3 signs your HR contract process is broken - and how to fix it

A broken contract process makes it even harder for people and talent teams to secure (and keep) the best talent.

In this guide, we’ll run through three telltale signs your HR contract process is failing you, and what you can do to transform it. 

1. Contracts take too long to agree

Time is of the essence when you’re trying to secure talent - but a broken contract process can negatively impact this process, delaying the time taken to get signatures on dotted lines. 

If you're finding yourself losing hours a month to contract-related admin, explore how you can improve the time taken to:

• Draft a contract: Does your process involve copying and pasting terms from one document into another? Is there a high risk of human error? How long do you spend customizing terms or populating the agreement?
• Negotiate a contract: Does this stage involve multiple versions of the contract, lengthy back-and-forth email chains, and a lack of visibility on whether the candidate has viewed the contract?
• Agree the contract: Are you experiencing friction getting your HR contracts over the line? Does the process involve moving into a separate eSignature tool? Or, worse, does it involve printing and scanning, with a wet signature? 

US-based delivery giant Gopuff found that contracts were taking too long to agree manually, which was creating strain for the HR team as employee count went past the 10,000 mark. 

According to Luke Hextall of Gopuff’s people operations team, the old contract process “had around 18 administrative steps, which meant it took up to 20 minutes to onboard one rider.” 

This is an extremely common problem we hear from people teams who feel slowed down by the admin work of contracting.

How can HR teams fix this?

Having an all-in-one contract management platform like Juro in place made all the difference to Gopuff, with the people operations team saving 90 per cent of time on HR contracts through automation. 

Here’s how Juro can remove the barriers to agreeing HR contracts faster:

Automated contract templates

With Juro, HR teams can self-serve on contracts from pre-defined templates, reducing the risk of human error and ensuring copy-pasted terms (or manually drafted ones) are a thing of the past. 

Juro's automated contract templates can be populated in seconds and are an effective way to make sure only the most up-to-date terms are used.

HRIS and ATS integrations

Juro’s contract platform integrates seamlessly with HR systems like Greenhouse and Workday to automate the contract creation process further and move data seamlessly from one system to another. 

Through these integrations, people and talent teams will be able to generate offer letters and other HR contracts without leaving the ATS. You can also live-sync contract data with your people data and make creating contracts a breeze

Streamlined collaboration and negotiation

Juro brings internal discussions, external negotiations, and redlining into a single workspace, removing friction and uncertainty around contract versions and untracked amendments. 

Juro’s timeline feature even offers HR teams an audit trail of contract activity, so they can see how a candidate is engaging with the agreement and respond to questions in real time.

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2. Contracts aren’t built for growth

Having a contract process in place that works with ten documents, but breaks in the hundreds, won’t cut it for fast-growing businesses, or teams preparing for this trajectory. 

The truth is, what worked five years ago might not work for your team today. Your HR contracting and onboarding process needs to facilitate and enable growth, not inhibit it.

That’s a predicament that the HR team at Deliveroo found themselves as they approached IPO. To maintain their growth rate, the HR team at Deliveroo needed to communicate review letters to employees at scale and speed, but the system they had in place before Juro wasn’t equipped for this velocity, or for the complexity of these agreements.

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How can HR teams fix this?

Like GoPuff, Deliveroo found a solution in Juro, enabling the UK HR team to issue 1400 legal documents to employees across 13 markets - in just two weeks.

Here’s how Juro can turn painful and repetitive contract processes into scalable ones:

Automated approval workflows

Bulk actions for contracts

Deliveroo used Juro to mass-send review letters to employees, and similar bulk actions can be set up to mass-sign hundreds, or thousands, of documents, too. 

This functionality empowers senior stakeholders to approve, sign and progress agreements created at scale without losing valuable time to a process whereby they’re signed individually.

A secure and convenient way to sign

Juro's secure, native eSignature tool allows candidates to sign on the go, from any device, at any time. This means no more wet ink signature, no more printing and scanning files, and less friction at the point of signing for both sides! 

This functionality is perfect for enabling new hires to sign their new contracts flexibility - and a lot faster.

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3. Contracts block HR from hiring top talent 

You want to position your business as a modern, tech-enabled company - but your contract process says otherwise, both in the way contracts are written, and in how they’re negotiated and signed. 

Jargon-heavy documents make it difficult for candidates to understand what they’re signing, and this can have a negative impact on their earliest experience of the company. 

Add to that the multiple tools involved in drafting, negotiating and agreeing these contracts, and it’s easy to see why the experience of starting a new job might not be as exciting as it could be.

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Retail space rental agency, Appear Here, faced this exact problem with their contract process, which led to a poor candidate experience.

How can HR teams fix this?

Appear Here leveraged Juro to to help them create engaging, welcoming contract templates that were easy to read and sign. 

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They also managed to get HR contracts out faster by enabling junior HR consultants to self-serve on agreements, rather than legal blocking the process. 

Describing the shift in the process after implementing Juro, Sophie Salisbury, Appear Here’s Head of Legal says: “People started using Juro immediately - it’s empowered our employees to self-serve. This frees up a lot of time for legal and HR - it’s a massive relief”. 

By automating routine contracting with a tool like Juro, you can deliver a fast and scalable contract process that keeps candidate experience front of mind. To find out more about Juro and see the solution in action, fill in the form below to book a personalized demo.