How Automated Document Management enables more efficient recruitment and onboarding

When the CIPD surveyed 1,000 HR leaders in 2024, they found 69% believed competition for talent had increased over the last year, and 64% reported difficulties attracting applicants. To succeed in this ultra-competitive labour market, moving fast is vital to engage the best candidates.

But at so many pivotal moments, recruiters are slowed down by managing and processing documentation, whether it’s application documents like CVs and cover letters or hiring documents like offer letters, contracts and all new employers’ documentation. If you’re hiring at volume, the administration burden becomes even more daunting.

Automating document management tasks offers under-pressure HR teams a pathway to greater efficiency, productivity, and effectiveness. For example, we helped fast-growing retailer B&M to cut their employee onboarding times from two weeks to just 48 hours by replacing complicated paper forms with streamlined, automated document workflows.

Cutting-edge automated document management solutions serve as the cornerstone of faster, seamless workflows. Integrating automation into the hiring cycle enhances the experience for recruiters and candidates, and improves key metrics, such as time to hire and quality of hire.

A pie chart highlighting a 69% statistic.

69% of HR leaders believed competition for talent had increased over the last year.

What is automated document management?

Automated document management is a form of process automation—a method of streamlining working by replacing human input with automated workflows. When you deploy automated document management, you gain a rich ecosystem of digital tools to process and store critical information and documentation. Automated solutions enable you to automatically generate, capture, classify, share, track, approve, and archive documents, all in one centralised platform.

During recruitment and onboarding, there are many document management tasks to handle, from creating job advertisements to storing signed employment contracts. Candidate information often needs to be gathered from various documents and entered in HR and applicant tracking systems (ATS). This can be tedious, repetitive, and time-consuming when completed manually.

Automated document management enables more consistent, structured, and agile recruitment and onboarding processes. If you are ramping up recruitment to support organisational growth, automated workflows make it easier to process higher volumes of applications and hires.

How does automation optimise recruitment and onboarding workflows?

One of the key steps in the automation journey is engaging members of the recruitment team and gathering feedback on current document processes. Mapping out pain points helps you to identify areas where automation delivers the greatest impact. Leading enterprises have made major improvements with automation in the following areas: Leading organisations have achieved significant benefits by embedding automation into their recruitment and onboarding processes, including:

1. Streamlined recruitment and onboarding

The latest document management applications can automatically generate and distribute items to candidates and internal HR stakeholders. This can cover application forms and questionnaires at the start of the process, job offers and contracts when recruiters are ready to hire, and onboarding documents to help prepare for day one of employment. Centralised storage also enables HR to operate in a truly agile fashion, using quick keyword searches to find relevant documents.

2. Digital approvals

Multiple recruitment and onboarding steps require formal sign-off and authentication from internal management and candidates. Automated document management systems offer tools that enable users to verify documents digitally, and eliminate the extra time and expense incurred when posting paper forms. They also automatically send updates and reminders so that the review and approval processes don't get stuck. E-signature integration can also help teams manage contracts and signatures digitally, keeping the entire workflow streamlined.

3. Enabling data-driven compliance and security

Whenever recruiters edit or update documents, automated document management solutions can track and log changes, and store all previous versions for easy reference. This ensures you can access the most recent version of all items, as well as providing a full audit trail, with full details of when, why, and who made amendments.

4. Optimised information processing

Modern document management systems offer seamless integration with many specialist ATS and HR information systems (HRIS). When documents arrive, automated solutions can read, extract, and then transfer data directly to the ATS or HRIS, replacing redundant manual entry.

5. Enhanced data protection

Automated document management solutions store incoming documents in a central repository, with robust security protocols and access controls to protect personal data and ensure compliance with GDPR, the Data Protection Act and other protection regulations.

A real-world impact

B&M, a major retailer, experienced firsthand the benefits of automated document management. By replacing the paper forms that were posted to head office, with automated workflows, they reduced onboarding times streamlining their onboarding process, and scaling their operations to add up to 100 employees per week.

This aligns with the findings of the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), which revealed that more than two in three HR professionals have reduced time to fill open roles with automation.

Read full customer story here

Find a trusted Document Management Partner

The success of your automation journey depends on detailed planning, early user engagement, a solution that supports automation at scale, and an expert partner. From initial consultation to the solution rollout, your partner will help you to avoid common pitfalls and ensure that you achieve rapid time to value. Ongoing training and support will smooth your transition to the new ways of working.

Automated document management holds the power to transform the speed and efficiency of your recruitment workflows. As automation handles previously manual work, recruiters naturally focus on strategic priorities that will drive organisational success.

Learn more about Ricoh's document automation solutions

Want to learn more about recruitment and onboarding automation?

Download our guide, "The Future of Hiring: Unlock Efficiencies with HR Document Automation", and see real-life results from companies using document automation in HR.

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