It’s time to rethink HR’s digital toolkit, from hire to retire

By Teja Vora, Director, Commercial Marketing, Docusign

Hiring, onboarding, and retaining great people is the basis of growing a successful business. It’s a big responsibility that falls largely to HR.

Despite HR’s critical role in a businesses’ success, many HR departments are still stuck with outdated, paper-based processes across the employee lifecycle. But old ways of working no longer cut it.

To compete for and retain the best and brightest talent, companies need to move quickly and maintain a reputation of being a great place to work—and digital agreements are a key component.

Get great candidates in the (digital) door

In our always-on, hyper-connected world, the recruitment stakes are high. Outdated HR processes hurt your chances of finding skilled candidates in the first place, or closing candidates before they accept a competing offer.

“A clunky career site, a long, downloadable pdf job application, the inability of the candidate to interact with HR, or a delayed response from HR creates a questionable first impression which for many companies is the last,” says HR recruitment expert Ira Wolfe.

Speed and providing digital experiences are especially critical as millennials and Gen Z take over the workforce and expect employers to reflect the digital experience they’ve grown up with. Paper-based recruitment and hiring processes provide a terrible experience, slow HR down, and saddle staff with burdensome administrative work. In a recent HR Daily Advisor survey, sponsored by Docusign, 43 percent of HR pros said that document-related tasks take too long to assign and execute. There are many symptoms of outdated recruiting and hiring processes, including:

• Offer letters that candidates must print, wet sign, and scan, or fax

• Recruitment and hiring information that HR must manually rekey, introducing error and security risks

• Inability to integrate candidate data across recruitment and HRIS software.

The Docusign Agreement Cloud for HR eliminates these challenges by integrated Docusign eSignature with HR systems like Workday, SAP, Oracle and Greenhouse. With Docusign, Expedia Cruise Ship Centers increased the turnaround time for employment contracts by more than 10x.

No-hassle onboarding

Once HR has convinced employees to join a company, it shouldn’t risk alienating them with paperwork or an inefficient onboarding experience. A digital system of agreement makes it fast and simple to onboard new hires and customize necessary documents, including federal and state tax forms, benefits registration, and employee handbooks.

Not only will digital tools make it easier for employees and HR staff alike to painlessly and securely deal with the document load, but it’s also good for the environment—a top concern for millennials who make up the future of your workforce.

Docusign gives HR the tools to automate the onboarding process, allowing HR staff to focus on more strategic work. After adopting Docusign, San Diego Zoo Global eliminated 100 percent of errors from government compliance forms, including I-9 and W-4.

Simplify retention and day-to-day HR responsibilities

Recruitment and hiring is a huge challenge, but research suggests that it’s not the biggest challenge that HR departments face. That dubious honor belongs to retention. Digital agreements are key to providing a great work experience that benefits employees and HR staff alike. Docusign makes it easy to handle the documents and forms that must be prepared, signed, acted upon, and managed during an employee’s tenure.

The Docusign Agreement Cloud for HR includes features like bulk send that make it easy to send, sign, and track document status for common agreements like policy updates that need to be sent organization-wide, all within the HCM systems you’re already using. And employees get fast, easy, digital signing experiences.

Stress-free offboarding

Turnover is a reality for any company, and so is the offboarding process, which is laden with documents and forms.

But there’s no reason to leave employees with a bad taste in their mouths on their way out of the door—or to burden HR staff with manual, error-prone offboarding tasks. Digital agreements simplify the offboarding experience for everybody involved, increasing the likelihood that former employees will recommend your company. In fact, in Glassdoor’s 2019 “Best Places to Work” survey, 14 of the top 15 companies are Docusign customers.

In companies large and small, HR plays an outsized role in employees’ day-to-day experiences. It’s among the few divisions that every employee interacts with, from the first recruitment contact through the moment they sign off for the final time. By going digital with cloud-based tools like Docusign, companies save time, cut costs, improve security and compliance, and create experiences that allow both employees and HR teams to focus on strategic work to move business forward.

Learn how Docusign can help your HR department to manage the employee lifecycle, from hire to retire.