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How to Automate the Employee Onboarding Experience on the Backend

by Celigo
November 19, 2020
You’ve found the perfect candidate for a role and you can’t wait to get them started. You are excited, right? If you’re in HR, the reality might be a little bit mixed. With hiring comes a careful balance of compliance and bureaucracy with the desire to provide the best onboarding experience possible for the new hire. In other words, as much as everyone prefers to focus on the fun part of onboarding (settling in the new employee), you first have to get past an undoubtedly massive checklist of paperwork and other manual tasks.

Here’s the root of the problem: an ATS like Greenhouse or Jobvite will serve you well during recruitment, but the transition to hiring gets bumpy because that’s when you start to involve many other systems. Some major examples include managing documentation on eSignature platforms like DocuSign and setting up the employee’s profile in an HRIS like ADP or BambooHRTo streamline the onboarding workflow and build the best experience possible for a new employee, you’ll need to integrate those systems together.

Today, we’ll show you how you can automate some of those mundane, logistical onboarding tasks with relatively simple offer letter integrations. The automated workflows outlined below are designed to automatically set up a new employee’s profiles on the backend as soon as they sign their employment contract. In doing so, you can significantly trim the number of mundane logistical tasks that you have to perform manually.

  1. Before you start, make sure you have offer letter templates prepared in your eSignature system. When you automate the generation of an offer letter, the candidate’s information will be mapped onto this template.
  2. Build an integration flow that syncs applicant information from your ATS to your eSignature application. When you change the status of an applicant to “Hired” in your ATS, the integration syncs the candidate’s information to automatically create an offer letter from a template. Once the candidate signs their offer letter through the eSignature application, their status will be automatically updated in your ATS as “Accepted.” It is at this point your candidate officially becomes a new employee.
  1. Next, you’ll want to integrate your ATS and eSignature applications to your HRIS. Following from the above workflow, when someone is marked as “Accepted” in the ATS, this automatically creates a new record for the new employee in your HRIS. Meanwhile, the signed offer letter will be synced as an attachment to the new employee’s record in the HRIS. This is a fantastic way to not only efficiently archive important documents, but to do so in a more secure manner than saving them locally and manually uploading them.
Although your HRIS will serve as your system of record for employee information from here on out, the beauty of sourcing personal information like name, address, and phone number from the ATS is that these were initially submitted by the employee themselves. Using personal information sourced directly from the employee reduces the propensity of typos (you most certainly have stories about fixing a wrong name or address entered on accident) and gives them the agency to submit their own personal information without requiring HR to act as a middleman.

Implementing Hiring and Onboarding Automation

With further integration flows, you can use the newly created employee record in the HRIS to automatically enroll the employee in constituent systems like payroll, training, benefits, and so on. If you want to see some examples of how those flows might work, check out our page on hire-to-retire automations.

You might look at the above and think: these automations look great, but don’t you have to be super technical to actually build these integrations? You actually don’t have to be technical at all; you can fairly easily implement these integrations with an Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS). On Celigo’s iPaaS, integrator.io, many of these flows are already pre-built as templates so the effort you actually have to put into configuration is fairly minimal.

Here’s some examples of prebuilt integrations you can just take and use on our platform:

  1. DocuSign – ADP: syncing and archiving offer letters as attachments
  2. Greenhouse – DocuSign: syncing applicant information to automatically create an offer letter
  3. Greenhouse – ADP: syncing applicant information to set up a new employee profile
  4. Greenhouse – BambooHR: syncing applicant information to set up a new employee profile
  5. Greenhouse – Namely: syncing applicant information to set up a new employee profile
  6. Jobvite – Namely: syncing applicant information to set up a new employee profile

Automating the manual drudgery out of the onboarding process is easier than you think, giving you the opportunity to build meaningful relationships with your employees. Stay tuned for further posts on automating specific onboarding processes, and remember that you can always reach out to us with questions at [email protected]!

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