Creating the future of digital experiences.

First impressions are important. When companies are hiring for new talent, they want to put their best foot forward and show that they are a progressive, innovative company that people want to work for.

Adobe is the digital experience company. Its 26,000 global employees work together to help create the most innovative experiences possible for customers. Employees in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa operate as part of the EMEA region, working together to serve customers in diverse countries. The EMEA Employees Experience Group onboards around 1,000 new hires a year, and it wanted to make sure that its internal onboarding processes reflected the modern digital experiences Adobe creates for its customers.

“Modern digital experiences should be fully digital and paperless, using automation to improve efficiency and personalization to connect with people,” says Yasser Dehen, Talent Operations Manager, EMEA, Adobe. “Our onboarding paperwork still had several manual steps for our team and our new hires. We knew we could improve the process by leaning into digital.”

The EMEA Employee Experience team partnered with the Adobe Acrobat Sign Professional Services team to build a fully digital onboarding workflow using Adobe Acrobat Sign and Microsoft solutions, including Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Power Apps, and Microsoft SharePoint.

“The new Adobe Welcome Pack fully digitizes the onboarding paperwork for new hires,” says Amy Wells, Senior Onboarding Success Specialist, EMEA, Adobe. “We give new hires a much more streamlined experience, which leads to faster and more accurate documentation, higher onboarding satisfaction, and a stronger first impression.”

Delivering personalized welcomes to all new hires

The new Adobe Welcome Pack app provides a centralized, single location where talent coordinators generate onboarding documents, send them to new hires, track completion progress, and archive documents. Created in Microsoft Power Apps, the Welcome Pack app sits on Microsoft SharePoint. With a click, the app opens a simple form asking for information about the new hire, including their name, personal email address, start date, and office location.

After completing the form, the Welcome Pack app uses Adobe Acrobat Sign to generate and send a personalized email to the new hire. The email contains links to any required onboarding documents, such as employee information and badge request forms.

“The required forms will vary depending on the new hire's office location,” explains Lucia Hornstein, Senior ERC and Talent Coordinator, EMEA, Adobe. “Previously, talent coordinators sent onboarding documents and updated forms in Adobe Sign manually. The Welcome Pack app automatically picks the right documents, reducing errors and simplifying work for talent coordinators.”

New hires simply click on the links in the welcome email to open their onboarding forms. The forms are easily accessible from any computer, tablet, or mobile device. This means that new hires can fill out and sign forms from anywhere—no more printing and scanning required. New hires don’t need to fill out all forms at once. Adobe Acrobat Sign automatically sends reminder emails that help new hires remember exactly where they left off.

“With a fully digital onboarding process, new hires are returning documents much faster: from 10 days to 48 hours,” says Dehen. “We received very positive feedback from new hires across EMEA where onboarding is made easy with all documents and comms combined and sent to their personal email inboxes. Our onboarding satisfaction increased by 10% in just one month.”

Streamlining new hire processing by 80%

Talent coordinators can see the status of onboarding paperwork—whether people have completed welcome packs or whether there are documents remaining—with a glance in the Welcome Pack app. This saves talent coordinators a great deal of time, as they no longer need to manually update a spreadsheet to keep track of completed documents.

Talent coordinators receive an email when new hires return documents. The forms use conditionals and mandatory fields to reduce the chance that forms are returned with missing information and errors. This has helped reduce error rates, with 96% of documents now being returned error free. Using the Adobe Acrobat Sign workflow, talent coordinators review the information and finalize it with one click. Once all forms are reviewed, it takes just one click of the “Archive” button to store documents in SharePoint for easy review and recovery.

“The Welcome Pack app helps talent coordinators spend much less time creating, tracking, and reviewing onboarding documents,” says Hornstein. “We reduced new hire processing time by 80%, saving each talent coordinator an average of 6.74 hours per month.”

The EMEA Employee Experience team also sends around 12 employment contracts every day through Acrobat Sign. These contracts can be around 40 pages long, so by digitizing these contracts and eliminating the need for print copies, the team saves more than 26,000 gallons of wear and 9,000 pounds of wood per year. That’s a total savings of more than 22,000 pounds of greenhouse gases—the equivalent of driving a car for 742 days.

Evolving digital experiences

Today, the Welcome Pack app is used across all EMEA countries. The app has also started to attract interest across regions. It’s deployed in India, with teams in APAC and the Americas considering usage.

The next step for the EMEA Employee Experience team is to increase automation even further. The team is exploring options such as using the integrations between Acrobat Sign and Workday, or automating archival of employee files.

The EMEA Employee Experience team is currently exploring other human resources processes that could see benefits from similar digitization.

“Onboarding is one of the earliest and most complicated interactions a new hire has with Adobe,” says Wells. “With Adobe Acrobat Sign and Microsoft, we show new hires some of the many ways Adobe improves digital experiences. That’s a lesson that will inspire them to help us bring even more creativity and innovation to our customers.”