Hiring new employees is an exciting time, but it can be a lot of tedious work for an HR department. From collecting all the details for the new employee, putting together all the paperwork, to running through the entire onboarding process, there’s a lot to do! With a tool like People HR you can easily manage your employees and other HR activities from a single interface.
To help with some of the paperwork, you can add Formstack Documents to your toolkit and automatically populate your HR documents with the employee’s information. You’ll never have to copy & paste again!
In this example, we’re going to show you how to automatically populate a new employee contract when we add a new employee to People HR. We’ll then use HelloSign to sign the contract.
To get started, we’re going to set up the template for our Employee Contract using a Word document. Inside Word, we’re going to add our boilerplate contract information, then for the spots that we want to insert the employee’s information, we’re going to add merge fields that look like {$Name}, {$Address}, {$Phone}, etc.
Here’s what our contract template looks like:
Since we’ll be collecting a signature using HelloSign, we need to add a signature tab to our document so that HelloSign knows where to place the signature in our document. This tag looks like: [sig|req|signer1]
Once we have our template finished we need to upload it to Formstack Documents. From the Documents page in Formstack Documents, click the New Document button and then enter a name. On the next step, choose Office Document as the document type and then select the file from your computer.
After you upload your template to Formstack Documents, you’ll be taken to the Settings tab where you can modify various options like the type of file that we want to generate and the name of the file. For this example, we’re going to include the name of our employee in the file name and we’re going to generate a PDF.
Next, we’re going to set up the delivery of our document so that it is automatically sent over to HelloSign for signature. From the Deliver tab, click the New Delivery button then select HelloSign from the list. After you enter your HelloSign API Key, you’ll need to define the signer’s name and email address (using merge fields).
After we’ve set up our HelloSign delivery, we are done with the setup process inside Formstack Documents and we’re ready to integrate with People HR. To help with the integration, we’re going to use our friends over at Zapier.
Inside Zapier, we’re going to set up a New Zap. For the Trigger, we’re going to choose People HR as the app, then New Starter as the trigger.
Once you authenticate your People HR account, Zapier is going to load a test employee to make sure that everything is working correctly.
Next, we’re going to set up the Action of our Zap. For the app, choose Formstack Documents/ WebMerge and then Create Document Merge as the action.
Once you authenticate your Formstack Documents account, Zapier is going to load a list of the documents in your WebMerge account. Go ahead and pick the employee contract template that you just set up and Zapier will load a list of the merge fields in your document.
For each of the merge fields, you’ll need to pick the corresponding field from People HR. This tells Zapier how to send data over to Formstack Documents so that it is populated in the correct spot on the template.
Once you have matched up all of your merge fields, go ahead and save your Zap and turn it on. We’re ready for a test! Log in to People HR and add a new employee (Starter) to your account. Zapier will detect this new employee and send the data over to Formstack Documents. The contract will be populated and sent over to HelloSign for signature.
Here's what our contract looked like ready to sign:
Congrats, you’re all done! You can now automatically populate all kinds of documents from your People HR account. Can you think of any other ways you can use Formstack Documents to simplify your paperwork process?