Reed Recruitment has made 95% of all new contracts paperless after adopting DocuSign‘s Enterprise Edition eSignature solution.
The employment agency has also reduced the amount of time it takes them to prepare contracts, from 30 minutes to three minutes, after deploying DocuSign’s technology.
Reed’s division responsible for recruiting for ‘specialist’ jobs picked DocuSign to provide a digital platform to replace a paper-centric process.
Businesses approach this division when they require technically-skilled staff for large projects, and the division then sources candidates from a base of specialist staff suppliers.
This process requires Reed to send out lots of paper contracts daily to those suppliers concerning new requirements, pay rate negotiations and other details.
Strategic supplier relationship manager, Debbie Legg, said: "We are sending out contracts on a daily basis to our suppliers. My team submits requirements continually as we win new clients and we need to have certain suppliers in place before we go live."
However, with a four-week deadline to sign these contracts, Reed frequently encountered issues like stakeholders being on holiday or out of the office, causing large delays to completing the contracts.
Legg said: "The process that we had in place before DocuSign was antiquated. We didn’t have any transparency into whether the person had viewed the contract or whether they’d redirected it, so the team would have to chase the supplier manually."
Since deploying DocuSign’s Enterprise Edition tool last year, Reed has digitised 95% of all paper contracts and now uses DocuSign’s templates to speed the preparation time of documents from 30 minutes to three minutes.
This has had the direct result of getting suppliers to sign them much faster, taking between two days and two weeks thanks to esignatures, compared to often missing the four-week deadline previously.
Reed employees can now sign documents out of the office via DocuSign’s mobile app, and all parties involved get a complete audit trail of the workflow, as well as automatic reminders to take actions.
The tool has also cut mailbox archiving times from up to three days per week to two hours per week.
Legg added: "Having it all centralised, reducing the paper burden, and having the ability to automatically route contracts to our director for signature are extremely valuable to us.
"It is extremely user friendly and intuitive. By creating efficiencies, it can free up staff to work towards value-added activities such as process management, as well as minimising the administration attached to the supply chain."
She said that Reed is now deploying the solution in other areas.
