HotelTonight is a leading hotel booking app with more than 25,000 hotel partners in over 35 countries and 1,700 cities. Since its founding in 2010, HotelTonight has experienced rapid demand for its mobile app, and the company has had to grow quickly to keep pace.
When a company is growing as fast as HotelTonight is, it needs to have an efficient offer letter process. That’s where Hilary Clarke comes in.
Hilary oversees hiring as HotelTonight’s Head of Talent Acquisition. She takes offer letters seriously because she knows how important they are to hiring.
Easy, accurate, and fast offer letters are critical to a positive hiring experience. A timely, accurate letter helps recruits feel positively about the hiring experience and makes them more inclined to accept the offer. But all it takes is a process that drags for days and a typo-ridden letter to slow down or even halt hiring.
Before using Ironclad, Hilary’s team employed a highly manual process for sending out offer letters, involving four different systems. Doing everything manually wasn’t just tedious — it also exposed the offer letter process to delays and errors.
Three junctures required manual work that exposed offer letters to delay and error:
- Which template should be used? There were five different Word templates which had to be manually selected based on such factors as geography, type of work, hourly and income earner. It was easy to select the wrong template, meaning often people had to redo contracts after having already spent a lot of time filling them out.
- Is the information filled out in the offer letter accurate? Are names correctly spelled, amounts correctly stated? Reviewing contracts to make sure information was properly entered was itself a manual, slow process. Once inaccurate information was discovered, it could take days to finalize the offer.
- Who needs to approve the offer letter? Finally, the offer letter needed to be approved by the heads of the relevant departments, each of whom would have to know where all the relevant clauses and provisions were before they could review and sign off. E-signature blocks had to be manually placed from DocuSign onto the Word Template.
With all of this manual work, Hilary wasn’t surprised when an audit of offer letters revealed that the process was error-ridden and slow. Names were sometimes misspelled or digits omitted or added to an offeree's income—errors that could add days to the process of finalizing the offer. A single offer letter often took 25 minutes to assemble, and errors could take days to correct.
HotelTonight was sending out dozens of offer letters a month, and could not afford a slow and inaccurate process. So Hilary asked Ironclad to help streamline HotelTonight’s offer letter process. With Ironclad, HotelTonight can now:
- Ensure that the correct template is chosen from the start. Ironclad’s backend logic automatically directs users to the right template, so users don’t have to worry about having to start over after having already entered contract information.
- When it comes time for review, all of the important information is captured in metadata right within the Ironclad platform, so no one ever needs to download a contract, pull it up in Word, and then manually scroll through pages of material to identify important clauses.
- Signatures are collected and placed automatically, so no manual dragging and dropping of signature blocks from an external system is necessary. Offer letters are automatically sent to the heads of the HR team, Payroll, FP&A, and the equity vendor — without any manual involvement.
“Ironclad is a lifesaver. With Ironclad, I never have to worry about selecting the right or wrong template; Ironclad does it for me. This alone has saved my team and me countless hours.” — Hilary Clarke
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