The Top Electronic Signature Features for HR Teams

If you’re in HR, you’re probably already familiar with the basics of using electronic signature technology to obtain signatures on offer letters, government forms, company policy agreements or other employee forms. But that’s just scraping the surface of the benefits of electronic signature for HR teams. If HR teams want to succeed in 2021 and beyond, they’ll need to start leveraging smarter tools and automation to better understand their employees and optimize their processes.

We put together this list of DocuSign eSignature features to inspire you to think about how to further enhance your document signing processes, streamline HR operations and gain new insights on your agreements and your employees.

Enhance the experience of sending and signing HR forms

The way you prepare agreements can have a huge impact on the signer journey and agreement completion rates. Here are some eSignature features that help you design a seamless signing experience for candidates and employees:

• Pre-built templates: Recruiters, HR managers and admins can leverage pre-built templates for some of the most common employee and candidate documents, like offer letters, I-9 and W-4 forms. Templates save you time and ensure accuracy by pre-tagging standard documents, ensuring certain fields are marked as required and reducing errors or incomplete forms.
• Responsive, mobile signing: When signers access an agreement on their mobile device or tablet, they expect a great viewing experience. Responsive signing improves the display of a document based on device type. This helps teams create a mobile-friendly hiring and onboarding experience by eliminating the need for pinching and zooming on a small screen.
• Smart sections: For agreements that include lengthier text, utilize smart sections to highlight the most important information on the page with other information collapsed or hidden. Candidates or employees can expand or collapse sections on their desktop or mobile device for a more enjoyable viewing experience.
• Signer attachments: Sending out an agreement for signature and expecting a document in return? With signer attachments, the signer can upload an attachment to the document they’re signing. For onboarding of new employees or collecting employee vaccination cards, this keeps all the employee information in one central place.
• PowerForms: Whether you’re a large or growing organization, your team will need scalable and efficient processes for common agreements like relocation forms, leave of absence requests or exceptions to company policies. With PowerForms, your business can generate on-demand, self-service documents for signature – easy to create and send and, for employees, easy to access and sign.
• Click: Clickwrap agreements are a great way to inform your employees of new or changing policies, have them consent with a single click and allow staff to manage versioning of the policy. You can easily keep track of who consented to which version and then have employees acknowledge receipt and agreement when you make significant changes to your policies. Since these are standard agreements, employees can simply read and click, offering a fast and positive user experience.

Simplify HR operations

These features will help streamline HR operations around agreements:

• Bulk send: Need a way to share a standardized document with multiple recipients at the same time? DocuSign eSignature’s Bulk Send feature enables you to send “one-to-many” agreements in bulk. Signed documents are automatically routed back to your team for tracking and filing.
• Conditional routing and advanced workflows: With conditional routing, you can rely on smart steps and logic in your workflows to get agreements processed. For example, once an offer letter is sent, if a candidate's salary exceeds a certain threshold, the document will automatically be routed to a senior executive for review prior to approval. In addition to hiring, HR managers can also leverage advanced workflows for employee relocation requests. As an employee fills out the request, they identify which department they work in and the agreement is automatically routed to their specific HR business partner.
• Agreement actions: After an agreement gets signed, what needs to happen next? Agreement actions lets admins easily configure rules to automate common post-signature actions, like automatically archiving completed documents to a cloud storage provider like SharePoint or Box, exporting data to a spreadsheet or starting other workflows in the agreement process. 
• SMS Delivery: For time-sensitive communications, many organizations have shifted to SMS as their preferred method of communication. SMS Delivery for DocuSign eSignature enables you to send real-time agreement notifications via SMS sent directly to a signer’s mobile device, whether that’s an offer letter to a candidate or a critical company policy to a group of employees.
• Pre-built integrations: DocuSign’s pre-built integrations with hundreds of well-known systems make it easier for HR teams to work fast in the software they already use. Teams can create offer letters directly in Microsoft Word, notify employees of company policy changes via Slack and send an employee handbook for signature via Workday – and those are just a few examples! Explore our integrations here.

Gain insights on your agreements

Want to take your HR agreements to the next level with analytics and insights? Get agreement analytics at your fingertips, setup automated workflows and better understand your employees with these features:

• Signing insights: Want to understand where and why your employees are dropping off on documents to enhance the signer journey and increase completion rates? Signing insights is a new data visualization tool that will help admins better understand signer behavior. Teams can view insights filtered by fields like template, device and browser used to fine tune the agreements you distribute and how you send them. This allows admins to optimize the signing experience for employees.
• Reports: The reports feature allows admins to get insights and real-time data from document activity. The reports overview provides a look at key metrics on your sent envelope activity, including overall envelope status, time to complete, and volume over time for the envelopes you send.
• DocuSign APIs: Beyond our hundreds of pre-built integrations, the DocuSign eSignature API also allows developers and admins to build custom integrations for their homegrown solutions or specific needs, so that all systems work together.

HR teams around the world are tasked with finding ways to put the employee at the center of everything they do. Without the right tools to drive automation and pull insights, HR teams are oftentimes found spinning their wheels on manual work. DocuSign’s eSignature features were built with HR teams of all sizes in mind, to take the work out of sending, signing and understanding employee agreements. 

Learn more about DocuSign for HR.