E-signatures and HR White Paper E-signatures and HR: How IT can help the business hire talent faster Collecting ink signatures slows down the hiring process. But IT has the power to solve the problem leveraging efficient SaaS solutions Table of contents 1 Getting signatures shouldn t take days 1 Business acceleration: Bring talent on board faster 2 Business agility: Make the organization more nimble 3 Trusted partner: Do business in a more secure way 3 Conclusion: Enable HR to work faster with a solution IT can trust 4 Checklist: How to evaluate an HR e-signature solution Getting signatures shouldn t take days HR has found the ideal candidates. They re anxious to on-board. But many documents to have to be faxed, scanned, signed, and returned and HR can t track where they are in the process before the organization can seal any deals. If it takes too long, the candidates might accept positions at other companies. To make matters worse, the cost of paper, printing, overnight shipping, and storage for all of those documents is eating up budget. In a highly competitive environment, it s hard to enough to find great candidates so when HR has found them, they don t want lose them due to slow, paper-based hiring processes. Lost candidates can mean a lot of money wasted on talent searches, plus the cost of launching a new search to replace them. And while it might seem like an HR problem, it s really a problem for the whole organization: Slow, manual HR processes that delay hiring can jeopardize a company s competitive advantage. The solution to this problem involves a simple fix that is easy for IT to implement and easy for HR departments to adopt. It requires minimal investment, software that IT and employees have already installed, and has virtually no learning curve. And it allows IT the chance to act as a strategic business partner by providing a solution that translates into a competitive advantage for the whole organization. An e-signature solution can speed HR processes by substituting fast, legally binding e-signatures for ink signatures and incorporating them into electronic workflows. With e-signatures, organizations can send, track, receive, and access documents from anywhere, on any device so they can quickly turn candidates into value-generating employees. This white paper shows how IT departments can lead the business toward a technology solution that makes HR processes faster and more agile all within in a trusted environment. Business acceleration: Bring talent on board faster All too often, IT departments are told that a new piece of technology will solve their problems. Unfortunately, the hype rarely matches the reality. Integrations can be painfully complex, deployments can stall, and software can turn out to be too complicated for employees to adopt. Using an e-signature solution, instead of ink signatures, can deliver huge gains in productivity. It empowers the HR department to accelerate the negotiation, new hire, and onboarding processes to quickly secure the talent the organization needs. And it speeds up these processes instantly with a click of the mouse so HR can seal the deal in hours, not days. Get offer letters and contracts signed more quickly With e-signatures, employees don t have to wait for offer letters and HR doesn t have to wait for signatures to close the deal. Send contracts instantly. HR can upload, customize, and send documents in a few quick clicks as easy as sending email. Send to one or thousands of signers at once. Make it easy. Enable employees and new hires to sign documents anytime, anywhere, on virtually any device. Automatically deliver PDF copies of the executed contract to all parties.
E-signatures and HR White Paper Page 2 Track and manage progress in real time No matter where employees are or what devices they re using, an e-signature solution provides instant insight into the status of documents. Know who, what, and when. In real time, HR can know exactly who has opened, viewed, or signed a document and when. Get instant access. It s easy to retrieve signed documents whenever they re needed on any device. Adobe EchoSign streamlines our entire onboarding workflow, reducing the average time from two days to under an hour. With greater efficiencies, our account managers can focus on spending more time with clients giving every account a personal touch, instead of dealing with paperwork. Meliza Barriga, Client relations and marketing coordinator, TargetCW Avoid missing deadlines. HR can get alerts when things happen and when they don t. Free up resources and cut costs Manual hiring and on-boarding processes aren t just slow they re also expensive. An automated, electronic solution can free up HR resources saving both time and money. Streamline workflows. Enable HR employees to spend their time on more important activities, such as the talent search and professional development. Find archived documents instantly. Automatic document archival provides an easy way to filter and search by recipient, company, and date so employees don t spent hours searching for signed documents. Save money. Help HR reduce or eliminate the time, cost, and environmental impact of postage, shipping, faxing, printing, and physical storage. Business agility: Make the organization more nimble IT knows that agility is one of the most important ways to measure its own success. That s why a cloudbased e-signature solution is an attractive option for HR and IT: It requires minimal IT resources to deploy and maintain providing the agility that IT and HR both need. Roll out quickly A hosted, cloud-based e-signature solution can be deployed rapidly to a small group or the whole enterprise. Get value faster. Organizations experience very few barriers to deployment and adoption an e-signatures solution can start generating value virtually on day one. Scale on demand. Test the process with a single client or group of clients. Then roll it out to the entire HR organization. Integrate with existing systems When the on-boarding process takes place manually and offline, it can t be integrated with existing systems. An e-signature solution unlocks value hidden in other systems, such as human capital management (HCM), by pulling contracts into the systems that HR employees already use every day. Leverage previous HCM investments. Elegant API components based on the functions of sending, signing, and tracking are easy to deploy, so HR can get more value out of existing systems. Integrate with other business applications. An e-signature solution with robust APIs allows customization according to established workflows. It can also integrate with popular business applications such as SharePoint, Acrobat, Adobe Reader, Google Docs, Box, and more. Extract greater value from proven business processes. E-signature solutions require few changes to existing processes, so they re easy and cost-effective to roll out to other parts of the business, such as procurement and sales. Bring more insight into your management processes. An e-signature solution illuminates parts of the contract process that are impossible to see with manual processes, giving the business the ability to maximize efficiency at every step.
E-signatures and HR White Paper Page 3 With Adobe EchoSign, we ve moved towards a paperless environment and streamlined our agreements with a tool so easy to use, groups across the company are pushing to adopt it. Matt Maimoni, Talent operations, Foursquare Seamlessly mirror existing processes When you help HR substitute e-signatures for pen and paper, they don t have to change any other part of the on-boarding process that employees and candidates are already using and they don t have to change upstream or downstream business processes. Don t disrupt. Nobody likes solutions that turn their processes upside down. E-signatures make life easier for HR by making contract signing a much faster process, with virtually no training required. Build on current business process improvement investments. Implementing an e-signature solution is an easy way to build upon your current BPI investments in areas such as contract life-cycle management and document storage. Trusted partner: Do business in a more secure way A cloud-based, automated e-signature solution can streamline and speed up employee on-boarding. But most IT decision makers want to know about one thing security. And many are surprised to learn that an e-signature solution offers exactly the security they need without requiring a large IT investment or complicated integration with existing systems. Trust in the legality of e-signatures Governments around the world have established laws that make e-signatures legally enforceable. In October 2000, the U.S. Congress passed the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act (ESIGN Act), making electronic signatures legally equivalent to written signatures. The ESIGN Act includes provisions to: Protect the consumer with appropriate notifications and disclosures Ensure technological neutrality and universal access Ensure authentication and privacy Create legal certainty and protection to prevent fraud Allow easy document access and record retention We implemented Adobe EchoSign to expedite the hiring process by managing documents more quickly and efficiently. Adobe EchoSign eliminates paperwork. Adobe EchoSign isn t just making our lives easier it s helping our candidates and customers as well. John Clifford, CIO, TRC Staffing Services Store contracts securely in the cloud Protecting HR contracts is critically important to organizations because they contain confidential or sensitive information. Although many IT departments feel comfortable storing documents on protected in-house servers, the reality rarely matches that ideal. Today, HR departments are most likely to work with contracts in one of two ways: First, they may work with contracts in paper form Vulnerable to loss or theft, and there is no audit trail. Second, they may save contracts in a personal Cloud storage folder Vulnerable to a breach or a stolen or lost device. This is not the level of security that IT needs for peace of mind. With an e-signature solution, your organization can store contracts in a protected online repository that is accessible from anywhere and simple to search. Passwords and permissions control document access every document maintains an audit trail that shows who accessed it, when, and how. Conclusion: Enable HR to work faster with a solution IT can trust HR organizations are eager to replace manual signature processes because they re out of sync with the increasingly mobile, automated way that employees want to work. That s why many IT departments are using a combination of e-signature solutions and PDF software to automate the signature process removing a major source of pain for HR. With an automated, end-to-end workflow that satisfies everyone who needs to sign contracts, HR works more productively and IT secures its reputation as strategic business partner. Thousands of organizations around the world have turned to Adobe to speed the signing process. From document creation and review to collaboration, Adobe Acrobat software streamlines the entire process by collecting all feedback and approvals in a single PDF file. Adobe EchoSign software moves contracts through the signature process, including sending, signing, tracking, and archiving. These solutions are low-cost, simple to implement, and easy to use and, in many cases, already deployed in enterprises around the world.
E-signatures and HR White Paper Page 4 Adobe s e-signature solutions are backed by rigorous enterprise security standards that millions of customers have come to trust over the company s 30-year history. Adobe invented the PDF standard and is widely recognized as the leader in more secure, reliable document workflows. Today, Adobe EchoSign offers: Dedicated servers in a state-of-the-art, SSAE16 Type II SOC 1 facility. SSAE 16 supersedes and replaces the Statement on Auditing Standards (SAS) No. 70. Backup of all documents and data, both on site and off site, at a remote facility. A high uptime and availability record monitored by a third party. Current service status and past service availability records are available online at http://trust.echosign.com. Secure HTTPS encryption of all site traffic and data access utilizing 128-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encryption. And Adobe EchoSign warrants that signatures collected in its system comply with the ESIGN Act of 2000. What that means is that in the unlikely event one of your signatures is challenged in court, Adobe will stand beside you. Checklist: How to evaluate an HR e-signature solution An e-signature solution can be a game-changing technology for HR departments if the solution offers the right capabilities. When evaluating an e-signature solution, make sure the software offers the features in this checklist. Sending, tracking, and managing capabilities HR can upload, customize, and send contracts in a few quick clicks as easy as email. Real-time tracking of contracts tells exactly when they re opened, viewed, and signed. Contract initiators can get alerts when things happen and when they don t. HR can present and gather contracts, even when offline. Integration with existing systems Solution easily integrates with the HCM and business applications your employees use. E-signature processes can be automated within the HCM system. Employee records and signed contracts are accessible from within the existing HCM system. Secure storage and access Documents are encrypted and stored in secure data centers that you trust. Secure passwords and permissions control access to all documents. HR can search for and retrieve executed contracts anytime, anywhere, on any device. Every document has an easily accessible audit trail and history. Signers identities are verified through multiple mechanisms, including knowledge-based authentication that uses industry-standard questions extracted from public and commercial databases. User experience for signing documents Recipients can e-sign contracts anywhere, anytime, on any smartphone, tablet, or desktop. The signing process is simple and intuitive. It requires no software installations or new logins. All parties automatically receive PDF copies of the signed contract. The solution lets people sign using software most users already have, such as free Adobe Reader. HR can brand the entire signing experience with the company s logo, colors, and messaging.
E-signatures and HR White Paper Page 5 Authorized Reseller Getting Started with the EchoSign Pod We re thrilled to be able to offer this Adobe Connect add-on that offers real-time document review, signature, and audit, right from within a live Adobe Connect online meeting, powered by Adobe EchoSign. System Requirements The integration is available now, and requires Adobe Connect and Adobe EchoSign, as well as the integration: E-Signing Pod for Adobe Connect. To learn more about the E-Signing Pod for Adobe Connect and how it can help you drive your business forward, please visit www.intesolv.com. www.intesolv.com 512.681.7272 info@intesolv.com Contact Us