The rapid transition to remote work over the last two years has shown us that the employee onboarding experience needs to be seamless, rewarding, and paperless. Onboarding is the first step in your journey with new employees and can have substantial long-term implications, for better or worse.
E-signatures have played a crucial part in digital transformation, but we need more
Even before COVID-19 impacted the hiring process, many businesses were already relying on e-signatures for important documents such as offer letters and employment agreements. Moving away from wet ink signatures created a plethora of benefits including:
- time-savings
- enhanced remote collaboration
- positive impact on the environment
However, e-signatures have proven to be just one piece of the puzzle when it comes to onboarding automation. In a remote work culture, having a quick and personalized onboarding process is crucial, especially given the unprecedented issues we’re seeing with employee retention. In November 2021 alone, 4.5 million Americans resigned from their jobs. With workers in high demand, companies are doing everything in their power to differentiate themselves from competitors. And onboarding is the perfect place to start!
HR teams need to create efficient and seamless processes
Onboarding necessitates documents and paperwork, making it a cumbersome process for both HR teams and new hires. To stand out, HR teams are constantly seeking opportunities to create an efficient and personalized candidate experience, while also facing resource constraints.
Reducing employee onboarding time
Reducing the time to onboard is particularly important for companies that have a high hiring volume, such as Seso. As with many industries, hiring agricultural workers requires a ton of paperwork including job applications, tax forms, contracts, employee eligibility forms, and so on. In order to hire new farm workers as quickly as possible, Seso had to cut down time spent on employee record management and onboarding using an automated solution.
Capturing accurate and complete employee information
Having complete and accurate employee data is the first step in guarding against employment issues. There are many potential legal consequences for failing to maintain complete employee records, including litigation and eligibility audits. But the need for comprehensive information goes beyond reasons of legality. New hires should feel amply prepared to hit the ground running on day one. And this means collecting all the necessary information from them before their first week so they’re not distracted by lingering HR needs.
Creating a seamless employee onboarding experience
Despite its well-known complexities, employee onboarding can and should be intuitive and easy. So, how does one create a seamless and engaging onboarding experience? Having a platform that can accurately capture and track all incoming employee information is a good starting point. New hires shouldn’t have to click 10 different email links just to access their forms, not to mention provide the same information over and over again. A document automation solution, like Anvil Workflows, can help you capture and manage employee data via secure Workflows, build custom experiences, and share data through existing software integrations.
Introducing e-signatures was a big step toward streamlining hiring through automation. With the increasing pressure to stand out from competitors, it’s become clear that employee onboarding automation has to extend beyond that. Investing in automating your end-to-end new hire journey can be the difference between evolving or falling behind.