Engaging Commonwealth Public Servants just got a whole lot easier

The deregulation agenda of the Federal Government continues to support further digitisation of Government. The latest instalment now enables the engagement of Federal Public Servants to be done 100% digitally as of today.

By Glenn Powell.

In the twilight of the 46th Parliament of Australia, a significant Regulatory change now allows prospective Federal Public Servants to sign their employment contracts with an electronic signature. Up until today, Federal Public Servants needed to print, sign & scan their employment contracts. This presented an unnecessary barrier to prospective employees, as well as delivering a sub-par experience on what should be a joyous occasion. 

For Human Resources teams across the Public Service, the manual processes of preparing and managing the employment contract and associated documents, presents a cost burden to agencies. With over 10,000 permanent hires last financial year, and double that of temporary hires, the impact of e-signatures on hiring costs is significant.

Our global research shows that conservatively, $50 of savings are available by eliminating paper when engaging staff. That's $1.5M per year across the Federal Public Service that can be realised as of today. Until now, Section 22 of the Public Service Act 1999 (Engagement of APS employees) was required to be completed in paper form.

With most Agencies having implemented digital systems for recruitment and onboarding, the need for paper signing presented the last barrier to being able to deliver a great end to end digital experience for new hires.

Yesterday at our Momentum ‘22 conference, I had the pleasure of interviewing Mohamed Hannaway, Organisational Development Business Partner from Forestry Corporation of NSW. Mo spoke about how Docusign has helped them drive significant productivity gains while providing a great user experience to new employees. He spoke about how their error rate has reduced, and that they can demonstrate to their audit teams the end to end process of onboarding, including the important step of filing the signed agreements in their EDRMS (Content Manager or as some know it as, TRIM).

Docusign’s Agreement Cloud, with our over 400+ Integrations can seamlessly integrate with your existing HRIS and Recruitment Systems, whether they are from SAP, Microsoft, Oracle or TechnologyOne.

Across Australia and New Zealand, over 250 public sector agencies already use the Docusign Agreement Cloud for secure signing of agreements. Our onshore data centres and our IRAP assessment to ‘Protected’ provides assurances that our Agreement Cloud platform not only provides a superior e-signature experience, but that it is a more secure solution than any other method.

To learn more about how we can integrate e-signature into your hiring processes, check out our list of integrations.

If you would like to discuss further how this regulation change can help your agency, or would like to hear about the other recent regulatory changes that enable boost to productivity please get in touch.

Glenn Powell is the Industry Lead in the ANZ Public Sector team at Docusign. He, along with his colleagues, focus on delivering seamless agreement solutions using the Docusign Agreement Cloud to Federal, State & Local governments across Australia and New Zealand.