Learn how e-signatures can revolutionize your HR processes, help you save time and money while hiring the industry’s top talent.

Busy HR departments are loaded with paperwork. And hiring a new candidate often comes with an endless stream of supporting documents, while getting signatures for each document can take days or even weeks.

As compared to the 5 days required on average for obtaining signed documents through traditional methods, e-signature solutions help in getting documents signed within 37 minutes on average. Wait for more benefits.

E-signatures in hiring

For HR to become a strategic partner to your business, you need to free up time for your team to think and operate strategically. For example, by automating the manual work that usually takes up much of your time. And that starts with one of the most labor-intensive tasks: hiring.

Last year, on average, the time-to-hire across all industries in the US was 3-4 weeks: the time was needed to complete various tasks from managing new hire requests to advertising positions and analyzing CVs to arranging and managing interviews, scheduling tests and assessments, and, finally, making an offer and getting a contract signed.

So how can HR teams win time and streamline the hiring process?

Here are 5 practical ways to improve the hiring process with eSignatures.

1. Make manual HR tasks become automatic

The time HR managers lose a week by completing tasks manually is around 14 hours weekly (in 28% of cases – more than 20h). That’s valuable time that could be spent on engaging employees and retaining your top performers.

A lot of this time is spent on creating documents like NDAs, background checks and medical permissions, job contracts, and staff onboarding forms.

eSignature tools allow you to templatize these so that most of the editing is already complete, you just need to update some important fields.

A “signer order” is another useful tool that helps you select the exact order people need to sign a document, while also automating the sending process. This keeps the contract moving and reduces the amount of manual processes you have to manage.

2. Make the signing process easier

The good news is: eSignatures offer a user-friendly and easy solution.

With sophisticated eSignature tools, all you need to do is to send a link, and candidates will have access to the important documents for signature from their internet browsers. No need to create attachments, use the third-party software, or print&scan. What makes it even easier, candidates can fill in forms and sign contracts from any device.

3. Cover the legal part of the process

From medical permissions to actual job contracts, HR paperwork has laws and regulations that need to be met.

In most countries, eSignatures are recognized as legally binding.

Check our e-signature legality guide

In fact, they have an advantage over standard ink-on-paper signatures. How?

They come with a traceable and court-admissible audit trail. This means you can see who signed where and when seeing the names.

Furthermore, templating important HR documents means your legal team can review a reference document at any time, knowing it covers all the legal and compliance bases.

4. Get things done faster

One of the biggest reasons for distractions (=delays) is switching between different windows and applications.

But simply by minimizing these distractions with smart integrations that let your team carry out multiple functions at once, you can tap into a whole new level of speed and productivity.

For instance: you’ve prepared an offer letter; now, rather than exporting it, attaching it to an email, and sending it, you can use a software integration to send it directly from the original document. By doing so you greatly save the effort and time spent on switching between the systems.

5. Surprise your new team members

Hiring doesn’t end the moment you have signed a job contract—it’s actually just the beginning!

Hiring new staff should be an exciting, positive experience for everyone that is involved—not a drain on your time and resources.

With eSignatures, it’s not only easy to digitize your whole onboarding pack and provide all the information and forms they need in one go, but also to surprise the onboarding employees with the speed and convenience of the internal processes within your organization.

Wrapping Up

The modern hiring competition comes down to speed and efficiency while digitizing your HR documentation streamlines the entire hiring process. E-signature software helps cut back on manual admin and meet applicants where they are (online) and deliver a legally secure and robust hiring experience.

Hiring new employees should be a pleasant and easy experience for everybody involved. And it is much easier with the right tools.

Check CloudSign features and pricing.