With a highly distributed workforce, Value Added Solutions (VAS) needed a more efficient and simpler means of signing and completing extensive employee onboarding documentation.
Value Added Solutions utilized GoFormz’s form sharing feature, Public Forms, to digitally send employees their onboarding documents with one simple link – streamlining their onboarding processes and eliminating administrative demands.
Onboarding Forms
Public Forms
Value Added Solutions (VAS) is a Tennessee-based Technical Staff Augmentation Contractor to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and its prime contractors. VAS provides the services of contract employees in Technical, Engineering, Administrative, and Business Operations. With four offices across the country, their administrative team manages human resources, payroll, and staffing for over 600 individuals.
Aaron Quick, Vice President of Operations for Value Added Solutions (VAS), joined the company in 2012 to help implement new tools and processes. With user adoption in mind, Aaron searched for a solution to better equip his team for their day-to-day responsibilities and improve their onboarding processes. Aaron came across a GoFormz customer that was utilizing the Public Forms feature for their job applications. “GoFormz is the closest thing you can get to a piece of paper in front of you,” Aaron stated. He quickly realized that the ability to maintain the original formatting of documents, paired with digital form field capabilities, was exactly what he was looking for in a digital solution.
Before implementing digital forms, onboarding was a significant burden on the VAS administrative team. With a geographically distributed workforce, VAS needed a way to establish an entirely virtual onboard experience for hundreds of employees. Prior to GoFormz, the VAS administrative team would send emails to candidates with several different PDF files attached. The candidate would then have to fill out each individual PDF form and then send back the completed forms via email. Not only was this process time-consuming for the applicant, but also left the administrative team tasked with parsing through inaccurate, incomplete forms.
After implementing GoFormz, Aaron proceeded to create shareable Public Forms links for each of their onboarding documents. “GoFormz provides an access point for a person or group of people so that they can engage in the paperwork that is needed for onboarding.” After an employee has received an offer letter, the administrative staff sends a Public Forms link that contains all of the necessary onboarding forms. When there are larger onboarding demands, VAS has a dedicated website that hosts a Public Forms link that provides access to the onboarding packet for new hires. Due to their large geographical spread of VAS employees, each location may require different forms to be selected. Utilizing Tags within GoFormz, VAS is able to easily determine which digital forms are sent to which employee based on their location.
When relying on manual documentation and rigid PDFs to complete onboarding paperwork, new employees were often required to enter redundant data throughout each lengthy form. The VAS team rapidly remedied this issue by equipping their digital onboarding forms with Replicated Fields. “Making someone write their name 10 times on 10 forms. I wanted to nix that… you write it on this form, it'll be copied all the way down.” Now, when employees fill out their names at the top of the form, the data is then automatically populated throughout the rest of the form – eliminating tedious redundancies and streamlining the form completion process.
“The top benefit is having a system that can take a form and make it digital and send it out to a large audience, at a reasonable price”
– Aaron Quick, VP of Operations, Value Added Solutions
Once a candidate has completed their onboarding packet and submitted their documents, automated Reports within GoFormz notify VAS administrative staff. These reports run automatically daily and simplify the management of the candidate’s onboarding status. This feature allows the VAS team to stay on top of onboarding without having to maintain constant contact with the candidate – simplifying collaboration, expediting the onboarding process, and enhancing professionalism.
Since implementing GoFormz and leveraging the Public Forms feature, Value Added Solutions has noticed significant improvements within their onboarding process for both candidates and administrative staff – saving time and reducing administrative burdens. “Life is definitely easier for the people filling the forms out and the people receiving them…”
By eliminating individual PDFs from the onboarding process, candidates can now quickly and efficiently submit their documents, simplifying the onboarding process for both the candidates and VAS administrative staff. “It is a complete night and day from before,” Aaron explained. “Even if we could distribute the information digitally before, the barrier of getting it back was much harder on the user.” VAS administrative staff is now able to easily copy and paste data from the completed forms into their internal systems.
Aaron explained that during a recent hire of over twenty employees in Ohio, VAS no longer needed to have a physical office for the onboarding process. This switch to a digital onboarding system replaced the need for in-person administrative support, saving VAS a significant amount of money.
The GoFormz pricing model also helped Value Added Solutions implement a more cost-effective means of documentation and data collection. Aaron explained, “this was the first company where I thought that this is sensible pricing for the business model.” Because GoFormz Public Forms is a credit-based system, it made it a lot easier for him to determine a budget ahead of time and increase the credits based on the amount of hiring they were doing during that time period.
VAS is continuing to iterate on the existing onboarding packets to ensure they are getting the most out of the GoFormz software and have considered building more complex calculations with Conditional Logic within their form fields. Otherwise, they are extremely satisfied with the current capabilities of GoFormz and are excited to make small tweaks to perfect their processes.