Duuo automated their hiring process with Contractbook to avoid data entry and wasted time.

Too much data entry 

Duuo is a high-growth soft facility management company that helps modern businesses manage and retain their employees by making sure that work takes place in nice surroundings. They offer services such as cleaning, maintenance and an Office Hero concept where companies can get office assistants as a service.

In total, Duuo has 180 employees, and the Office Hero concept has been particularly successful, so they frequently have to hire new young talents for the position. Since there is high churn in the cleaning and office hero business, recruiting is a time- and resource-consuming task for Duuo to manage. There is a lot of paperwork involved, including lots of contract management. That’s why Duuo’s Marketing Manager, Frederik Freiesleben, started looking into optimizing the process. 

Freiesleben is a real marketeer; he has a true growth-hacking mindset and always thinks in funnels. As he was in charge of planning and executing hiring campaigns through their online channels, he started looking into the entire hiring process. How could he optimize the funnel? 

Duuo had been using Contractbook for their employment contracts for a while, but the process was very manual, and there was a lot of copy/pasting. Luckily, Freiesleben discovered that Contractbook could be used to automate large parts of the workflow. 

“As we mapped out the processes, we found out what was doable. We realized that our finance department was spending so much time manually typing the same information into many different systems.”  Freiesleben explains.

Previously, new hires would leave a handwritten note with personal information such as name, address, ID number and tax information. Their finance department then had to type this information into a database, contract, salary, and bookkeeping system.

“It’s at least four different systems, probably more. Sometimes they can’t read what’s on the paper. We have more than 30 different nationalities and ways to write. Then there is the potential GDPR-liability of using such a paper slip. We just looked at it and thought, this is a nightmare,” he says. “Essentially, it wasn’t optimal. We wasted too much time on manual data entry, which is tedious.” 

Integrated and efficient

Together Duuo and Contractbook came up with a much more efficient workflow for their hiring process. 

When new hires have been to a meeting and accepted the job, they will receive a tablet and a link to an order form with a list of questions. They will type in all their personal information themselves. When they submit the form, the data flows directly to Duuo’s Airtable account, while an employment contract is automatically generated in Contractbook for Duuo to review and sign. Once both parties sign it, all the data is automatically transferred to Duuo’s bookkeeping system e-conomic and their salary-system Salary. 

There is no more data entry and no more copy/pasting. Everything is integrated so the contract can self-execute and data flow freely between systems. The only manual touch points are reviewing the contract for errors and signing it with a digital signature. 

Duuo were so happy with the solution that they also created a similar workflow for their sales agreements. 

They integrated Contractbook with HubSpot, so whenever a sales rep moves a deal to the right deal stage in HubSpot, it triggers a sales agreement populated with data from HubSpot to be generated in Contractbook. Again, they have decided to insert an optional review stage before they send the final contract to signature with the new customer. When the contract is signed, the deal stage automatically changes to Contract Sent, and when it’s signed, the deal moves to Closed Won.  

That way, they can follow the entire process in their CRM system and automatically trigger all the small manual actions. 

“It’s not rocket science,” says Freiesleben, “But it just works.” 

Clear results 

According to Freiesleben’s calculations, Duuo saves about 85 hours on their employment contracts and 20 hours on their sales contracts. And that’s a conservative estimate. 

“The more we grow, the more time saved, of course,” says Freiesleben. Hiring more or selling more doesn’t involve more work with contracts, so the system is scalable.

Previously, they only bothered making contracts for the bigger deals. Now, they are signing contracts for every service they deliver, no matter the size or price, because it’s so easy. According to Freiesleben, that amounts to about 100 contracts within a few months, making their legal situation safer and more predictable. 

Besides the quantitative benefits, there is also a more ideological reason behind their use of Contractbook. 

“In my eyes, working with contracts is boring and nerve-wracking, so it’s a task I would want to remove. Also, in my world, people should like going to work. They should do what they are good at and find interesting. If you take time away from writing contracts, people can focus on their actual work. Nobody likes typing the same data four times. So ideologically, I think we become a better company by taking away these tedious tasks.”, says Freiesleben. 

“So in the end, we save time, avoid double work, and we are making it easy and simple for the employees, in order to also minimize mistakes,” he concludes. 

Customize your own setup

Duuo have integrated their contract management workflow with Airtable, Salary and HubSpot, but there are plenty of other tools to integrate with if your tech stack looks different - be it Salesforce, Slack or HiBob, just to name a few examples. 

With Contractbook’s Foundation plan, modern companies get access to a wide variety of standard integrations that allow them to build their own customized contract automation workflows for HR, sales and operations.