Automating employment contracts at scale has saved Burd Delivery days of work

Hiring at scale!

Burd is a tech and logistics company that offers same-day delivery for webstores. It’s a bit like Wolt or Deliveroo but with things.

In most cases, their delivery is the last touchpoint a webstore has with the customers, so providing excellent service is key to their business. That human touch—a smile or a fun remark when the package is delivered—makes all the difference. But they’ve also understood the value of using state-of-the-art technologies to make their delivery services timely and reliable—right down to the minute.

Due to their success, Burd is hiring deliverers at scale. What makes their recruitment efforts even more tricky is that there is a high average employee churn rate in the kind of gig economy Burd operates in.

It’s crucial for Burd that their employees work under fair conditions and well-regulated contracts. That means a huge administrative burden connected to recruiting in just sorting out the paperwork and ensuring all the legal formalities are in place.

Such was the challenge Burd faced when they got in contact with Contractbook.‍

An automated onboarding process

Automation is key to scaling a high-growth business. Especially when there is tough competition for talent and the market cycle forces you to be cost-efficient.

With that said, you should not automate everything. We usually advise you to automate low-complexity and high-frequency manual tasks so your people can focus on their work's social, strategic and creative aspects.

In other words, tedious, repetitive tasks divided by automation equals more time plus freedom.With that in mind, Contractbook stepped in to help Burd automate the manual processes of their onboarding.

Burd’s solution works like this:

1. When a new recruit contacts Burd Delivery through their website, they receive a form where they type in basic information about themselves. Based on these data points, Contractbook auto-generates an employment contract for them to sign.
2. The template is set up and adjusted centrally from Burd's Contractbook account so that nobody can edit the contents of their standard document without permission. That prevents typos and other mistakes and helps Burd keep a consistent legal standard for their employment agreements.
3. When the contract is viewed, approved and signed, it self-executes—a bit like a smart contract but without all the blockchain fuzz. The recruit automatically receives further information about their onboarding. At the same time, they're automatically created in Burd's salary system. In that way, Burd doesn't need to spend time writing emails or doing manual data inputs and copy/paste work.

Burd likes to keep a human in the loop to review parts of the process, but the manual touchpoints are automated from the moment a new employee goes through their form on the website until they arrive at Burd's facility for their very first gig.

Meanwhile, Burd can keep track of all their employment contracts in a single centralized overview provided by Contractbook, so everything is indexed, organized, and easy to find.

Flawless contracts in no time!

You can consider automation a bit like a dishwasher. You use it for things you often clean and for things that are easy to clean - like your plates and cutlery. But don’t use it for your Japanese knives or that cast iron skillets you inherited from your great-grandmother. They require special treatment.

Burd Delivery got this right. They’re hiring at scale to keep up with the increasing service demand. Using Contractbook, they’ve automated all the manual aspects of their onboarding process, so they have more energy to focus on their X-factor—providing the best customer service in their field.

When talking to Jakob Kristiansen, Burd's founder and Creative Director, he mentioned two essential gains from their setup.

• First, Contractbook saves them a ton of time as they don’t have to waste it on data entry and copy/paste work. At least 15 minutes per recruit and adding that up; “Our Contractbook-setup has saved us days,” Jakob told us. Maybe even weeks.
• Secondly, they get a flawless setup. Let’s face it; computers are more reliable than humans when sending data back and forth. It’s those simple high-frequency tasks where machines excel, so Burd has been blessed with a much more error-prone and compliant setup thanks to Contractbook.

As Jakob mentioned, "This automation is super reliable, and we don’t risk making any typing errors in our contracts.”

In that way, Jakob summarized the wonders of Contractbook: we make working with contracts faster and more accurate.

Contractbook for HR teams

As a contract management software, the Contractbook platform is tailored for HR use cases. Whether you work with employment agreements, consultancy agreements, or NDAs, Contractbook allows you to create, sign, and organize your contracts in a single streamlined workflow.

Like Burd, you can automate your employee onboarding, collect employee data securely via forms, and auto-generate new agreements based on questionnaires. You can negotiate the deals seamlessly and track the progress of your deals. And you can automate your legal obligations to stay on top of trial periods, termination dates, renewals, renegotiations, and much more.

Companies like Burd usually also integrate Contractbook with their HR tools like HiBob, Humaans, and Persiono or payroll software that allows you to sync Contractbook with your payroll systems to reduce manual touchpoints and secure a smooth onboarding process.