Lose the paper and win the talent with electronic signatures for HR

In the 12+ years I have been fortunate to lead efforts to enable Adobe to attract, develop and reward exceptional people, the workplace has undergone some powerful changes including continued globalization, significant technology advancements, flexibility and the acceleration of change. All of these have driven us to change the way we work and how we enable people to be successful.

In the technology industry, as in many others, the landscape for attracting and retaining exceptional people is highly competitive. In the U.S. alone, statistics indicate that unemployment has been falling for more than four years, and while I hope this trend continues, it does create increased competition for talent. Some research indicates that the top 10 percent of active candidates are off the market within 10 days. Moreover, slow hiring decisions by prospective employers can cost them as much as 25 percent more for someone with very similar skills/capabilities. It is a necessity that the team responsible for leading the talent acquisition processes is leveraging every available advantage, to secure the talent needed to drive the business forward.

Adobe’s People Resources (Human Resources) team works hard to leverage those available advantages and has made great progress in integrating technology platforms and solutions that let us effectively engage people around the world, contribute to our ability to grow our business, and drive time and resource efficiency. In 2011, when Adobe acquired e-signature leader EchoSign, we believed, as we do now, that e-signatures are a huge advantage not only for hiring and onboarding, but for business overall.

Given the success of electronic signatures at Adobe, we are extremely proud of Adobe EchoSign’s new integration partnership with Workday, a leading provider of enterprise cloud applications for finance and human resources. Both EchoSign and Workday are thrilled about our plans together, as we feel the integration will ultimately improve hiring team effectiveness, streamline the offer processes and provide great onboarding experiences for Workday customers and their employees.

We know first-hand about those things, because Adobe’s been using EchoSign as part of its hiring and onboarding process for years. For Adobe and its efforts to attract top talent and onboard them effectively, EchoSign has been instrumental in many ways – just as it has been for the many EchoSign customers who are using electronic signatures for HR. The powerful tool helps companies get business done up to 5x faster by enabling them to prepare, send, sign, track and manage important business documents – including offer letters and onboarding documents.

For Adobe, it took only a few weeks to deploy EchoSign, and the results were apparent. Almost two-thirds of our external offer letters were approved and returned within 24 hours; that number was closer to 80 percent for internal offer letters. We eliminated 100 percent of spend on overnight mail. In our first two years of using EchoSign for offer letters alone, we saved over 1,000 hours of time. We’ve also witnessed tremendous improvements with respect to workflow and coordination with other internal groups, including legal, compliance and IT.

The goal for my team is to help propel our people and our business forward. To achieve this, we consistently look for ways to evolve (and in some cases disrupt) our people processes. Implementing EchoSign is a great example of how we have leveraged technological innovation to be more efficient and effective in making an impact to the success of Adobe’s business.

Please share your ideas and insights on ways you have helped to evolve processes focused on people.