Hiring and onboarding are critical HR processes for your business. The way you design and manage these processes can set you up for long-term success or failure—so you should take the time to get them right.For HR managers, the goal of hiring and onboarding is twofold:

1. Ensure the processes are thorough enough to reduce the risks of poor hires and quick turnover
2. Ensure the processes are streamlined enough to efficiently meet business goals

In other words, HR teams want to save time but also ensure due diligence has been done to reduce risks. So where do they start? One good starting point is the adoption of robust tools like Trello and Formstack. These tools can be used together (with help from Zapier) and separately to map out and build a powerhouse hiring system.If you’ve never used these platforms for HR purposes, you’re missing out! Here are 6 ways you can use Trello and Formstack for seamless hiring and onboarding:

Hiring

When it comes to hiring, everyone has the same goal: Find and curate a short list of qualified candidates to fulfill a job opening. The main tasks associated with the hiring process are assessing the need, gathering the requirements, crafting the job description, and getting the word out about the open position.Trello and Formstack can help you stay organized with all these tasks and meet your goal. Here’s how:

#1: Build a Recruitment Pipeline Board in Trello

Trello can help you organize all your hiring needs on one interactive board. This “recruitment pipeline” can include information about future hiring needs, current open positions, job descriptions or applications that need to be posted, and places to promote job openings (such as social channels and job boards).

Two Trello features that can help you get the most out of your recruitment pipeline board involve sharing the board and attaching files to specific cards. First, you have the ability to share the board with your entire organization so everyone is aware of current and future openings and can help generate leads or internal referrals. You can also update specific cards with file attachments, like job descriptions from Google Drive, so that anyone can edit or update the descriptions before they get added to a job application or posting.

#2: Create Job Applications in Formstack

With its intuitive online forms, Formstack can help you streamline the process of gathering qualified candidates for your open positions. You can easily collect and manage job applicant information by building an online job application in Formstack. The form builder even has a File Upload field, which means you can seamlessly collect file attachments like resumes and cover letters right on the application.

Even better? Formstack also allows you to email route any application submissions directly to the hiring manager, so the HR team won’t become a bottleneck in the hiring process!

#3: Build an Interview Pipeline Board in Trello

Once the job candidates start rolling in, you’ll need a way to keep track of where each candidate is in the interview process. Enter Trello. You can easily build an “interview pipeline” board in Trello to stay organized during the interview portion of your hiring process.

You can even set up a Zap to connect this interview pipeline board to your Formstack job application. With this connection, a new candidate card can be added to your Trello board automatically whenever the Formstack job application is submitted. And you can add colorful labels to each candidate card in Trello as a visual indication of which cards (or candidates) belong to each open position. This allows you to filter candidates by position as well.

Additionally, Trello cards are extremely adaptable, so they provide a number of ways for people to stay informed throughout the interview process:

1. Those involved in the interview process can be added to relevant cards, and they will receive notifications if a card changes status.
2. Relevant documents, such as resumes and cover letters, can be attached to candidate cards.
3. People can comment on the cards to provide candidate feedback or other pertinent information.

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#4: Create Candidate Scorecards and Evaluation Forms in Formstack

Once candidates start moving through the interview process, you’ll want a way to evaluate or rank them—and Formstack can help. You can easily create candidate scorecards or evaluation forms in Formstack and send them to internal interview panelists. The feedback you get can help you determine who is the best overall fit for each open position.Using HR forms like candidate scorecards or evaluations is a great way to ensure every person in the interview process has a voice. Just make sure the interviewers have a good understanding of what the ideal candidate looks like for a particular position. And make sure you include questions on the evaluation form that relate to those ideal traits (e.g., if culture fit is important, make sure to ask about a candidate’s ability to uphold specific culture values). That way, you’ll get truly helpful feedback on the evaluation form.

Onboarding

Once you’ve hired the perfect new employee, it’s time to get that employee up to speed with a thoughtful onboarding process. The main goal of onboarding is to ensure new hires have a smooth transition into their roles and are equipped with all they need to be successful. When someone new joins your team, a lot of paperwork and formalities need to be handled, and it can be tedious work. But Formstack and Trello can help ease the pain by giving you seamless ways to create an onboarding process that’s repeatable and trackable. Here’s how:

#5: Create Onboarding Forms in Formstack

There’s nothing worse than working through a pile of paperwork that needs to be filled out and signed on your first day. With Formstack, you can save new hires time and headaches by allowing them to complete their onboarding forms online. You can quickly gather information like T-shirt size, home address, and more via an online employee information form. And you don’t have to worry about security—Formstack has several security features that allow you to protect employee data.

Another great feature Formstack offers is the Electronic Signature field. Adding this field to your HR forms allows you to easily get new employee sign-off on things like your employee handbook.

#6: Build an Onboarding Pipeline Board in Trello

Once you have all your onboarding forms built out in Formstack, you can link them to Trello cards in your “onboarding pipeline” board. This type of board can alleviate pain points for new hires by giving them all the information they need in one place, such as tasks to complete the first week, answers to typical first-day questions, and contact information for key people in the organization.

Additionally, an onboarding pipeline board can keep all your onboarding forms organized. You can include a checklist of all the forms that need to be completed and even include form URLs to make the online forms accessible from the card.

To help new people feel like a part of the team from the start, you can also include columns in your onboarding pipeline that provide details about your company history and culture, each employee in the organization, and more.

Want to learn more about using Trello and Formstack for your HR processes? Click below to hear yours truly (Formstack’s Talent Department Manager) and Trello’s Community Manager discuss how to streamline processes in your HR department.