5 Clever Ways to Automate Freelancer Onboarding

Setting up your talent for success is key to producing great results. Whether you’re onboarding workers remotely or overseas, or you simply need a consistent onboarding experience at scale to manage 100 to 1,000+ freelancers, automated onboarding is a must-have.

What we’re about to show you are some of our customers’ absolute favorite ways to automate all the “work about work,” and eliminate back-and-forth emails with your talent. These admin tasks drag out the workday past dinnertime, and take away precious brainpower that could otherwise be spent on strategy and creativity. 

Before using automated onboarding, The Daily Dot’s parent company Fragment Media wasted a solid five hours a week with constant onboarding, chasing down payment details and sending agreements. Now they can spend their time on “the big picture stuff” thanks to this setup.

The secret: Automated Onboarding Workflows in Worksuite. 

A workflow is a curated series of automated steps that communicates information, collects documents, and performs actions on your behalf. Just specify the “stages” you’d like to happen, and the conditions under which you’d like them to happen, and this will take place on autopilot.

We built Worksuite’s workflows to eliminate admin work and seamlessly onboard your candidates and freelancers, while you sleep. 

Whether that’s… 

The process of onboarding freelancers typically takes countless manual emails, chasing up your talent to fill in the blanks. Multiply this by hundreds or even thousands, if you’re like many Worksuite customers who manage contractors at scale. Then don’t forget our old friend Version Control — digging through those email threads to find the latest agreement, or the appropriate bank details. This amounts to hours, even days of wasted effort — valuable energy you could be spending on the strategic parts of your business.

No more! Now you can have this automated onboarding workflow running in the background while you focus on your core job. And Worksuite’s system handles all the polite nudging, to make sure everyone is payable and ready to work.

Below you’ll learn just a few of the ways to leverage this wonderful feature in Worksuite, with inspiration from how our customers use it.

You can configure multiple workflows for different groups of workers. Agencies like Jack Morton Worldwide often turn this into an automated “choose your own adventure”, guiding 1099 and W2 contractors through unique and branded onboarding experiences. 

Every stage of the onboarding workflow can be personalized with micro-copy. You can even add a quick video to the beginning, welcoming your talent into the team. This keeps your brand voice and tone consistent across every touchpoint, and gets your talent excited to jump into the project and deliver great work.

Not only do automated workflows give you all the details you need – they also give your freelancers everything they need. Hugo Mentors automatically onboards their coaches with a comprehensive playbook, which saves their team 30 emails a day. Digital publishers use workflows to share editorial guidelines with freelance writers. Creative agencies can share their client’s brand guide to get a designer up to speed quickly before sending the creative brief. All without lifting a finger.

One of the more obvious ways to automate your onboarding with Worksuite is to collect document signatures. Vested uses workflows to have every financial partner sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement. Collect signatures on autopilot, and configure our HelloSign integration with the contract template and fillable fields exactly how you want them.

Couple workflows with one of Worksuite’s many integrations, and you can build an automated compliance machine. For example, Ferguson uses our workflows + integrations to run automated background checks on every single contractor who enters someone’s home. That’s thousands of contractors in all 50 states!

Worksuite’s agreement e-sign functionality also integrates with HelloSign (Dropbox Sign), allowing you full version control over your contracts, and customization as to where the names, dates and fields should be placed.

After a workflow stage is completed, admins can select whether another action should be taken manually or automatically. You can auto-prompt your managers to review a stage before moving someone forward, for example. And then automatically assign a task to the freelancer once they are approved. 

The possibilities are endless. Cheers to spending less time coordinating admin tasks, and saving your energy for the strategy and creative work!