Antidotes to slow hiring
for time-starved HR
managers and teams
6 ways eSignatures speed up
recruitment and onboarding

The rising cost of slow hiring(and how to fix it)

Employee demand is at an all-time high and business leaders are
pessimistic about it changing, with nearly 70% believing thetalent pool is shrinking. 

Is hiring getting harder? 

By all accounts, yes.

As Dayne Nash, VP of Global Channels at PageUp explains,“Hiring is more competitive than it’s been in a decade. There are
more jobs available and employees are reconsidering who theywant to work for and where they want to work.” But finding talent isn’t just getting harder, it’s also getting more
expensive. The average vacancy costs a company $500 a day andthe average job interview process takes 27.5 days. That’s nearly$14,000 before an employee even starts to contribute.

The problem is, as competition for talent increases, it extends thetime to hire new employees, further driving up these costs.

While you could stay the course and hope the job market
shifts, a more pragmatic approach is to look inward and trim
the fat to unlock more agility in your hiring process.

And one such hiring process that’s a sticking point isagreement signing. However, there’s already a solution.
eSignatures are a fast and easy way to significantly increase
your hiring speed by:

Removing friction from your hiring experienc
Automating parts of the job offer proces
Reducing negotiation amendment time
Automating onboarding for a smoother new-hireexperience

Ready to inject pace into your hiring process? Dive in to learn
how eSignatures are increasing HR teams’ hiring speed in thiscompetitive employment landscape.

“Hiring is more competitive than it’s been ina decade. There are more jobs available
and employees are reconsidering who theywant to work for and where they want towork.”— Dayne Nash, VP of Global Channels at PageUp

#1

Create a fast, frictionfree hiring experience
Paperwork is one of the necessary evils holding back the quality
and speed of your hiring experience. Sure, a candidate might look
past a single request to download a document, sign it using thirdparty software, reupload it, attach it to an email, and then send itback. But expecting candidates to go through this again and again
in the hiring journey—for an NDA, then an offer letter, and thenbackground checks, and potentially more—is a big ask.

A smooth and fast hiring experience, however, can be thedifference between hiring good talent and great talent. In fact,companies that invest in their candidate experience improve thequality of recruits by 70%. 

“If you're not good at replying quickly to candidates you're goingto lose them to someone who's better and quicker. So if you're
just pushing them through to your applicant tracking system,
and your old 26 minute and 37 step application process, then
you're going to lose and your cost of acquiring talent is going tobe too high,” says Craig Fisher, founder of employer brand andrecruitment marketing strategy firm TalentNet Media.

So how do you deliver a great candidate experience whencandidates are faced with unavoidable NDAs, contracts, W9s,
and so on?

Simplify your signing
process with embedded
eSignatures
eSignatures eliminate the lengthy download-sign-upload-send
process by embedding directly into your website or app. Thatmeans candidates don’t have to leave your experience to sign
documents—no third-party tools, switching tabs, or email-checking—the entire signing experience becomes one cohesive interaction.

What’s more, because these important forms are embedded into
your website, candidates can sign from anywhere, on any device.

“If you're not good at replying quickly to
candidates you're going to lose them tosomeone who's better and quicker. So if
you're just pushing them through to yourapplicant tracking system, and your old26 minute and 37 step application
process, then you're going to lose andyour cost of acquiring talent is going tobe too high,”— Craig Fisher, founder of employer brand andrecruitment marketing strategy firm, TalentNet MediaCustomer story

How Fountain cut its signing time
down to 6 minutes
The hourly workforce—the biggest source of jobs in the UnitedStates and globally—is highly mobile and eager to start working as
rapidly as possible. So Fountain’s customers, the businesses
recruiting this mobile workforce, must move quickly to hire.‍And
critical to that speed is guiding applicants to the final contract
signing stage fast. 

By integrating eSignature functionality, applicants only spend an
average of 6 minutes signing documents—compared to an averageof 43 minutes with other signature methods. Reducing the averagetime it takes to move candidates through this stage significantly
improves Fountain’s customers’ time-to-hire and time-to-fill.

This eSignature step also eliminates the need for applicants totoggle between two different interfaces or open new browsers tofind and sign documents. Instead, they can sign in one cohesiveworkflow. 

“At Fountain, we strive to provide a seamless branded experience
across corporate sites and customized job directories,” says SeanBehr, CEO of Fountain. “Automated document signing supports
this, allowing candidates to apply for jobs on the go and moveswiftly to be hired.”

#2
The good news is, a lot of these time-consuming tasks arerepetitive—making them ripe for automation. “Automation is a
critical concept in hiring. If we can automate or have workflowsthat take care of tasks like paperwork, I don't have to sit there worry
about it. I can focus on all those other 87 things that demand myattention, and I can perform at my very best,” says Ben Eubanks,HR analyst and Chief Research Officer, Lighthouse Research &Advisory.

HR teams can use sophisticated eSignature tools to cut document
prep time down to minutes—so hiring teams can focus ondelivering a great first day, week, and month for new hires.

Reduce repetitive hiring and onboarding admin with eSignature

Automate the job-offer
signing process
Though it can be a hassle for candidates to sign documents likeNDAs and W9s, it’s an even bigger burden on your team whoprepare, personalize, and send them. It’s this type of admin thatchews up a massive 40% of HR teams’ time and slows down thehiring process.

templates. With eSignatures, you can templatize all of the repeat
documents in the hiring and onboarding process.

Take a standard NDA, for instance, a document that rarely changes
aside from the name of the signer. With eSignatures, you cantemplatize this mostly generic document, and then every time youneed to send a new NDA to a candidate, it’s as simple as filling in acandidate’s name and pressing send.

#3
Track candidate signing
progress in real time
There’s nothing worse than sending documents to a candidate andnot hearing back. Did they miss my email? Have they changed theirmind? Should I reach out or is it too soon?
It’s a worry for so many hiring teams. And worse, it slows down thehiring process because you can’t move on to another candidate.
You’re left waiting. Wondering. Hoping.

And it’s only becoming more common. “Very few candidates have aspreadsheet of everything they've done. So if you're not reachingback out, the burden is on the employer. Ghosting happens
because employers are not good at following up and they don't
have a good methodology for it.” explains Craig Fisher.

But with eSignature, you have greater visibility over candidates’
signing progress so you know when you need to follow up.

Track job offer progress and automatically follow up witheSignatures  

With digital eSignatures, once you send a document to be signed,
you can follow its exact status— unopened, opened, signed. What’smore, if a document requires more than one person’s signature, youcan see exactly who the document is with.

Plus, Dropbox Sign can automatically send reminders to candidates
who have yet to sign documents so you don’t have to waste timechasing errant signatures.

#4
Reduce offer negotiation
times
With more choice than ever, candidates have more negotiating
leverage—and they’re using it.

"We're seeing an increase in salary expectations. Now top talent has
multiple choices, as you can imagine, so we're actually seeing an
increase in counter-offer activity,” explains Sally Sourbon, VP Global
Talent EMEA at ServiceNow.

And every time a detail changes, it requires your team to prepare an
entirely new offer letter. More annoyingly, every party has to sign thedocument again, and that means starting the entire signing processfrom scratch. 

That means at best, your candidate waits patiently while you prep andsend new documents—which could add just as much anxiety on theirend as you may have about making the hire. At worst, the candidate

The problem is, negotiating terms of employment can often deteriorate

gets frustrated with delays between new terms and accepts anotherinto a long and tedious back-and-forth over terms and details. Thatoffer. It’s a lose-lose.

means, when it comes to securing your preferred candidate, speedmatters.

The faster you can move candidates through the negotiation phase,the greater your chances of securing and retaining them.

“How quickly you turn a contract around matters. Depending on therole, negotiations can drag out. The more senior the role, the more

Amend job offer details faster with eSignatures

negotiation the more back and forth. And those are the people in more

Sophisticated eSignature tools with programmable logic makedemand, right? So the simpler you can make that process, the fasteryou can turn around the contract, the quicker you can make that makethat offer and hire them,” says Ben Eubanks.

managing multiple stakeholder signatures faster and easier. Instead ofwaiting for a manager or CEO to sign and send back a document andthen manually send it on to the candidate, with custom logic you canlay out the order you want your documents signed and the eSignature
tool will automatically send it to each party in that order.

“So the faster you can turn around thecontract, the quicker you can make thatmake that offer and hire them.”— Ben Eubanks, HR analyst and Chief Research Officer,
Lighthouse Research & Advisory

#5

Automate onboarding for animproved new-hire experience

A great onboarding experience can improve employee
retention by 82%. But when the average new hire
onboarding experience consists of 54 activities—and58% of organizations say their onboarding workflow isfocused on process and paperwork—that’s easier said
than done.

To deliver a more rewarding onboarding experiencemeans finding ways to get paperwork out of the way
fast, so you can give new hires the attention they need.

Help make onboarding about people, notpaperwork, with eSignatures

With eSignature automation, you can upload all of the firstday documents a new hire needs to read and sign, and thenschedule them to be automatically sent as one package on
their start date.

What’s more, because so many of these documents aregeneric, you can create templates so each new-hire document
only takes a fraction of the time to prepare.  

This means you don’t have to collate everything together
every time there’s a new hire, and it’s ready to go on day one.

“ To deliver a more rewarding
onboarding experience means
finding ways to get paperwork out of
the way fast, so you can give new“hires the attention they need.

— Ben Eubanks, HR analyst and Chief Research Officer,
Lighthouse Research & Advisory

Customer story

How Greenhouse processes over
10,000 signature requests every month
Signing and organizing stacks of confidential HR paperwork is apain for new hires and HR professionals alike. Greenhouserecognized this pain in their customers’ HR workflows and decided
to fix it by embedding eSignatures into its onboarding solution. 

By implementing Dropbox Sign, Greenhouse’s hiring teams andmanagers no longer juggle piles of documents or force candidates
to log in to different eSignature systems. Instead, they have astructured and automated onboarding process that sets new hires
up to become productive and active employees from the moment
they accept their offer letter.

“The goal of Greenhouse Onboarding is to create an automatedand seamless experience for new hires to become productive andactive members of the company faster. The HelloSign [nowDropbox Sign] eSignature integration serves as an importantpart of this to provide our customers with a seamless anduninterrupted onboarding experience,” says Aaron Gibralter,
Director of Product Engineering.

And Dropbox Sign has been in hot demand since its adoption,
handling over 10,000 signature requests every month#4
Build a hiring experiencecandidates trust
A trustworthy process is fundamental to an effective
hiring experience. It’s understandable given the numberof personal details candidates are asked to share—
name, address, SSN, and the like. 

So when you send customers to a third-party website orforce them to use off-brand software to sign documents,
you’re introducing doubt and confusion into your newhire journey.

At worst, this can make candidates second-guess theirdecision and at best it creates delays in the signing
process as candidates double-check everything islegitimate. Either way, you’re losing time.

Custom-brand your hiring experience for total
candidate confidence

Custom-branded eSignature tools let you make thesigning experience look and feel exactly like your brand.
You can add your fonts, colors, logos, and more, whichremoves confusion as to which company candidates are
dealing with—removing doubt and distractions
throughout the signing process.
Combine custom-branding and embedded signing
for the ultimate user experience

Dropbox Sign eSignatures combine embedded signing
and a custom-branded experience that guides
candidates through a distraction-free signing workflow.
And from what we’ve seen, this significantly reduces
bounce rates and improves document completion by asmuch as 28%.

Speed up your new-hireprocess today
As hiring becomes increasingly competitive, eSignatures won’t help you
find more quality candidates, but they will help you lower the cost ofsecuring and retaining the great candidates you do find with a smooth,human-centric process for everyone involved.

Whether it’s removing friction from your candidate experience or creating
more efficient ways for your team to process hiring and onboarding
documents, eSignatures are a sure-fire way to add speed—and thereforesavings—to your hiring.

If speed is something your HR processes could use, check out Dropbox
Sign. Its extensive features—from custom branding to custom logic—arebuilt to speed up your hiring and onboarding.

Let’s talk about how we can speed up your hiring and onboarding processes.

Make Dropbox Sign
your signature move
Dropbox Sign simplifies work for millions of individuals.
Companies all over the world rely on the Dropbox Sign API
to power their applications, making it easier to close deals
faster, onboard new hires, save developers time, complete
documents without error, and much more. For more
information, visit the Dropbox Sign website.