment and onboarding, a wide variety of documents and forms are filled out and signed. These can include:
During ongoing employment, the human resources team may from time to time require team members to fill, sign and submit the following documents:
When an employee finally decides to move on to other things, some HR teams will want he/she to fill out a few forms to keep in their archives. Some of these forms include:
As you can see, the list of forms and agreements that HR teams manage can become quite extensive. Nevertheless, electronic signatures are a legally binding and convenient way to streamline the entire process.
With electronic signatures, getting a document signed or filled by one or more parties is a simple 4-step process that can take less than 5 minutes. The process is as follows:
Each recipient receives an email or a text message with instructions on how to fill, sign, or approve the document. The recipient can use either a mobile phone, tablet, or desktop computer to create a signature, sign the document, and fill the document at a convenient time.
After this process is done, the author can create a template that will eliminate the need to repeat the process. When using a template all you need to do is to change the recipient, make minor modifications if needed and then send. Your employees will save a lot of time on doing repetitive and duplicative document flows, time that could be reallocated to bigger value add projects.
Electronic signatures from DocEndorse can do more than provide greater convenience, one can also improve the accuracy of document completion, facilitate the requisition of additional documents with minimal effort, and collect credit card payments from third parties.
Recruiting is often a very manual, and time-consuming process that typically requires cross-department collaboration, and analysis of personal data, and personalities. We make it easy for teams to digitally collect data from job applicants both in-person and remotely, data that can be easily fed into a company’s cloud storage systems. In instances where companies need to handle thousands of applicants in different parts of the world, our bulk sign feature allows HR teams to handle a large volume of documents with just a few clicks.
Our platform also allows HR teams to quickly proceed with dispatching the necessary contracts (job offer letter, confidentiality agreement, insurance, pension, etc) - whether individually or as a group - to the applicant for he/she to complete on any device. Through our platform, HR teams can send out multiple documents at once for team members to fill and sign. HR Teams will also get "play by play" updates of all the actions taken by the recipient(s), allowing HR teams to notify respondents whenever they are slow in completing each document.
Electronic signatures are legally binding in the United States, Canada, the EU, Australia, the UK, and in many other western countries. With every contract signed on our platform, a court-admissible audit trail is produced, which provides more documentary evidence of intent to execute than a traditional pen and paper or faxed contract. The sender has access to the time the document was signed, as well as the IP address, device type, identification of the signer, and location. DocEndorse’s electronic signatures are much more reliable than those taken from PDFs that have been scanned and emailed (see our legal section for more information on e-signature laws).
Our electronic signature platform comes ready with form validation tools built-in, which limits the range of characters that can be entered into a document, and in so doing reduces the likelihood of inaccuracies. For example, we have text boxes that only accept numbers and letters and other special characters, email boxes that only accept emails, and number boxes that only accept numbers. Errors are also minimised by setting roles for each recipient. A recipient who is required to fill only cannot sign a document, and those who are established as approvers can only approve. The sender of the document can also demarcate who should input data at what part of the document. Through these techniques, the need for hours of back and forth making corrections is reduced significantly.
In many cases HR teams have to collect additional personal documents from Job applicants, more so after he/she has been selected. Some of these documents could be a photocopy of an identity card, a voter ID, copies of transcripts, or reference letters. Traditionally this would require another round of back and forth between the candidate and the HR team. Using our platform, these documents can be requested, at the same time as the request to sign and fill is sent. Our advanced authentication system allows users to securely submit the documents to the organisation while he/she is in the process of filling and signing the contract.
With our bulk sign feature, HR teams can streamline the recruitment process, and handle document signing more efficiently when dealing with a large number of job applicants. The process is quite simple. You get all the applicants' name, and email address in a single CSV file, which is then uploaded to our bulk sign workflow. You then find and select a template, and our platform will process and dispatch all 100 signature requests automatically. Each individual request can be tracked using our request page, or you can track the progress of the batch, using the batch page. This will cut the time and the paper work involved in onboarding a large number of staff members, freeing resources that can used elsewhere in your organisation.
Electronic signatures is very useful for employers that want to secure top quality talent. More and more young people prefer to work for corporations that have environmentally friendly policies. Using electronic signatures allow corporations to significantly cut down on the use of paper and ink, thereby saving the number of trees that have to be cut down every year. Furthermore, in large corporations with a footprint in many countries, or a large workforce stretching into the hundreds of thousands, the cost savings in paper and ink could amount billions of dollars per year.
In many instances it is highly beneficial for recruiters to keep records of communications between themselves and job candidates. Such records are a very important resource when involved in litigation or government audits. Our platform tracks all communications with signatories done through our platform whether it be by text message, WhatsApp, or email. A historical record of the these communications is available in the "get information" section of each e-signature request. You can also choose to be auto cc'd on all e-signature emails dispatched from our platform, allowing you to keep track of each communication directly in your inbox of choice.
Electronic signatures are a turnkey option to make your organisation more customer-centric, and innovative. With the readily accessible data that our platform naturally generates, companies can also speed up their operations and become more agile. HR team members can release a lot of the mental space that gets taken up with paperwork, so that they can focus on finding and keeping top talent. DocEndorse encourages HR teams to impress potential job applicants with extraordinary convenience, as this is a low “hanging fruit” in creating a good brand reputation among potential candidates, and it sets the tone for employee expectations coming into your organisation.