HR contracts: how to create, manage and automate them

HR contracts are the stepping stone between a great candidate becoming a new hire, so how you manage them matters.

What are HR contracts?

HR contracts are legal agreements used by people and talent teams to create, or update, terms of employment. Once signed by both the employer and employee, these terms become legally binding, outlining:

1. What is expected of an employee throughout their role
2. How the employee will be compensated for their work
3. The various rules each party need to adhere to throughout their relationship

What an employment contract includes can vary wildly between different businesses, depending on their transparency, templates and so on.

Types of HR contracts

The most obvious category of HR contracts are those that set out the terms of employment for an individual. These are commonly known as job offer letters or employment agreements.

However, there is another, broader group of HR contracts to consider. These are legal documents that would usually be managed by or through the HR team, but don't go into detail about an individual's roles and responsibilities.

This bucket includes contracts like option agreements, NDAs, variation letters, salary increase letters, and so on. These are often created at scale.

Who is responsible for managing HR contracts?

HR contracts typically sit with the human resources team. The function can include a separate people team (for existing employees) and a talent team (for hiring new employees).

But people and talent teams aren't the only stakeholders for HR contracts. The hiring manager for the role often helps to outline the terms and package covered in a HR contract, alongside other stakeholders from the legal and executive teams (depending on the seniority of the role).

This involvement can be in the form of an approval workflow or a signature. In some cases, legal teams will even review and update the templates used to create HR contracts  to make sure they are legally sound.

But the collaborative nature of HR contracts means that other teams can quickly become a bottleneck for hiring or promoting employees.

Fortunately, CLM software can solve most of these problems and make generating and managing employment agreements quick and easy. Juro's CLM tool for HR teams automates routine contract admin and reduces time-to-hire by up to 75 per cent.

You can find out more about Juro by hitting the button below. But if you're interested in finding out more about HR contract creation and management first, read on.

Common HR contract management challenges

HR contract management presents a unique set of challenges for people and talent teams to grapple with. These include:

• Ongoing compliance. HR and legal teams need to ensure contracts apply with evolving labor laws, regulations and company policies. This is difficult without a platform and forum to collaborate effectively.
• Visibility into contracts. New candidates will likely have a completely different employment contract to those that joined years earlier. This makes it difficult to track which terms exist and where, and whether they need updating.
• Lengthy negotiations with candidates. Back and forth over email to negotiate employment terms can slow time-to-hire. Revisions and requests often sit in email inboxes, meaning it takes longer to secure the ideal candidate and de-risk the hiring process.
• Updating terms at scale. When a company policy changes, your contracts need to change with it. Manually updating every contract can be a long and arduous task, distracting your P&T team from higher-value work.

While these challenges are unique to HR teams, they aren't unique to the businesses managing HR contracts. We know this because we've helped businesses like Deliveroo, Gopuff, Curve and Tempo solve them:

• GoPuff had 18 administrative steps to onboard new riders. Implementing Juro cut the time to onboard new riders by 75 per cent.
• Bottlenecks in Curve's contract management process resulted in lengthy hiring cycles. Implementing Juro enables Curve to reduce time-to-hire from 35 days to just 27.
• Tempo's manual contract process became a blocker to business growth. Rolling out Juro enabled Tempo to agree contracts in five minutes - instead of 25.

Hiring is hard enough, without the hassle of pushing around paperwork. Fortunately, there's a faster and more efficient way to tackle employment contracts and onboarding paperwork.

If you follow the advice below, you'll never let an arduous contract processes stand in the way of securing a standout candidate or implementing an exciting new policy again.

A better way to manage HR contracts in 2024

Adopting an all-in-one contract management system like Juro empowers you to accelerate the creation, execution and management of HR contracts. Let's explore how it enables teams like yours to manage contracts more efficiently in 2024.

1. Automate your employment contract templates

Juro users can automate their contracts using pre-approved contract templates. This eliminates the need to manually draft new HR contracts from scratch.

Instead, talent teams simply complete a short conversational form. Juro then pulls their responses into the relevant contract smartfields, customizing the document in seconds.

This is ideal for companies processing employment contracts on a regular basis and at scale since the time saved enables them to focus on more strategic initiatives.

Juro has removed the need for us to hire people to focus on admin work, and that’s the biggest win - Luke Hextall, Head of People Ops, GoPuff

2.  Generate HR contracts without leaving your ATS / HRIS

Juro integrates seamlessly with HR systems such as HRIS or applicant tracking systems, enabling teams to generate employment contracts in just a few clicks.

This works by automatically pulling the relevant employee or applicant data into a pre-approved contract template in Juro, live-syncing contract data with people data with no manual admin work required.

To find out how this works in your HRIS / ATS, check out the guides below:

• How to manage contracts in Workable
• How to manage contracts in Bullhorn
• How to manage contracts in Greenhouse
• How to manage contracts in Workday
• How to manage contracts in BambooHR

3. Use mass actions to create and sign agreements at scale

Looking to send out hundreds or thousands of new HR contracts detailing a new policy? No problem.

Juro's bulk actions empower those managing contracts to quickly and efficiently create, edit, approve, send and sign legal agreements en masse.

Users can mass generate, upload, send, sign and approve contracts in the platform, eliminating repetitive contract admin work.

We completed two weeks of work in a day, thanks to Juro’s mass signing feature - Luke Hextall, Head of People Ops, GoPuff

4. Streamline contract negotiations in a collaborative platform

Juro's browser-based contract platform enables HR teams to negotiate terms with candidates faster, and more efficiently. They no longer need to answer questions via email and upload new versions of the contract every time they make an amendment.

Instead, they can comment, redline and discuss terms in real-time, without leaving their browser. The contract updates automatically, with comment threads to streamline negotiations.

The time I spend replying to candidates and negotiating terms has been reduced by 75 per cent thanks to Juro - Karolina Plaskaty, HR Business Partner, Curve

4. Enable candidates to sign faster with eSignatures

Juro offers native eSigning functionality, which empowers internal stakeholders and candidates to sign contracts from anywhere, on any device.

Allowing contracts to be signed digitally eliminates the need to print, scan or mail physical documents. This accelerates the contract signing process and provides a more convenient candidate experience.

Using Juro for our HR contracts has been a game-changer for me. Moving HR online adds to the candidate experience - Sophie Salisbury, Head of Legal, Appear Here

Ready to improve your HR contract management process?

Over 6000 companies already power their contracts with Juro, with the platform successfully reducing time-to-hire and reducing contract admin for HR teams just like yours.

Want to join them? Fill in the form below for a personalized demo of Juro's AI contract automation platform.