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

A broken contract process can make it difficult for HR or people and talent teams to secure the best talent.

How can you tell if it’s broken, and how can you fix it? We explore three telltale signs your contract process needs improvement.

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 an HR leader with various tasks on your plate, you don’t want to sink more time than necessary into routine contract work. Instead, 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?
• Negotiate a contract: does this stage involve multiple versions, lengthy back-and-forth email chains, and a lack of visibility on whether the candidate has viewed the contract?
• Agree the contract: does this involve using a separate eSignature tool? Or, worse, does it involve printing and scanning, with a wet signature? 

It’s also important to understand where your contracts will be stored after they’ve been signed. When it comes to post-signature, ask yourself questions around:

• Managing the contract: where do your contracts live? Is there a central repository for documents, or do they live in various shared drives and on personal desktops? Are they automatically tagged so they’re searchable? 

If your answers to any of the questions in the bulletpoints are unclear, or point to a time-consuming or manual process, it could be a sign your HR contract process is broken.

How can HR teams fix this?

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 10,000. 

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 a super common problem we hear from people teams who are slowed down by the admin work of contracting.

Here’s how Juro can fix the problems in various stages of the contract lifecycle:

• Drafting a contract: the HR team can self-serve on contracts from pre-defined templates, reducing the risk of human error and ensuring copy-pasted terms are a thing of the past
• Negotiating a contract: with internal discussions, external negotiations, and redlining taking place in a single workspace, HR teams don’t have to worry about identifying the most recent version of a contract. Plus, Juro’s timeline feature offers HR teams an audit trail of contract activity 
• Signing a contract: a secure, native eSignature tool allows candidates to sign on the go, from any device, at any time - no more printing and scanning required!
• Managing a contract: post-signature, contracts live in a unified workspace, where they’re searchable and easy to access

Having an all-in-one contract automation platform like Juro in place made all the difference to Gopuff - the people operations team saved 90 per cent of time on HR contracts through automation. Find out how GoPuff implemented Juro in our case study.

2. Contracts aren’t built for growth

When your business is trying to grow efficiently, in an environment where every hire counts more than ever, the last thing you want is a poor contract process blocking that growth. 

Food delivery giant Deliveroo faced this problem as it approach its IPO. As our case study explains:

Deliveroo has a dynamic global workforce that’s growing all the time, with Juro powering its employee contract workflow. But for its compensation review process, it encountered a problem. The HR team needed to communicate review letters to employees at scale and speed, and the system they had in place struggled to cope.

Having a contract process in place that works with ten documents, but breaks in the hundreds, can cause several problems, including:

• Slowing the business down when it comes to securing top talent
• Causing friction between teams
• Delivering an unsatisfactory candidate experience
• Time wasted for both HR teams and the candidate

How can HR teams fix this?

An effective way to resolve this is by implementing a contracts process that is robust, reliable, and scalable. 

Deliveroo used Juro to mass-send review letters to employees, as Cameron Russell, senior award analyst at Deliveroo, explained: 

Employees received a signing link, jumped in [Juro] and signed. It was so easy for employees to use the preview link, and for managers to jump in to see what was being signed

Deliveroo aren’t alone - this is incredibly common in disruptive businesses looking for a contract process that grows with them. 

Find out more about how Deliveroo mass-sent 1400 contracts to employees in two weeks, through Juro. 

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 the experience. 

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 should be.

How can HR teams fix this?

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

Multiple tools were a huge problem for the time-crunched General Counsel, Sophie Salisbury, who was the point of contact for all contract work: 

“When you’re the only lawyer in the business, your time is an expensive resource to the company - I was forced to spend too much of that time scanning signed documents and saving them to shared drives.”

Appear Here implemented an all-in-one contract automation platform to help them create engaging, welcoming templates that were easy to read and sign. 

Using Juro for our HR contracts has been a game-changer for me. Moving HR online adds to the candidate experience; we have really slick contracts to sign online rather than lawyers sending candidates a 15-page document from the dark ages

Read the full case study here to learn about how Appear Here enhanced the candidate experience with Juro.

And if you’re trying to improve your HR contract process, find out how Juro can help - click the button below.