A Better, Digital Solution for Hiring Workers in a Remote World

Businesses need to be more agile than ever and ready to adapt their hiring and onboarding practices to support a remote workforce. Whether it’s a start-up looking to add team members from around the country or an established company looking to open a new office, digital tools that expedite the typically sluggish hiring process are a game-changer. That especially applies to businesses that are currently hiring en masse due to seasonal surges or unexpected market demand.

For those companies—and all others needing to suddenly ramp up hiring and onboarding processes—time is of the essence. But getting a new workforce up to speed and integrated into existing HR systems with paper and manual processes is easier said than done.

Manual steps unnecessarily delay start times      

Far too many businesses rely on analog processes to add new members to their ranks, resulting in delays during nearly every phase of hiring and onboarding. In our current economic situation, delays are not an option. 

As a result of office technologies that still involve printing, scanning, emailing, and faxing, for instance, HR teams waste precious time on administrative tasks from the get-go. In fact, a recent HR Daily Advisor study found that more than 25 percent of HR leaders spend between 25-50 percent of their time on document process management.

So rather than focusing on effective recruiting strategies, HR professionals are manually sifting through resumes. And instead of taking advantage of pre-populated contract templates and automated status tracking systems, they’re stuck drafting and sending offer letters, chasing down candidates, and rekeying personal information between systems time and again. Adding to the complexity is the fact that most companies are currently operating with fully remote workforces.

But that inefficiency doesn’t stop once a hire is made. At that point, there are still stacks of onboarding paperwork to get through (from a W4 to state tax forms to banking information) before a new employee can get to work making a difference.  

The right digital tools can help businesses thrive

Luckily, there are ample opportunities to digitize parts of the process and speed up the hiring and onboarding of large numbers of employees. (In other words, HR will no longer be swamped, and workers can dive right in.) Docusign eSignature takes care of generating, sending, signing, and managing documents like offer letters and employee handbooks. And Docusign’s PowerForms feature further eliminates preparation time, enabling businesses to more easily turn around pre-built templates.

Once HR managers extend a job offer (and the individual accepts), they can take advantage of Docusign’s ID Verification for I-9 Onboarding. This digital tool allows new hires to sign their I-9 forms electronically using eSignature and HR can seamlessly capture and validate employee IDs. This is especially helpful now, given the DHS’s decision to temporarily delay in-person verification for remote workers. 

For those companies that do need to hire a large pool of workers at once, you can lean on Docusign's Bulk Send feature for sending one document to many people simultaneously—ideal for the high-volume distribution of important forms or employee policy updates.

And for anyone still worried that HR might still be wasting time copying and pasting personal information, Docusign plugs into existing HR systems like Workday, Oracle HCM, and Greenhouse, among others, reducing the likelihood of human error and compliance issues.

As business models change and companies must adjust their workforces due to our new technological and economic reality, automating a significant portion of hiring and onboarding processes will allow organizations to operate more efficiently. Not only will this save HR teams from unnecessary work and new hires from lengthy waiting periods, but companies will be able to more quickly meet the demands of the marketplace. 

To learn more about digital solutions that will make these processes easier, check out the Guide to Digital Hiring & Onboarding.