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On-boarding High Volume of Employees with Ease

print4payhotel_bannerad_300x150_pix_2017 updated 9-13-17

National hospitality staffing company, LGC Hospitality, implemented DocuWare Cloud to digitize and streamline their onboarding workflow, making the process simpler for both the applicant and staff.

Established in 2003, LGC Hospitality is a leading hospitality staffing company with over 26 offices across the USA. They help hotels, corporate dining companies, country clubs, hospital food services, special events centers, stadiums, caterers, schools and others to fill hospitality, hotel and restaurant positions. LGC provides temporary, temporary-to-hire, and career options at a variety of venues.

Their mission is to ensure a positive experience for both candidates and clients by going above and beyond the expectations they have of staffing firms. LGC strives to make quality placements as a result of long-standing client and candidate relationships built on trust and honesty.

LGC processes paperwork for over 50,000 applicants a year and issues W2 forms for over 24,000 employees. Employees range from those looking for fulltime work, a few weeks of work, weekends or just one event. Regardless of how many hours they end up working, each employee must fill out a 54-page application plus additional paperwork to set up payroll. When using their paper-based process, getting the applications complete and properly filled out was one of LGC’s biggest challenges. The application was long and asked for the same information in several locations which candidates found frustrating. To add to the labor intensive process, LGC staff had to spend a lot of time reviewing applications just to make sure every field was filled in and that every page had been signed. It was also very difficult managing, storing, and sharing this information internally, in addition to pulling information for audits.

Requirements

When a new Vice President of Operations came on board, she began looking for a digital solution that would ease the company’s pain. She decided on DocuWare because the solution met all her needs: streamline the application process, eliminate time spent manually storing documents, provide the company with a searchable database of employees, and give recruiters the ability to use the system when they were at event locations. Additionally, implementing a cloud-based system would make rolling it out to 26 branch offices an easy process.

Solution

Today, the application and on-boarding process is all done through DocuWare via one online web form that contains fields from all their forms such as: Form W4 – Employee's Withholding Allowance Certificate, Form I9 – Employment Eligibility Verification, Direct Deposit, Emergency Contact Information, and others. The web form avoids redundant data entry by only asking for each piece of information one time and ensuring completeness by making some fields required. Once the information is entered and the web form has been signed, the data is used to create separate documents that are automatically stored in DocuWare. To simplify searches, branch offices and the corporate office each have their own filing cabinet, however, area and corporate managers have access to multiple cabinets. The solution was methodically rolled out to each office and after one week of training, staff jumped in and embraced their new paperless processes.

Benefits

Before DocuWare, the application process could take up to an hour and a half; now it only takes about 30 minutes. Making the process even easier and faster, LGC can email the applicant a link to the form so they can complete it at home and then finalize it in the office.

“DocuWare has so much flexibility that if we have a candidate who is struggling to use the computer, we can print out the form and let them use the paper version, then scan the document back into our system,” said Rachel Martin, VP of Operations. “All we need is a laptop, signature pad and Wi-Fi. We can even do our hiring for an event from a venue location,” Martin continued.

DocuWare has expanded beyond just the first phase of the application process to now include a workflow to ensure all documentation is complete as someone transitions from applicant to employee. LGC’s hiring managers use DocuWare to electronically stamp tax forms, I9 forms, and direct deposit forms as approved which routes the documents to the payroll department for a few final processes and allows the employee to begin work.

“We stayed very close to the same payroll processes we were using before DocuWare, with one exception; our processes have been completely streamlined. Once a payroll form has been submitted and approved by a manager it launches a workflow that activates or allows deposits to be made to a pre-paid debit card, eliminating a two-week lag time. It’s been a win-win for everyone, our staff and our hospitality employees,” said Martin.

LGC has every applicant fill out IRS Form 8850, so it can apply for Work Opportunity Tax Credits, a Federal tax credit available to employers who hire and retain veterans and individuals from other target groups with significant barriers to employment. In the past, branch offices would mail physical forms to the corporate office weekly, who would then consolidate the shipments from the branch offices and mail a bigger box of forms to the IRS. LGC only had one month from the date-of-hire to submit the form and deadlines were often missed. Today, as soon as the form has been reviewed and stamped approved, it is automatically emailed from the branch office directly to the IRS processing facility, ensuring the company takes 100% advantage of eligible credits without the added physical work of copying and packing documents or the weekly shipping costs. Employees have to work a certain number of hours before LGC can qualify for a tax credit, but since all forms are automatically sent, the number of credits LGC is potentially eligible for has risen.

When it comes to placement, since the applicant files are digital, the staff can now search their newly created database to quickly find a candidate with the right qualifications for an event

“Sometimes, I need to find someone with a specific qualification, such as someone who has a certain certificate or has had a certain health screening. I can do a search in DocuWare and find several candidates. We love being able to search our own database, because this is something we could never do with paper records,” said Martin.

Conclusion

The biggest benefit DocuWare has brought LGC is its impact on the audit process. LGC’s large corporate accounts conduct periodic audits that require the corporate office to produce requested documents such as signoff-sheets, background checks and verifications within a small window of time. In the past, the corporate office was dependent on the branch offices to forward paper documents. Today, the requested documents are completely and accurately filled out and easily accessible in DocuWare, allowing LGC’s corporate office to pass the audit with ease.

Martin summed up their DocuWare solution saying, “DocuWare has significantly impacted our business and streamlined our processes. Our on-boarding procedure is considerably easier and quicker for both applicants and staff and the use of online web forms results in complete, accurate information. On a corporate level, we have access to all the documents from each of our 26 locations, smoothing our audit process and improving our efficiency. DocuWare has helped us moved our business into a modern age and allowed us to better serve our clients.”

DocuWare Corporation | 4 Crotty Lane, Suite 200 | New Windsor, NY 12553   (888) 565-5907 | www.docuware.com

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