Onboarding woes? How to simplify the process using digital tools

Let’s face it. The employee onboarding process is anything but simple. Forms to fill out, contracts to sign, security cards to allocate … the list goes on. All this paper-pushing can become incredibly cumbersome and inefficient, and creates a pretty bad experience for your nervous new employee. Streamlining your onboarding process can pay off in spades, as we explore below.

First impressions really count

Aside from initial interviews – where, let’s face it, candidates are more focused on leaving a good impression than of forming an impression – the onboarding process is likely the first time that a new employee gets a sense of what it will be like to work for you. It’s during these early days of filling out forms, reading through policy manuals and setting up work devices that your new employee will either think, “Wow, this place makes everything so easy!” or “Yikes, what have I got myself into?”

Obviously, you’ll want to fall into the former camp. In fact, these first impressions can impact on the bottom line, helping you avoid costly attrition as well as getting your new employee up to speed faster. Research from Glass Door shows that a positive onboarding experience improves new-hire retention rates by 82% and boosts productivity by 70%. Clearly, an investment in improving your onboarding processes will pay off.

There’s this statistic, too (thanks Digitate). Employees who have had a negative onboarding experience are twice as likely to look for new opportunities in the near future. Ouch.

Making a great first impression

So what can you do about it? As a first step, you’ll want to eliminate as much of the painful, paper-based form-filling as you can. Streamlining your onboarding process to make it as smooth and stress-free as possible is guaranteed to leave a better taste in your new employees’ mouths. Throw in some sweeteners like a cute reusable coffee cup, or an inspirational book in their welcome kit, and you’re onto a winner.

The DocuSign Agreement Cloud for HR is a great place to start. Integrating with some of the world’s leading HR systems – like Workday, Oracle HCM and SAP SuccessFactors – DocuSign helps to turn your employee onboarding experience into a competitive advantage, helping to retain top talent and get them to maximum productivity faster.

Crucially, the DocuSign Agreement Cloud for HR eliminates some of the annoying bottlenecks that leave a bad impression on new employees. By automating workflows, enabling eSignatures, and keeping everything in one central place, you can eliminate stacks of paperwork and instead get forms filled out in a few simple clicks. Those digital forms can then land with IT, security and whoever else needs to know about the new hire, so they can set the wheels in motion for a laptop, phone, security pass and whatever else the employee needs. It all happens swiftly and seamlessly.

Using ID Verification to take things one step further

If you need to verify your new employee’s identity when they receive a bunch of onboarding forms – which is becoming more common in our heavily regulated world – then you can do it swiftly and securely using DocuSign’s ID verification tool, DocuSign Identify. For example, you can ask an employee to show their Australian driver’s licence and the smart system knows exactly what to look for to ensure the document is not fraudulent.

From an employee’s perspective, the benefit of using a tool like DocuSign Identify is the ease with which they can upload a pic of their driver’s licence to have it verified. No messy photocopying, scanning, and emailing – they can simply do it all from their phone when they first open the DocuSign document. It really is that easy, and gives your company a professional edge

Managing the process electronically is a win all-round

Implementing a system like DocuSign Agreement Cloud for HR can be done in incremental, easily manageable steps. For example, you might want to start with candidate offer letters – digitising this one step at the outset (because, after all, it’s all about that first impression, right?) could help you get offers out faster and win the top talent.

Then, you might want to think about integrations at the back end, so your HR staff can complete the entire onboarding process within a single platform to save time and reduce errors. It won’t be long before you are managing all candidate application and onboarding documents electronically, which is guaranteed to be a win all-round.

To learn more about how DocuSign can turn your onboarding process from a “meh” to a “yeah!”, get in touch today.

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