Salesforce speeds up global recruiting efforts with DocuSign and Workday

Salesforce recruits new employees across five continents to fuel its global growth. Each job market presents the rapidly growing company with different challenges to recruit the best and brightest. Timing is everything, and even the smallest details matter in the fiercely competitive technology industry. For Summer Ford, Salesforce’s senior director of recruitment operations, keeping pace with changing candidate expectations and the competition meant ditching paperwork for eSignature and digital agreements that integrate with the company’s existing HR platforms. 

Salesforce began its journey with the DocuSign Agreement Cloud for HR by deploying DocuSign eSignature in the United States in 2012. That sparked a global adoption that enabled the company to better engage with potential candidates and get hiring agreements signed quickly— without paper or manual processes. When Salesforce adopted Workday in 2018, the company used DocuSign’s pre-built Workday integration to connect with its new HCM system. 

Salesforce’s high-octane recruiting processes are slowed by paperwork

Before Salesforce digitized HR agreements with the DocuSign Agreement Cloud for HR, recruitment teams relied on paperwork. But keeping tabs on the status of physical offer letters and employment contracts strained staff and frustrated candidates. 

“Even several years ago, people—especially in the U.S.—expected to be able to sign on their phones and be able to turn things around quickly,” Ford says. 

According to Ford, closing candidates used to depend on whether an executive was physically in the office to wet sign contracts and offer letters—and on candidates themselves to return signed agreements via mail or fax. 

DocuSign’s integration with Workday enables Ford’s team of recruiting coordinators to close candidates quickly, without chasing signatures or managing piles of paperwork. The integration also allows Ford’s team to manage employee agreements and data within Workday, a critical benefit given Salesforce’s rapid growth. In 2012, when Salesforce first rolled out DocuSign eSignature, it employed about 8,000 employees. By 2018, the company’s headcount had eclipsed 29,000 employees. 

“DocuSign has changed the way we recruit and hire employees. At this point, the team can’t believe that we used to manage hiring by sending everything out on paper,” Ford says.

A digital recruiting strategy to match Salesforce’s reputation for innovation 

The seamless integration between DocuSign and Workday allows Salesforce’s recruitment team—and thousands of candidates—to complete the recruiting process digitally every year. Last year, the team prepared agreements for about 7,000 new hires, plus offer letters and contracts that ultimately didn’t result in a hire.

Thanks to the combined efficiency of both solutions, Salesforce’s recruiters were able to speed up the recruitment process and offer candidates a streamlined and modern hiring experience As a result, Salesforce decreased the average time needed to complete offer letters from five days to less than one. 

Digital agreements make global recruiting faster and error-free 

Recruiters at Salesforce, especially in Europe, are often responsible for hiring in multiple countries. As a result, they must contend with offer letters and other agreements in different languages and conflicting legal regulations. 

These administrative burdens could lead to costly human errors, such as keying inaccurate salary information in an offer letter. Now, local recruiters enter offer details into Workday, which is then automatically pulled into DocuSign eSignature. Once the offer letter is signed, any data that is collected from the employee is updated in Workday along with the completed offer letter. DocuSign’s global reach (available in 43 languages and used in 188 countries) and seamless Workday integration made it the perfect partner to help solve localization challenges. 

“It’s a lot less risky than having many different humans prepare important documents that are rich in detail,” Ford says. 

Moving from paper offer letters and multiple HR platforms to a single integrated digital experience with Workday and DocuSign has allowed Salesforce’s recruiting team to keep pace with the company’s global growth ambitions. That simply wouldn’t have been possible with paper.