There are a lot of aspects that come into play for HR when you begin the process of making a new hire. You need to understand the requirements of the position to be filled, where to look for top-notch candidates, and prepare a boatload of documents for onboarding.
With all the important things HR has to do to make the hiring process go smoothly, they run the risk of letting something get lost in the shuffle. That can throw everything off and could result in an onboarding process that takes way too long for everyone involved or could even result in losing your preferred candidate to a competitor.
This is where the connection between eSignatures and hiring can make a big difference. By adopting an eSignature solution that facilitates increased efficiency for your HR team, you not only speed up your hiring but also reduce the potential for human error on key paperwork.
That is just the start of what a hiring process with eSignatures can do.
Confronting the Cost of Paper
Over time, the cost of paper builds up and not just the financial cost, but paper also costs time and space. Between filling out forms, waiting for them to be delivered to and returned from a signee, printing documents, and making and storing copies, using paper can be an albatross around the neck of a business.
Quality electronic signature software allows you to make more — if not all — of your hiring processes paperless. This means you don’t have to buy nearly as much ink and toner for your office printer, nor will you need to pay as much for postage or courier services.
It also means that you don’t need the physical space to store all those tax forms and contracts and the myriad other documents that must be completed as part of the hiring process. When all your forms are stored in the cloud, all the space you’ve been filling with filing cabinets becomes available for more productive use.
Electronic paperwork is also easier to search and locate. How much time does it take to rifle through drawer after drawer to find the exact forms you need as compared to typing in a few keywords to pull up the documents you need?
Embracing the union of eSignatures and hiring can also save your new team members time and money. Many millennials and people from younger generations don’t prioritize owning a printer or scanner.
If you email forms to a candidate to fill out and sign, those must be printed out and then scanned and emailed back. You have then forced them to go out, find a printer and scanner, and pay for those services. It needlessly complicates the process.
Electronic signature solutions facilitate an extreme reduction of paper costs for both the hiring organization and for the candidate being hired — costs in time, space, and money. But that’s just the start of the benefits of eSignatures to the hiring process.
Reducing Human Error
One of the dangers of filling out paper-and-ink documents is the risk of doing it wrong. Putting the wrong information in the wrong field or missing a required signature can throw your entire document out of compliance.
That can result in problems with tax forms, issues in external audits, or the simple extra time and cost of going back and filling everything out again to get it right. And even then, there’s a chance that a new mistake could be made!
Combining eSignatures and hiring processes is an excellent solution to the problem of human error. Take the issue of missing a signature. By making your documents digital and your signatures electronic, you can ensure that a stakeholder cannot submit a form unless all fields are completed.
Compared to a stack of papers covered with sticky tabs which can fall off to indicate key fields, a digital document that will not allow you to miss a signature is infinitely better. E Signatures take those risks of human error and set them aside.
Allowing Automation
Hand-in-hand with reducing human error is automating processes. Manually processing all the paperwork that moves through an HR office takes a great deal of time. But eSignatures allow you to streamline workflows by automating many of those processes.
Think about the documents required when you make a new hire — tax documents, direct deposit permissions, onboarding forms, background check authorizations, and an NDA. The combined time it takes for your HR team to process all this paperwork can amount to as much as half of their work week.
Embracing eSignatures with your hiring process allows you to automate much of the work that goes into processing those forms.
Creating and saving templates for your key documents allows you to automatically fill in relevant fields and you can structure your documents to pass to the appropriate stakeholder as soon as they’ve been signed. For example, if the form needs to be signed first by the candidate, then the hiring manager, and then the CEO, that chain of signatures can be established before the form goes out to the first signee.
Integrations Increase Productivity
This is an underrated aspect of the partnership between eSignatures and hiring. Something that is not often discussed is the way little distractions slow down a person’s ability to complete an important task.
One of the easiest ways a team member can get distracted is by hopping between different applications in different windows or tabs. A notification in one app might distract you from what you were doing in another app, and then your first task winds up on the backburner for a half hour or more.
Integrating your eSignature solution with the other software you use for document generation and storage allows you to automatically create your new documents based on your saved templates without hopping from app to app. There is no need to fill in an information field in one window, then export that file to another app to add the eSignature fields, and so on and so forth.
Something like Dropbox Sign — a leading eSignature program and solution — is designed to integrate with your full suite of enterprise document management technology. It is made to allow you to address your eSignature needs in whatever application you use to generate your documents.
Secure and Legal
Among the eSignature benefits in hiring is the security that electronic documents afford. Hiring documents contain a great deal of information that needs to be protected, such as your new hire’s social security number and other personal identifiable information (PII).
eSignature software that follows industry best practices will include encryption to protect sensitive information. Additionally, it facilitates tracking who has accessed which document at what time and what changes were made to that document.
There are decades of legal precedent that have established the legality and enforceability of electronic signatures, so any concerns you may have about potential legal issues with electronically signed documents can be assuaged.
eSignatures and hiring processes also combine to ensure the identities of all parties signing important documents. Thanks to multi-vector identification, you can be much more certain that the person signing your document is the person that is supposed to be doing the signing.
Convenience for Your Candidates
As previously mentioned, adopting eSignature documents for hiring takes the onus of printing, signing, scanning, or sending documents off of your candidates. This is especially good for people you have hired to work remotely or with a hybrid schedule.
Using eSignatures also shows candidates that you respect their time and value them as new members of your team. Signing documents electronically takes less time than pen-and-ink signatures.
That also means that if your candidate has been interviewing at more than one company, you could potentially have them into your onboarding process before a competitor has even gotten an offer letter out to them.
Remember, you aren’t just selecting a candidate to hire. You are also showing them why they should choose you. A hiring process that respects their time and makes filling out and submitting important paperwork simple and efficient shows your candidates that you value them and want them to start making a difference for your organization as soon as possible.
eSignatures and Hiring Benefit All Parties
Creating more efficient hiring with eSignatures benefits everyone involved in the hiring process. It benefits your HR team, your prospective candidates, and the departments that those candidates are set to join.
Your HR team spends less time generating and processing the paperwork associated with making a new hire and beginning the onboarding process so that they can focus more of their bandwidth on making your organization the best environment for your teams that it can possibly be.
Your prospective candidates are shown that you don’t want to waste their time and that you want them in your organization as soon as possible. It also puts those candidates in place with their new coworkers quickly, allowing them to demonstrate the value you hired them to generate sooner than they ever could have with analog paperwork.
eSignatures and hiring processes combine brilliantly. They allow time-consuming steps in your hiring workflows to be automated, thus greatly reducing the risk of human error. They also allow you to ensure that no signatures are missed and that every important stakeholder is notified when their signature is needed.
Whether you are hiring someone to work remotely, work in-office, or work a hybrid schedule, using eSignatures as part of your hiring process just makes sense. It saves time, storage space, and money.
eSignatures and hiring are a perfect combination. Our document management experts at TEAM IM can help you incorporate the perfect eSignature solution for you into your technology stack. Reach out to us today and eliminate costly pen-to-paper documents right away.
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