E-signatures

HR documents that need a signature

HR paperwork is repetitive, two-sided and time-sensitive, which is the case electronic signing was built for. The useful question is not whether to use it but which documents, with which fields, in which order.

Nuwan Madhusanka · Co-founder

6 min read · Published 1 September 2026

Most HR teams do not move to electronic signing all at once. They move the offer letter, because a candidate with a competing offer is a deadline, and then everything else stays on paper for another year because nobody decided what it should look like.

That is a reasonable place to start and a bad place to stop. The documents differ in ways that matter to how you set them up, and setting them up wrong is what makes the second document slower than the first. What follows is general information rather than legal advice, and employment rules differ by country, so check your own obligations before changing a process.

Which HR documents to move first

Order the list by two things: how often the document goes out, and how much of the delay is the signature rather than the writing.

Offer letters win on both. They are frequent, they are urgent, and the entire wait is a signature. Policy acknowledgements are next, not because any single one is urgent but because there are hundreds of them and chasing paper across a whole company is a job nobody wants. Employment contracts follow, and they are worth doing carefully rather than quickly, because they are the ones with clauses you may want initialled.

Leave that ordering alone for one class of document: anything with its own statutory form rules. The US Form I-9 is the standard example. Electronic signatures are permitted for it, but under 8 CFR 274a.2(h) the system has to acknowledge that the attestation was read, affix the signature at the time of the transaction, keep a record verifying the identity of the person signing, and print a confirmation on request. A general signing tool is not automatically compliant with that, and you should not assume it is.

The eight documents, their fields and their signers

The table at the foot of this article sets out eight HR documents with the fields each needs, the signing order, and the identity check that suits it. Three patterns run through it.

One signer, no countersignature. Acknowledgements and receipts. The employee signs, nothing comes back, and the whole thing is a signature and a date.

Two signers in sequence. Offer letters, contracts, timesheets, leave and exit paperwork. Someone submits, someone approves. The order carries meaning and should be enforced rather than implied.

Two signers at once. Performance reviews, where neither party is approving the other and there is no reason to make one wait.

A worked employment contract, with the clauses that usually get initialled, is in the employment contract example.

Fields that matter: initials, date signed, and what a checkbox really does

Ten field types can be placed on a page. Four of them do most of the work in HR.

Signature. The default box is 200 by 60 points. One drawn or typed mark fills every signature, initials and block position for that signer at once, so a contract with initials on four clauses is still one act of signing.

Initials. An 80 by 50 box, and worth using sparingly. Initials are a claim that a particular clause was read. Put them on pay, notice and restraint, and leave the rest alone.

Date signed. This is the field people most often get wrong, by using a text field and asking the signer to type a date. Do not. The date signed field is stamped from the recorded signing time and is never typed, printed in the form Aug 22, 2026. A typed date is a claim; a stamped one is a record.

Checkbox. Be careful here. The signer portal has no tick control: a placed checkbox falls through to a generic input, so the signer types into a small box, and the stamper then prints the letter X whenever that field holds any value at all. It is a mark that says something was entered, not a boolean anyone can query. For a policy acknowledgement that is fine, as long as you know what you are looking at. The 18 by 18 point default box also makes its label hard to read while you are placing it, so give it a short one.

Signing order: candidate first, HR countersigns

The switch is called “Sign in order”. Turned on, only the lowest outstanding order is invited, and every signer route blocks anyone trying to act out of turn. Turned off, everyone is invited at once.

One thing to watch. A newly created request has order enforcement set to true in the database, but the prepare screen renders the switch in the off position, so the switch and the behaviour disagree until you touch it. Set it deliberately on every request rather than trusting what the screen shows. The signing order explainer covers the two modes.

Identity: email link or one-time code for a new hire

Three checks are available: the emailed link on its own, an access code you share separately, or a six digit code emailed at the moment of signing. Which one was used is printed on the certificate for each signer.

For internal documents going to a company address, the link is usually proportionate. For an offer letter or a contract going to a personal address you have never seen before, the emailed one-time code is the better default, and it costs the candidate about ten seconds. The trade-offs are set out in how to verify a signer’s identity, including the honest limits of a code sent to the same inbox as the link.

Records: certificate, thirty days, resend

Three things to plan for.

Every completed request produces a certificate of completion as its own PDF, and the completion email goes to every recipient plus the sender with the certified PDF attached. Nobody has to log in to get their copy.

Every request expires thirty days from creation, and that number cannot be changed in the application. For a slow-moving contract, that is a real deadline. Resending rotates the link, which kills the old one, resets the viewed state and clears any lockout.

And the certificate is evidence of signing, not your employment record. Australia’s Fair Work rules require time and wages records to be kept for seven years, legible and in English, and separately require every new employee to be given the Fair Work Information Statement, which may be sent by email. Signing changes how a document gets executed; it does not change what you have to keep.

The example

The worked example below is an offer letter with a salary, a superannuation figure, three conditions and an acceptance block. It is the document that pays for the change of process on its own, because every day it sits unsigned is a day a candidate is still reading someone else’s offer.

Eight HR documents, the fields each one needs, and the order the signatures should arrive in
Document	Signers	Order	Fields to place	Identity check that fits
Offer letter	Candidate, then a hiring manager	In order	Signature, date signed, name, plus a signature block for the countersignature	Emailed one-time code for the candidate
Employment contract	Employee, then the employer's signatory	In order	Signature, initials on the pay and notice clauses, date signed, title, company	Emailed one-time code
Policy acknowledgement	Employee only	Single signer	Signature, date signed, one checkbox per policy	Email link
Handbook receipt	Employee only	Single signer	Signature, date signed, text field for the handbook version	Email link
Timesheet	Contractor, then the approver	In order	Signature, date signed, text fields for the totals	Email link
Leave approval	Employee, then the manager	In order	Signature, date signed	Email link
Performance review sign-off	Employee and manager	Everyone at once	A signature block each, date signed	Email link
Exit checklist	Departing employee, then HR	In order	Signature, initials, date signed, a checkbox per returned item	Access code shared in person

A finished example

An offer of $98,000 plus $11,760 of superannuation, with the three checks it depends on and a clear instruction not to resign until they clear. The letter also names what is not in the offer, which is the part candidates most often assume.

Read the job offer letter

Questions people ask

Can a new hire sign before they have a company email?

Yes, and they should. The request goes to whatever address you enter for them, which for a candidate is a personal address. Nothing about signing requires an account: the link, the identity check and the document all work for someone who has never seen your systems. Send offer letters to the address the candidate applied from, not to an inbox that does not exist yet.

Should HR countersign?

If the document says the employer accepts something, then yes, and it should be a real second signer rather than a pre-printed signature. Put the candidate first and the countersignature second with sign in order switched on, so the employer's signature lands after the candidate's and the certificate shows the two in that sequence rather than side by side.

Do we need initials on every page?

Rarely. Initials are worth placing where you want evidence that a specific clause was read, which in employment paperwork usually means pay, notice period and restraint. Initialling all twenty pages adds twenty things to click and no extra evidence, because the certification already covers the whole document against later changes.

How long does the request stay open?

Thirty days from creation. That is fixed: the application never offers a different date, so every request expires on the same schedule. A nightly sweep moves outstanding recipients and the envelope to expired and writes an expired event, and the link then returns a message saying the request has expired rather than opening the document.

What if the candidate declines?

Declining is a first-class outcome, not an error. The candidate can give a reason of up to 500 characters, the whole request moves to declined, no further stamping happens, and the sender is emailed with the reason. If it was a negotiation rather than a refusal, edit the document and send a new request, because a sent request cannot be edited.

Is the certificate enough for an audit?

It is the evidence of signing, not the whole employment record. It shows who signed, how they were verified, when, from which IP address, and which version of the consent wording they accepted. Your obligations for keeping employment records sit elsewhere: in Australia, time and wages records must be kept for seven years, legible and in English.

Can policies be acknowledged with a checkbox?

You can place checkbox fields, but be precise about what they do. The signer portal gives no tick control: a checkbox field renders as a small input the signer types into, and the stamper prints the letter X whenever the field holds any value at all. It records that they entered something in that spot, which for an acknowledgement is usually enough.

Written by

Nuwan Madhusanka · Co-founder

Works across the builders and the export paths: how a form becomes a PDF, how a flyer canvas becomes a print file, and how a signed document carries its audit trail.

LinkedIn profile

Sources

Written and checked by the OneCraft team. Last checked 1 September 2026.

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