The HR automation
toolkitAutomation is bringing
humanity back to HR
Consider this: On average, HR employees spend 40% of their time on
administrative work.

So how do we untether our teams from admin and free them up tofocus on the human parts of HR?

Ironically, the answer lies in not-so-human automation.

Now, you’ve probably heard about the promises of automation: fasterhiring processes, better candidates, etc. But why automate now?

As Enrique Rubio, Founder of Hacking HR, says, “Digitaltransformation has been accelerated over the past 12-to-14 months.
And that means that not only are more technology tools available,
but that there's also an appetite to use more technology to optimize
HR processes.”

And with millions of HR processes and tools out there—some good,some bad—it’s hard to know which are worthwhile.

That’s why we’re getting to the bottom of what a lean, resultsfocused HR team needs to thrive. In this guide, you’ll find out how
you can automate your HR processes toSimplify the recruitment proces
Deliver an onboarding experience that will keep employees
aroun
Glean actionable insights from your team’s dat
Improve employee experience

Let’s go!

Contents
1. Tip 1: Simplify the recruitment process 2. Tip 2: Keep new employees around with slick new-hire experiences

3. Tip 3: Glean actionable insights from your team’s data

4. Tip 4: Improve your employee’s experience

5. Conclusion: Tools amplify great processes

#1

Simplify therecruitment process
Finding the best candidate for an open position often means wading
through hundreds of resumés, conducting long interviews, andreading through mountains of paperwork. 

It’s a time-suck for HR teams who already have enough on theirplates. Plus there’s no guarantee that you’ll even find the best
candidate.

And that’s left many a recruiter asking: how do you source top-notch
talent and simplify the recruitment process so applicants have ahigh-quality experience that puts the company in a good light?

It’s a tall order, but automating different stages of the recruitment
process can save you time, reduce costs, help find the best candidate
for the job, and offer a smooth candidate experience.

As Enrique explains, “Recruitment has quintessential processes thatorganisations are trying to automate. It's low hanging fruit.
Automation can help recruiters with meaningless yet significant
tasks. Things like programming interviews and helping people
navigate the process of hiring.”

Shortlist candidates faster
Wading through a mile-high stack of resumés is a tiring thought formost recruiters. Not only are there mountains of boring
administrative tasks—shortlisting, organizing interviews, sending
rejection emails, and so on—but vetting candidates chews up somuch of your team’s time.

HR automation speeds up the entire recruitment process. As
Terrence Yong, Chief Business Officer at Pulsifi, a recruitment
platform, says, “Think about the operational efficiencies of justFast track interviews withvideo screening

having a machine do your applicant screening. If you've got a
particular formula or template in place, it doesn’t matter whether

Recruitment doesn’t end at finding good candidates though. One

you’re hiring 100 people, 1000 people, or 10,000 people. What you'reof the most time-consuming aspects of hiring is interviewing—

doing is codifying hiring so it's consistent, fast, and accurate.”aligning schedules, finding meeting rooms, and ensuring

And there are so many automation tools available. Applicant tracking

everyone turns up all takes time.

systems like Greenhouse automatically post jobs to job boards,

Automating parts of the interview process using video screening

compare job application data, and create a shortlist of suitable

is a huge time-saver. Tools like Vidcruiter invite candidates tocandidates based on your hiring criteria. 

record short answers to questions specified by an HR team,

Other more sophisticated tools can streamline and automate therather than live over video or in-person.

recruitment process further with automated emails, auto-reject

By removing the live face-to-face (or screen-to-screen) element

questions, and self-service interview scheduling.

from the hiring processes, HR teams eliminate an entire round ofscheduling interviews. What’s more, because they’re not live
events, employees can review suitable candidates at a time thatfits around their other work.

Customer story

Beyond automation: AI-powered recruitment
Cutting edge organizations have started using machine learning

And AI-powered recruitment platform Pulsifi is predicting with highmodels to optimize every word of a job posting. Job advertising

accuracy whether candidates are the right fit for the job and if anplatforms like Zoek use artificial intelligence to match relevant jobs

employee would thrive in a given environment.

adverts to candidates that have the right skills, work experience,and qualifications.

Simplify backgroundchecksSpeed up recruitment witheSignatures

The background-check process is also traditionally aGetting a candidate from ‘interested’ to ‘hired’ is often a matterlabor-intensive and time-consuming recruitment burden.

of speed. And while a faster hiring experience will no doubt

Linking your HR and recruitment software withbackground-check providers such as Checkr andGoodHire can automate the admin-intensive backgroundchecks, reference checks, and criminal record checks,
and speed up your time-to-hire.

increase your chances of locking down top-tier talent, one hintof an outdated or difficult process could send an eager
candidate running.

It’s why a slick hiring process is so important. 

Once you’ve sent an offer letter, you want it signed and returned

Automating this process reduces the risk of error andas soon as possible so you can get on with onboarding. That’s

ensures the right checks are carried out for the right role.

where eSignature tools offer HR teams a huge advantage overAs a bonus, it can also help your organization deliver athe competition. 

better candidate and employee experience—which isessential for hiring success and long-term employee
retention.

By digitizing the signing process, sophisticated eSignature
tools like Dropbox Sign remove steps in the hiring process andspeed up the entire process.

But more than simply speeding up the signing process,eSignatures also offer candidates greater flexibility by making it
possible to sign anywhere on any device, which means they cansign as soon as the contract arrives. 

Even better, advanced eSignature tools deliver an improved
candidate experience that is entirely white-labeled to matchyour brand—removing any confusion that could derail acandidate.

Customer story

JobAdder onboards 97% faster with Dropbox Sign
Having been in operation for over a decade, JobAdder is known as
the solution for recruiters who wish to simplify their workflows. Anda huge part of that solution is a smart alternative for handling (ordouble-handling) paperwork. 

By implementing Dropbox Sign, JobAdder significantly reduced
paperwork for its users leading to a faster time to hire. As Tom

Dyson, Product Manager at JobAdder says, “Time-to-hire isincredibly important, particularly for recruiters in the high-volume
or temp-worker space where they need to get candidates
onboarded quickly. Now, with the HelloSign [now Dropbox Sign]
integration, recruiters can get candidates onboarded in 30 minutes,
which is 97% faster than the previous manual workflow.”#2
Keep new employees
around with slick
experiences
Just as important as locking down the best candidate for theposition, is making sure they stick around. And this starts with thefirst impression of your business—your onboarding process.

The thing is, onboarding is far from simple—it demands dedicatedcommunication and information exchange between multiple
departments. Manual onboarding processes quickly become tedious,
error-prone, and a huge source of frustration for your team and newemployees.

“Humans are not great at consistency or following a particular
process. There's human error, especially when dealing with large
volumes of information. The place HR teams are seeing efficiency
gains is by having automation do a lot of the heavy lifting. And thenusing humans for complex tasks, because the machines can't dothat,” says Terrance.

Forward-thinking HR teams are making huge strides by deploying
automation tools that improve their onboarding efficiency of their
onboarding process and the experience for new-hires.

Create better first days for
new-hires

And when, on average, HR departments spend 40% of their time on
burdensome administrative tasks such as retrieving data from one
system and entering the information into another, there are some biggains to be had.

While everything might be new to first-day employees, theonboarding process is repetitive for HR practitioners. And that makes
it ripe for automation. 

But by implementing an eSignature solution, HR teams can eliminate
a huge amount of paper-based admin from the onboarding process.
Because rather than posting out paper forms or emailing PDFs, HR

Using onboarding software, HR teams can automate repetitive

teams can use eSignature tools to templatize forms. So once a form

manual onboarding tasks by—like a W9 or employment contract—is set up once, it can be used

Automatically sending out welcome emails

again and again without re-entering details.

Notifying managers and co-workers of which tasks need to be

As an added bonus, eSignatures slash storage and printing costs

completed and whenassociated with paper-based processing.

Setting up new hires with the technology they need using ITchecklists.

This ensures new employees start their employment fully engaged,
productive, and with the right tools, resources, and information fromday one. It also takes the legwork out of onboarding for HR teams.

eSignatures cut team admineSignature tools are worth revisiting for onboarding new employees,
too, because they eliminate so much onboarding admin. 

Customer story

How Fountain hires at Speed andScale with eSignatures

The hourly workforce—the biggest source of jobs in the United

process is getting an applicant to the final contract signing stage

States and globally—is highly mobile and eager to start working asfast. After turning to Dropbox Sign eSignatures, Fountain is now

rapidly as possible. 

processing 700,000 applications and hiring 96,000 applicants
every month.

Fountain’s customers, the businesses recruiting this mobile
workforce, have to move quickly to hire.‍Critical to the hiring

#3
Make the most of yourHR data
Digital software has made analyzing data sets accessible toeveryone. 

However, not everyone is making the most of the data at theirdisposal, as up to 73% of company data goes unused for analytics.

And HR teams are one of those business units sitting on a goldmineof data. But often they lack the technical knowledge to make themost of it.

As Terrence points out, “There are silos of information across HR
and it's difficult for a human to pull all that together. Today,
companies still consolidate and aggregate everything into massive
Excel spreadsheets and then try and figure it out from there.
Obviously that's not the most secure way to deal with very sensitivepieces of information. But it’s also an inefficient way of collectinginformation.”

Today there are easy analytics tools out there that can helporganizations track their workforce and measure how effective their
HR initiatives are.

Automation for simple
insights and metrics

Looking beyond standard
reporting metrics

Accuracy and improved efficiency of HR departments are the two
key benefits of HR analytics tool. But before you can glean deep
insights from data, first you need to collect, store, and sort it in a
usable format. 

Performance management is a dynamic HR process that tracks,
measures, and analyzes employee performance by aligning it withbusiness goals. 

By integrating analytics tools like intellihr into their core systems, HR
teams don’t have to aggregate data in Excel spreadsheets to unlock
insights anymore. Instead, analytics tools can automatically collectand process data to deliver insights such as turnover, cost-per-hire,benefits participation rate, and more. And with this information inhand, HR professionals can understand what’s working for andagainst their organizational growth.

Automated performance management software streamlines theprocess, keeps it bias-free, ensures accurate decision-making, andmakes it memorable for both employers and employees. And withthis information in hand, you can even predict how likely highperformers are to stay or leave your company.

Additionally, progressive HR leaders have begun to track and reporton metrics beyond traditional insights. Visier, an HR analytics
company, offers tools that measure the progress of diversity andinclusion initiatives and worker overtime trends.

#4
Improve your employee
experience
An HR team’s job doesn’t end with new hires. Keeping
employees productive and happy is a never-ending task
that’s always evolving alongside technology, culture, andglobal pandemics. 

And in today’s world, there’s an expectation that youremployees’ experience is smooth. “People expect consumergrade experiences. And that includes employees. Because of
their exposure to other consumer-grade apps, they wantsomething that's easy to use. They want integration of
information seamlessly so they don't have to go into
different applications,” Terrence explains. 

But keeping on top of these tasks doesn’t have to be an
overwhelming chore with a range of tools available toautomate functions and stay on top of employees
expectations.Make employee leave

Take the admin out ofrequests easy

expense claims

Managing leave requests manually is inefficient, to say

Before HR automation, HR administrators had to scan

the least. Data input, checking leave balances, getting athrough various Excel spreadsheets and stacks of paper files

manager’s approval, and recording the leave for payroll

to reconcile employee expense records. Then the HR teams

calculations results in an endless chain of back-and-would have to process every expense item into the financeforth emails.

system. It would also need to be reviewed and approved byInstead, there are simple automation tools out there thatstreamline the entire process for HR teams. With

their manager. Next, onto the accounting department. Thisis the process regardless of claim size. 

solutions like Kissflow’s time and leave management

Even with a detail-oriented manual process, expenses had

tool, employees track and manage their own timesheets

the potential to go missing and be filled with inaccuracies.

automatically, and leave approvals become automatedWith such a manual process, it’s no surprise the backlog

emails.

would bottleneck, causing frustration and fatigue. 

However, expense automation software is eliminating themost painful aspects of filing and processing expense
reports. Simple expense claim automation software cansimplify the entire process by:
Speeding up employee reimbursemen
Limiting errors
Removing admin for your HR and finance team
Reducing your expose to fraud

Newer tools like Spendesk have even created apps to makethe entire process fast and simple for HR teams andemployees

Conclusion

Tools amplify greatprocessesAll of these tools can help your HR team work faster, smarter, andat greater scale. But technology is only ever as good as the people
and processes it’s built around.

And more often than not, it’s processes that haven’t progressedwith technology that are adding more labor and frustration to theHR process.

Identifying these gaps and closing them—whether that’s throughdigitization or automation—is a sure-fire way to get more out ofAbout Dropbox Sign

any HR team. And one great place to start is with eSignatures,
which speed up the signing process and eliminate needless admin
for your team.

Dropbox Sign simplifies work for millions of individuals. Companies
all over the world rely on us to help streamline their HR processes,
making it easier to close top candidates, onboard new hires, andcomplete documents without errors. For more information visit theDropbox Sign website.