How Electronic Signatures Are Important for Human Resource Recruiting

Human Resources (HR) is a mission-critical department. Without employees, your company simply cannot meet its objectives.  Human resource professionals must be excellent recruiters and record keepers to manage every phase of an employee’s journey – from their initial application and onboarding to training, growth, and potential departure.

Given the demanding procedures involved in recruiting and hiring a workforce, it is no shocker that heaps of HR paperwork and a maze of filing cabinets come with the territory. Here is a post highlighting a few recruitment challenges and how Electronic Signatures HR can be implemented to overcome them.

If you had to name one stumbling block to your recruitment endeavors, what would it be? Honestly, your response will vary depending on the type of roles you are hiring or the size of the organization you work for. But, most HR professionals would gravitate to a few typical recruiting challenges.

The likelihood of losing your target candidate is very high if you have a lengthy recruitment process. The recruitment process ought to be short and straightforward.

Most organizations have a protracted hiring process that leads to an unnecessary waste of time and money, besides loss of interest from candidates. But how fast do you have to hire? According to a study by ERE Media, top candidates remain on the job markets for ten days.

HR professionals are directly responsible for managing employees within a company while complying with the regulations that govern employer obligations and employee rights. A company that violates these ever-changing laws exposes itself to endless risks, including financial losses, lawsuits, and reputation damage.

For instance, before hiring an individual, you must verify their identity and employment eligibility by having them fill out Form I-9. Additionally, during the hiring stage, you will come into contact with employee information such as phone number, home address, social security number, driver’s license number, and more. No matter the communication channel you are using; you must ensure this information is protected.

Candidate experience is crucial, especially when top candidates are weighing your employment offers. How you treat applicants during the recruitment process reflects how you will treat them once they are fully hired. A negative experience may make candidates less willing to accept job offers. On the contrary, positive candidate experiences can improve your employer’s brand and persuade top candidates to apply and take up your job offers.

Considering the above challenges, how can HR professionals save time and simplify recruitment? Below are ways to enhance the recruitment and hiring process with electronic signatures for HR.

HR professionals lose around 14 hours weekly by performing tasks manually that could otherwise be automated. A significant percentage of this time is spent on recurring paperwork such as job contracts, background-check permissions, NDAs, I-9 form, and other onboarding forms. That is a lot of time that could otherwise have been spent on employee training and engagement.

Using an eSignature tool like Foxit eSign aka eSign Genie, HR departments can templatize these documents so that most of the editing is already done. In other words, the editable contract templates will allow HR professionals to modify relevant fields unique to the applicant, such as name, address, job title, salary, etc., without having to create an entirely new contract each time.

Furthermore, eSignature software can integrate with popular apps like Google Docs, Gmail, Slack, and Microsoft Word, so you can create and send documents for signatures directly from your preferred tools. For instance, if you have created an offer letter in Google Docs, you can use Foxit eSign aka eSign Genie to send it directly from the original document instead of exporting it and attaching it to Gmail. Obviously, this saves the effort of transferring information back and forth between applications.

When potential candidates have to juggle email attachments, PDFs, or perform the print-sign-scan process merely to sign an NDA or a job offer letter, it makes signing time-consuming.

The good news is electronic signatures provide an easy and faster solution. With Foxit eSign aka eSign Genie, HR professionals can simply send a link, and applicants can sign onboarding paperwork directly on their phone or computer browser. No need for third-party software, printers, scanners, or attachments. Once eSigned, the contract is instantly sent back to you to continue with the next stage of employee onboarding. Generally, this accelerates the recruitment cycle as electronic signatures allow candidates to sign their contracts faster than wet-ink signatures.

Knowing where your HR contracts are within the workflow is vital for productivity. Seeing that a potential employee has received a contract, opened it multiple times, but not appended their signature gives the HR professionals the go-ahead to follow up with the prospect and get the contract signed.

Some contracts may require multiple signatures from different managers. eSignatures allow for the contracts to be passed between managers for each to sign. As contracts go through the different approval stages from multiple parties, the administrator of the contract (HR department) knows where it is and can chase people up if needed to avoid delays.

From background-check consents to actual job contracts, HR documents have regulations and laws to meet. The good news is that electronic signatures are considered legally binding. State and federal laws uphold the legal validity of eSignatures and electronic documents. Actually, the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act (E-SIGN) and Uniform Electronic Transaction Act (UETA) expressly state that contracts cannot be denied legal effect simply because they contain electronic signatures.

One advantage eSigned documents have over the traditionally-signed ones is that they come with a court-admissible and traceable audit trail; therefore, you can see time stamps of when the candidate signed. Also, you can see if anyone tried to tamper with the document.

Internally, using the available templates for HR contracts means your legal department can review a reference contract once, and you can reuse it with assurance knowing it satisfies all the legal and compliance requirements.

We mentioned that great candidate experience is important. First, hiring doesn’t stop with a signed job offer – it’s just the beginning. According Gallup, a Washington D.C-based analytics and advisory company, only 12% of employees strongly agree their employer stands out at onboarding recruits. As a result, 20% of these recruits quit within 45 days of starting a new job.

Unfortunately, for most organizations, the first thing new employees have to do is sign dozens of documents. HR departments should do their best to abolish this as nobody likes their first day in a new job packed with the nonstop signing of physical contracts.

With electronic signatures, HR teams can digitize the entire onboarding process. That’s why; your new hires get all the forms and information they need in one go. Most importantly, they can sign it fast and effortlessly- this is particularly important for millennial workers, who comprise a significant percentage of the workforce. This generation was raised in a technologically-advanced environment and prioritizes using IT to expedite tasks that they find tedious or inconvenient.

HR departments have plenty to gain from the implementation of electronic signatures. Consider all aspects of recruitment and hiring that still depend on paper and see why digitization is important. Below are some of the documents recruiters can sign electronically to make their work easier:

• Letters to unsuccessful job applicants
• Candidate placement forms
• New employee detail request form
• Offer of Employment Letter
• Probation letters
• NDA
• Manpower requisition
• Employment agreement and contract
• Candidate evaluation form
• Employee handbook
• Authorization forms for payroll

Hiring new employees should be an exciting, pleasant experience for everybody involved – not a waste of your resources and time. And with the right tools, such as the Foxit eSign aka eSign Genie, you can minimize manual administrative tasks and ease the speed of recruiting new hires.