HR Digital Transformation with Online Forms & Workflows

Discover how Cognito Forms’ online form builder can empower your HR department to simplify employee data collection and daily operations.

In today’s fast-paced business environment, HR teams face increasing pressure to deliver strategic value while managing a growing administrative workload. This often leaves HR teams balancing critical people initiatives with time-consuming operational tasks.

A recent survey by Personio highlights a significant disconnect between what executives expect from HR teams and what those teams can currently deliver. While 63% of C-suite executives believe HR provides strategic value, 64% of HR managers feel weighed down by administrative tasks.  Given this gap, it’s not surprising that 53% of C-suite executives feel they don’t receive enough input from HR teams.

Instead of driving organizational change as expected by leadership, HR is often stuck in a reactive loop – constantly trying to catch up.

Adding to this challenge, workplaces have fundamentally shifted over the past few years. According to HRCI’s 2024 survey, 78% of HR teams report that their employees now work remotely or in hybrid setups. This shift demands modernized operations and digital solutions that support distributed teams.

Now more than ever, manual processes, paper forms, and disconnected systems hinder productivity and effectiveness. Without modernizing, HR teams risk falling behind in today’s evolving workplace, struggling to meet the rising expectations of both leadership and employees. To keep pace, HR teams need tools that streamline workflows, automate routine tasks, and centralize information – so they can focus more on people than paperwork.

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The Benefits of Digital Transformation in HR

Manual paperwork, scattered emails, and sprawling spreadsheets are quickly becoming a thing of the past. As these outdated tools disappear, today’s HR teams are embracing smarter, faster solutions.

Digital transformation gives HR the chance to rethink how they work, streamlining daily operations and strengthening their organization’s strategic impact. Let’s explore how digital transformation is reshaping the HR landscape and the key benefits driving this change.

Reclaim valuable time for strategic work

HR teams are increasingly expected to contribute strategically while still managing day-to-day operations. Personio’s study found that 69% of C-suite executives want HR to take a more active role in shaping future business strategy, yet many HR teams struggle to find the time for strategic work today. Meanwhile, 63% of HR managers say their role is primarily operational, highlighting a gap between leadership’s expectations and HR’s day-to-day reality.

This disconnect calls for a smarter approach. Digital transformation and workflow automation help bridge this gap by eliminating redundant administrative tasks. Automating repetitive tasks like application processing, onboarding paperwork, and routine approvals, frees up hours once spent on manual data entry. These reclaimed hours can fuel initiatives that boost employee engagement, improve retention, and support organizational development – areas where human expertise truly shines.

Another study found that HR professionals spend up to 57% of their time on administrative work. By automating these tasks, HR teams can shift their focus from low-impact duties to the strategic priorities leadership values most. Priorities like workforce planning, talent development, and culture initiatives can become part of HR’s daily focus. This shift empowers teams to influence business outcomes and drive meaningful, lasting change.

Standardize processes for consistency and compliance

Freeing up time is critical, but ensuring consistency and compliance is just as essential.  Inconsistent HR practices can expose organizations to risks ranging from legal compliance issues to unfair employee treatment. When processes rely on email chains, verbal instructions, or one-off practices, critical steps are more likely to be missed or inconsistently followed. Digital workflows ensure every task follows a defined, repeatable structure – regardless of who handles it. From onboarding new hires or conducting performance reviews, digital systems enforce consistent steps, documentation requirements, and approval chains. This consistency is especially important for staying compliant with labor laws, privacy regulations, and internal policies.

All of this isn’t just in theory; it’s actually happening in real organizations. One of our customers, CareSphere (a home healthcare organization), uses Cognito Forms to standardize its HR workflows. Their CHRO, Malky Neiman, ensures compliance by adding validation rules and automatic error messages to form fields. She shares, “We haven’t been cited for regulatory compliance since implementing Cognito Forms because our processes just run the way they’re meant to, now.”

Standardized processes go beyond risk management by fostering transparency and fairness. Employees can trust that leave requests, performance evaluations, and other HR tasks will be handled consistently, regardless of department or location. This trust and sense of fairness contributes directly to workplace satisfaction and a stronger relationship with HR.

Eliminate physical constraints for remote and hybrid models

Beyond supporting compliance and fairness, digital transformation enables HR teams to thrive in today’s flexible work environment. The COVID-19 pandemic permanently reshaped workplace expectations, with nearly four in five organizations now operating in remote or hybrid models. This shift quickly exposed major gaps in the disconnected, manual processes many organizations once relied on.

Paper forms, in-person signatures, and office-bound processes simply don’t work when employees are spread across multiple locations. This is where digital tools come into play. Supporting distributed teams has become essential for today’s tools in the workplace. By digitizing operations, your team can work efficiently from anywhere – whether that’s home, a satellite office, or your company’s headquarters.

Supporting this trend, the HRCI survey found that 40% of organizations now conduct HR functions remotely all or most of the time, reflecting a major shift in how HR operates. Digital forms and workflows make this possible by allowing secure access from any device and eliminating physical location as a barrier to HR services.

Employees can submit time-off requests, update personal details, and complete required forms from anywhere, while HR teams can manage these submissions remotely. This flexibility supports today’s work models and helps organizations quickly adapt to change – keeping HR operations effective, no matter the location.

Improve data accuracy and decision-making

Just as important as flexibility is accurate, actionable data to guide HR decisions. However, manual data entry and paper-based processes are notoriously error-prone. When data is transferred between systems or entered more than once, accuracy often suffers. These errors can lead to serious consequences, such as payroll mistakes, compliance issues, and employee dissatisfaction.

This is where digital tools can make a measurable difference. Digital transformation strengthens HR’s ability to collect, manage, and analyze data. Digital forms with built-in validation rules help reduce errors by preventing incomplete or incorrect submissions. When data moves between systems, automated integrations replace error-prone manual transfers.

Beyond improving accuracy, collecting data on a platform with workflow automation and integrations gives HR teams access to clean, easy-to-analyze data. Rather than being buried in filing cabinets or scattered across inboxes, data is consolidated in digital systems – making analysis easier and more meaningful. A strong data foundation empowers HR teams to make smarter decisions about workforce planning, compensation strategies, and talent development.

Why Cognito Forms is an Effective Solution for HR

HR teams face unique challenges requiring solutions that balance ease of use with powerful functionality. Cognito Forms is an effective platform for HR teams aiming to improve operations and streamline everyday processes. With powerful automation and intuitive design, Cognito Forms supports data collection, simplifies internal workflows, and eliminates manual tasks – all while remaining cost effective.

One standout feature of Cognito Forms is how easy it is to use. Our user-friendly interface sets us apart from other online form-builders and enables anyone, regardless of technical skill, to build powerful forms and automated workflows with ease. Many of our customers, especially those in HR, consistently highlight ease of use as a top reason they chose our platform over other tools. Here’s how Cognito Forms empowers HR teams to work smarter and more efficiently:

• Flexibility and ease of use: Our platform is easy to use, without sacrificing flexibility. The intuitive drag-and-drop interface makes it simple for anyone to add, remove, and arrange fields to create a custom form in minutes. Built-in features like conditional logic and calculations provide powerful customization, with no complex setup required.
• Automate any process: Automate your internal processes by using Workflow in your forms. Set up automatic task assignments, team notifications, and status updates as submissions move through approval processes. You can also use data from your forms to generate custom PDF documents, like offer letters, contracts, and employee handbooks, without manually filling out any Word or PDF templates.
• Integrations with your current systems: Easily integrate Cognito Forms with the systems you already use. Trigger automated actions or send data where it’s needed using our data integrations like Zapier, Make, Power Automate, or the Cognito Forms API.
• Pre-built templates: New to Cognito Forms? Get started quickly with our range of customizable HR form templates. You can tailor each template to fit your needs by adjusting form fields, content, or design to get up and running without a steep learning curve.

Research and Customer Insights

Over the past few years, we’ve introduced a range of powerful new features and invested heavily in research to ensure our platform supports the needs of HR teams.

We’ve found that many of our customers manage many complex HR processes on a regular basis. To help them get started quickly, we’ve built practical starting points they can use when building new forms. These templates help new users learn the platform quickly and give them the confidence to start building forms with ease. They also demonstrate how different features enable you to simplify daily tasks, streamline workflows, and keep your teams on track.

We spent considerable time researching the HR industry and exploring how our customers use Cognito Forms to strengthen their departments. The most powerful part of our process, though? The live, virtual interviews we conducted with HR professionals. These conversations gave us deeper insight into the many moving parts of the employee lifecycle. They also gave us the chance to connect directly with our customers and learn what HR teams truly need and expect from Cognito Forms. Collaborating with customers during the template creation process has been both impactful and rewarding for us.

Building on this research, we’re excited to introduce a new set of templates designed specifically for HR teams. They aren’t just your average form templates – they’re backed by research and tested by real customers who rely on Cognito Forms to manage everyday tasks. Each one includes powerful, pre-built configurations tailored to common HR processes. These innovative templates help streamline internal workflows while improving the overall employee experience.

Now, let’s explore how HR teams use Cognito Forms to work smarter.

How HR Teams Use Cognito Forms

HR professionals use Cognito Forms in countless ways to streamline operations and eliminate manual, time-consuming processes. Our platform is flexible enough for any need, from recruitment and onboarding to everyday operations. With Cognito Forms, you can build custom forms and automated workflows – no technical expertise required.

Easily collect the information you need, automate approvals, and integrate with existing systems to create efficient, paperless workflows. Whether you’re building simple application forms, robust onboarding processes, or advanced performance evaluation systems, Cognito Forms gives you the tools to create solutions tailored to your needs.

Here are some of the most common ways HR departments use our platform to transform their operations:

• Employment applications
• Employee onboarding
• Expense reimbursements
• Timesheets and PTO requests
• Performance evaluations

Employment applications

In today’s competitive job market, your employment application process plays a key role in attracting top talent.  Traditional paper applications and generic online forms often create frustrating experiences for candidates. As a result, many qualified applicants abandon the process. Research shows an average candidate drop-off rate of 80%, with 60% caused by lengthy or complicated application forms. Additionally, managing applications through emails or disconnected systems complicates tracking candidates and advancing them through the hiring process.

Managing applications through email or disconnected systems makes it harder to track candidates and move them through the hiring process. These challenges, along with internal inefficiencies, directly impact candidate satisfaction. A streamlined candidate experience is essential for attracting top talent. Research from JobScore found that nearly half of all candidates said they were likely to withdraw from the recruitment process due to poor communication.

Fortunately, modern solutions like Cognito Forms are designed to solve these challenges. Our intuitive design and flexible form-building options make it easy to simplify a hiring process tailored to your needs. Cognito Forms specifically enables you to:

• Create professional, branded application forms that candidates can complete on any device, from anywhere.
• Collect and store applications in a secure, centralized location that protects sensitive applicant data.
• Send automatic status updates to applicants and route applications to the right hiring managers.
• Generate custom documents automatically, like offer letters, using collected application data.

Let’s now look at how one organization transformed its hiring process with Cognito Forms.

A customer’s journey from paper applications to digital efficiency

Oklahoma Baptist University (OBU) transformed its hiring process by building a standardized, automated employment application process after recognizing the need for digital transformation in its HR department. Prior to embarking on this transformation, candidates had to download PDFs, complete them by hand, scan them, and email them back. This process was frustrating for applicants and often caused confusion or delays. Applications were often lost in email threads or junk folders, making it difficult for OBU’s small HR team to find and track submissions. Additionally, sensitive employment information was transmitted via unsecured email, posing significant security risks.

The changes they made using Cognito Forms had an immediate impact that led to remarkable results. OBU’s HR team began processing applications twice as fast by eliminating lost submissions. With Microsoft Power Automate, they automated document routing to SharePoint, further simplifying their workflow. The new system used Lookup Fields to pull open positions from a master form and automatically assign the correct hiring manager. This significantly reduced administrative workload when open positions changed. Security improved dramatically as well, and 100% of applicant PII is now encrypted and stored securely using our File Upload fields. As Josh Shoffner, their VP of Technology noted, "Get in Cognito Forms, and you’ll see for yourself how easy it is to create a form and customize it."

Deliver positive candidate experiences

Our pre-built employment application template helps you deliver a seamless, professional experience for candidates. It includes sections for applicant information, work history, education, references, and more – all fully customizable to fit your needs. It connects to a separate form with all open position information, so your job listings stay up to date automatically. With Workflow and automated notifications, this template streamlines every step of the hiring process, from application to offer.

Template

Employment Application with Connected Job Openings List

• Easily manage open positions
• Securely collect files
• Automatically notify people involved in the Workflow

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Employee onboarding

Traditional onboarding processes often involve disconnected forms, email threads, and manual tracking systems, creating a disjointed experience for new employees and administrative headaches for HR.

Research indicates that 70% of new hires decide whether a job is the right fit within the first month, while 29% make this decision within the first week itself. On average, companies have 44 days to make a positive impression and influence a new hire’s retention. These findings highlight how critical onboarding is for long-term success.

Clearly, onboarding plays a pivotal role in long-term success. Yet despite its importance, coordinating the many steps and people involved remains a challenge for most organizations. Onboarding often involves long paperwork checklists and multiple preparation tasks that require coordination across HR, IT, finance, and other departments. Streamlined, digital onboarding processes have become essential for creating positive employee experiences from day one.

Given the complexity and high stakes, organizations need a smarter way to manage onboarding. This is where a platform like Cognito Forms comes in. Cognito Forms solves these challenges by providing a centralized platform that enables HR to create, manage, and track all aspects of the onboarding process with ease. Cognito Forms enables you to:

• Replace stacks of paper forms with digital onboarding experiences tailored to the role, department, or location.
• Track employee onboarding checklists using automated workflows.
• Automatically route completed forms to appropriate team members.
• Set up automated reminders for upcoming and outstanding tasks.
• Securely collect and store sensitive employee information in compliance with regulations.

How one company transformed their hiring process

When the founders of CareSphere acquired the home healthcare agency back in 2020, they faced a critical roadblock: everything, from employee applications to patient documentation, was paper based. Their onboarding process was very long, taking up to four weeks. Prospective employees had to fill out forms by hand, scan and return them, and wait, all while HR manually entered data across disconnected systems. This created delays, administrative burden, and serious compliance risks.

With Cognito Forms, CareSphere completely reimagined its onboarding process. They built an automated system that connected job applications to interview scheduling, document submission, and account activations. New hires now complete their forms digitally, with conditional logic guiding them through each requirement and triggering automated reminders for missing documents. The system instantly updates payroll, the employee portal, and their Electronic Medical Record (EMR) using the Cognito Forms API and Zapier.

These enhancements transformed CareSphere’s operations for the better. They reduced onboarding time by 93%, cutting the process from four weeks to just two days. This efficiency enabled them to grow to over 2,000 employees and achieve 314% revenue growth in three years, all without needing to hire additional administrative staff. They even eliminated compliance errors with validation rules and error-proof workflows that enforce documentation requirements. Malky Neiman, the company’s Chief Human Resource Officer, states, "There was no way we could have grown so much if we didn’t have Cognito Forms. Really, the forms do everything for us."

Streamline your new hire onboarding process

Our employee onboarding template bundle streamlines your new hire preparation. HR enters personal and hiring details, while location information is automatically filled in using our Work Locations Lookup form. IT tracks hardware, software, and access requirements to ensure everything is ready by day one.  Once IT setup is complete, employees are assigned a task to complete an employee handbook acknowledgement form. Tying it all together, the pre-built automated Workflow ensures seamless coordination between departments, so every item on your new hire orientation checklist gets completed on time.

Template

Employee Onboarding Template Bundle

• Easily collect & store employee details
• Keep track of key onboarding steps
• Assign new hires a task for handbook acknowledgment

Use this Template

Expense reimbursements

Efficient expense reimbursement is key to maintaining financial accuracy and employee satisfaction. Manual or inaccurate data collection often causes delays, errors, and frustration. Digital expense reimbursement forms offer clear advantages for both employees and finance teams.

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Workflow automation and data integrations eliminate many manual steps in the process and allow you to add custom errors and data validation directly into your forms. This ensures employees enter information correctly, improving accuracy from the start.

Together, these features create more efficient, accurate workflows. As a result, digital tools improve productivity and ensure timely reimbursements, directly boosting employee satisfaction. In fact, a study by the Aberdeen Group found that companies using automated, structured spend management processes saw a 1.6x boost in employee satisfaction and a 4.9x increase in productivity.

Cognito Forms provides powerful tools to create custom expense reporting systems that streamline submissions, approvals, and processing. Cognito Forms simplifies expense reporting for both employees and finance teams by enabling you to:

• Create expense forms with built-in calculations for totals, taxes, and categories.
• Upload receipts directly from any device.
• Set up conditional validation rules to ensure policy compliance and clean data.
• Create approval workflows to route expenses and notify employees of updates.
• Integrate with accounting systems using the Cognito Forms API or third-party tools like Zapier or Make.

Streamline your expense reimbursement processes

Use our pre-built expense reimbursement form to easily transition to a secure, digital expense process. This template includes authentication to ensure only your employees submit expenses. It also includes fields to categorize expenses, upload receipts directly within the form, and calculate totals automatically. The connected employee information form makes it easy to use current employee data across multiple forms and also tracks who submitted each report. The pre-built Workflow streamlines the entire process, from submission to approval, saving time for both employees and finance teams.

Template

Authenticated Expense Report Form with Connected Employee List

• Authentication for secure access
• Automated calculations and validations
• Full approval Workflow

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Timesheets and leave of absence requests

Managing employee time, whether tracking work hours or processing time-off requests, is a fundamental HR function that directly impacts payroll, productivity, and employee satisfaction. Paper timesheets and leave of absence request forms often lead to delays, errors, and frustration for employees and HR teams alike.

Moving to digital timesheets and leave of absence request forms improves both accuracy and efficiency. According to a survey conducted by Personio, 23% of employers identify low productivity as a potential barrier to success. This highlights the value of efficient time management workflows in improving organizational productivity.

As a powerful online form builder, Cognito Forms allows you to create customized timesheets and absence request forms that seamlessly integrate with your existing processes. Cognito Forms enables you to:

• Create digital timesheet forms with built-in calculations for regular hours, overtime, and total time.
• Ensure accuracy by setting up calculations that validate available time-off balances.
• Set up approval workflows that automatically route requests to the appropriate manager.
• Integrate with other systems using the Cognito Forms API or third-party tools like Zapier.
• Automatically send notifications for new submissions, pending approvals, and upcoming or overdue task reminders.

How we use our own product for time management

Most of our HR operations here at Cognito Forms are managed directly on our own platform. We track time entirely though digital forms and automated Workflows.  Timesheets and PTO requests are two of our most-used forms within the company itself. The built-in Workflows make it easy for managers to process submissions quickly.

Our HR Manager, Kaitlyn, built a system that automates most of the process. The PTO request form automatically calculates how much PTO employees have used as well as how much they have remaining. It also lists an employee’s previous time off for quick reference. Our timesheet form seamlessly connects with time off requests, showing any submitted requests for the current pay period and all approved time off is automatically included in total hours for the pay period.

Additionally, custom errors prevent timesheet submissions that don’t meet the required minimum hours for salaried employees. This ensures greater data accuracy, reducing the hassle for Kaitlyn and helping prevent paycheck delays.

Both forms are available as Form Views for all users in our Cognito Forms organization, regardless of permission level.  Employees can start a new timesheet or submit a PTO request directly from the Cognito Forms dashboard. This setup simplifies time management, saving Kaitlyn time and making self-service easy for employees.

Performance evaluations

Effective performance evaluations are key to employee development, organizational growth, and talent retention. However, for many organizations, evaluations are inconsistent across departments, often delayed, and hard to track. As a result, the process becomes time-consuming for managers and frustrating for employees. In fact, research from Lattice shows that a single performance review can take one to two weeks.

Digital form builders with conditional logic and validation options let you standardize performance reviews across departments. Workflow automation tools support timely, consistent evaluations that deliver real value at every stage of the process. By streamlining your evaluation processes, you can see an increase in employee engagement of up to 11%. Even better, companies with effective performance management solutions see 30% higher revenue growth on average.

Cognito Forms provides a powerful form builder to create customized performance evaluation systems that improve consistency, completion rates, and overall effectiveness. Our platform enables you to:

• Build standardized evaluation forms with multi-stage evaluation processes including self-assessments, manager reviews, and peer feedback.
• Apply custom validations, errors, calculations, and conditional logic to align with your internal review process.
• Automate workflows to guide and track evaluations through each stage.
• Generate performance documents and development plans using data collected in your forms.

Conduct effective and timely performance evaluations

Our performance evaluation form template helps make your employee reviews more structured, transparent, and efficient. With choice fields and textboxes for comments and goal-setting components, the form captures both quantitative and qualitative feedback. A built-in Workflow guides your team through each step of the process - from manager input, employee signature, and HR processing - ensuring consistency across the organization. Automated notifications keep all participants informed of outstanding tasks, improving your team’s alignment.

Template

Performance Evaluation Form

• Connected employee list
• Full workflow from manager input to employee signature
• Automatic email notifications & task assignments

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Boost Your HR Team’s Productivity with Cognito Forms

Cognito Forms helps you transform your HR operations with digital forms and automated workflows. Quickly build forms that match your team’s exact needs – no coding required. You can go beyond basic data collection with Workflow Automation, simplifying status updates and reducing manual data entry. Automation increases accuracy, streamlines employee interactions, and allows your team to focus on the human-centered work that truly matters most. This shift helps your HR team operate more effectively and deliver greater impact.

Unlike rigid, pre-built HR tools that force you to change your processes, Cognito Forms gives you the flexibility to build custom solutions that fit how your team works. From recruitment and onboarding to daily operations, you’ll have the power to create efficient, paperless processes that evolve with your team.