Making Onboarding New Employees Easy with Google Workspace - Part 1

Recruiting new talent is always a tough task. An HR Executive has to go through a lot of resumes and profiles before shortlisting candidates for interviews and again go through all the documents of candidates who made it through all the rounds of interviews. Once prospective candidates are shortlisted for hiring, time comes to close the selection process with best offers.

An offer should have good standard compensation as well as presentation wise. When the presentation itself catches the eye of candidates, it makes it easier to convert and close. Google Workspace provides an assorted array of applications that can be integrated for ease of working for self and others. Let’s see with examples how implementation of some of these applications with Google Workspace can make Onboarding new employees easy, both for HR and for the new employee.

Step 1: Extending the Offer Letter with DocuSign

What is DocuSign? Well according to Google, DocuSign “is the fast, reliable way to electronically sign documents and agreements on practically any device from almost anywhere in the world. Whether you're signing a school permission slip or a contract for your kitchen remodel, using DocuSign is so easy, you'll never go back to paper.” 

What does that mean? Basically, DocuSign is a powerful web based document (doc, pdf, etc) editor which allows you to Review the document, Type in or Edit wherever necessary, and Sign and/or Stamp for approval with ease without having to download the document to your computer or mobile device. 

Pretty cool right? Plus, it comes with a really strong encryption of its own with an added layer of security from Google, so you don’t have to worry about your data ever getting in the wrong hands.

Let’s carry on with how this integration works and how it will make it easy for onboarding new employees. 

DocuSign eSignature for Google Workspace™ should be downloaded and installed only from Google Workspace Marketplace. Once the signup is completed, the home page will look something like the image below.

Let’s assume, I am working as an HR Executive and I have to onboard another person named Harshavardhan whose interview process was completed successfully and he is right now awaiting an offer letter from Me. Now, I have already drafted an offer letter which I am about to send to Harshavardhan. Since he will need to review and sign the offer letter as accepted for us to proceed with the Onboarding process, I will use DucuSign to send him this offer. The first step of adding the Offer Letter to DocuSign will look like the following image below.

Once the desired file or files (yes you can send multiple files) have been added, clicking NEXT will take you to the next step where multiple recipients can be added. Here, I have selected Harshavardhan’s personal email address as the recipient. Next step is to review and prepare the documents. Here, I can add my own signature or initials, stamp, date, along with name, email address, etc. as desired for the document. I can even mark the places where I will be needing the signature from the candidate or where the candidate needs to fill in some details. The process will look like the following picture below.

After you have reviewed and prepared the documents, the final step is to review the summary, check again if all the email addresses of recipients are right, add a message body to the email, decide whether you want to switch on/off reminders and play around with other settings and options available on the final page.

Be sure to add a very nice message in the message box of the email, otherwise it may feel robotic. 

Now that everything is done and perfectly ready, we can go ahead and send the offer letter to the candidate. The final stage of the process will look like the pictures on the left and below.

Being cloud based, the added advantage to this application is that it gets saved in real time. What it means is that, even if you are interrupted midway through and you had to close the terminal, you can start off again where you left off without loss of any data. Furthermore, if at any stage you decide to add any new files in the same process, you can just go back, add the files and complete the process of review and preparation again.

Now that the offer email is complete and ready, we can send it to the candidate. You’ll be notified via email once the candidate has viewed the offer letter you sent through DocuSign. You’ll also get a notification when the candidate has completed the review and signed it along with the copy of the signed document. 

What now you’ll ask? Well we wait for the candidate to review our offer letter and reply to it. 

Step 2: Waiting for the Candidate to revert

The DocuSign email is not any different from regular email, and delivery is as instantaneous as any regular email sent through Gmail. Let’s see what our candidate has received in his/her email. Since I am the assumed candidate, I will now go to my personal email where I have received the sample Offer Letter. Let’s see how it looks.

If you see the series of attached images above, the Pictures are screenshots of my mobile device screen showing the whole process from receiving the DocuSign email to finishing by signing off. Picture 6 shows that I have received an Offer Letter from Infiflex through DocuSign. It has a body like a regular email which lets me know what the content of the attachment is and what is expected of me. 

Now, Me as a Candidate has to click on the “Review Document” tab available in the email. Once clicked, the tab will take me to a new page where I can view the document as shown in Picture 7. Here I can read through the document, review it and decide what further action to take.

DocuSign gives you a choice on the action you want to take. You can decide to Finish the reviewing/signing of the document later and you can start where you left off, or you can assign someone else to sign the document, or you can even Decline to sign the document owing to some discrepancies you found in the document. See Picture 8, where other available options are also visible. 

Now that I have reviewed the document and found it correct and to my expectation, I am ready to sign it. By tapping on the blank space an option panel pops up, as shown in Picture 9. This option panel allows you to add your Signature, Name, Date, etc. Suitable option can be selected for adding the desired field. As I proceed to add my signature by selecting the Signature option from the panel, it takes me to a new page as shown in Picture 10. On this page, DocuSign gives us three options, 1st is auto generated signature using default available styles, 2nd option is to Draw the signature in the assigned space and third option is to upload a jpeg/jpg/png file of our signature from our device. I use the default option, i.e. the 2nd option to draw my signature.

Once I have drawn my signature and submitted it, I then proceed to add my name under the signature, the date on which I signed the document and a short message/note on the document for the HR Executive. This is shown in Picture 11. Now that I have completed the task, I submit the document by clicking “FINISH” at the bottom of the page. This notifies me that I have completed the document and assures me I will be emailed a copy of the signed document. This is shown in Picture 12. Picture 13 shows the email I received from DocuSign after completing the document.

Now that the candidate has completed signing the Offer letter through DocuSign, the HR Executive too has received an email from DocuSign informing the same along with the Signed document. The Pictures 14 & 15 below represent how it will appear to the HR Executive. From here, the document can be downloaded and saved on hard drive or saved to Google Drive directly. 

DocuSign avoided the need to have access to a printer-scanner to create a hard copy of the offer letter to sign and send back. It also avoided the need to have often paid document editors on the computer or mobile device of the candidate. So just like that we were able to start the onboarding of a new candidate without much hassle to the candidate. All possible only because of Google Workspace and its ability to integrate seamlessly with a powerful utility tool like DocuSign. 

Bonus Content : Using Dynamic Email for Employee Data Collection

With Google Workspace, Gmail now supports dynamic emails. Dynamic emails are messages with interactive content using which you can interact without having to leave Gmail. With dynamic email your interaction would be like you would interact with a website. For example, you can reply to an event invitation, or respond to comments in a Google Doc, or fill out a questionnaire without leaving Gmail.

As an HR, this feature can be used to collect useful information from the current employees or newly joining employees. For example, the candidate who just signed our Offer Letter, will need to share bank details for salary transfer, address to send company assets and stationeries and other details that will be necessary as per statutory as well as internal requirements. A Dynamic Email with necessary fields in a form of questionnaire can be sent to the candidate. Once the fields have been filled and submitted, the details then can be transferred to the sheet easily.

Preface to Part 2: Using Appsheet for Creating an Employee Onboarding App

What is AppSheet? As per Google, AppSheet is a no-code development platform that lets anyone without coding experience build mobile and web applications. Which means, you can build AppSheet apps from data sources, such as Google Sheets, Excel, Cloud SQL, Salesforce, and other similar connectors. 

In Part 2 we will see how we can use AppSheet to create a customized Application for completing the Onboarding process of new employees. The application will allow HR to carry out Induction, Team Introduction and Training of new employees in a systematic format along with the ability to monitor the progress of each employee. 

So see you in the next part. Adios!