Document Templates - What are they?

Any time you want to create an Offer Letter or a Contract, you'll be using a Document Template.

There are two types of templates - Mail Merge and eSignature.

In practice, both types of template work in exactly the same way, with the only difference being that eSignature templates result in a document that can be electronically signed within the Candidate Portal.

In addition to offer letters, Mail Merge document templates can be used to create a basic Candidate Export or New Joiner forms.

What do I need to think about when planning?

The key thing to think about where document templates are concerned is, how many do you need?

As noted above, Document Templates are used to create your Offer Letters and Contracts.  So, logically, the more offer letter and contract variants you have, the more document templates you'll need.

That might not necessarily be the case, though. 

A lot of our customers take the implementation of Eploy as an opportunity to harmonise their various offer letters and contracts down to only a couple of versions.

Alternatively, rather than have several templates, you could have a single document template for your offer letters or contracts with highlighted sections of text which those team members responsible for onboarding would remove once the document has been merged, prior to sharing it with the Candidate.

Before you go ahead and do this, spare a thought for Auto-Merged documents.  Within our Onboarding Form Flow you have the ability to have Eploy auto-merge the contract (or any other document) when a Candidate reaches a specified point in the onboarding process.  As these documents are created automatically by the system when the Candidate reaches a given stage, there is no opportunity for you to review the document prior to the Candidate seeing it - so having highlighted sections of text which should be removed won't work in these situations.

Once you've decided how many templates you'd like to have, the next consideration is the design of these templates.

You can either build the document templates within our Document Editor, which has a similar interface, and editing capabilities, as MS Word or Google Docs; or you can create the template outside of Eploy and upload it in to the system.

Whichever route you take to create the template, you'll want to include Merge Fields in to your templates - these are specially coded fields which, when the document is merged within the system, auto-populate from the relevant part of the system, allowing you to automatically include Personal, Vacancy and Placement information without having to manually enter it.

At this stage of your implementation, you simply need to identify the information you'd like to merge in to the documents - during Phase 3 you'll be able to create the document templates themselves and include the merge fields.

I'm still not sure what I need to do - are there any examples I can see?

Let's ask Churchill....."Oh yes!"

There's two ways to see document templates within your demo system.

To see them in action, navigate to View > Placements, then click the blue Application button against any of the placements.  Once within the Application Dialogue, open the Files tab and use the Create button to merge a document.

To look at the templates, navigate to Admin > Document Templates then select either Merge or eSignature documents.  Once looking at the list of templates, click Edit next to any of them to open the document editor window.  If the editor doesn't open straight away, please switch off your browser's Pop-Up blocker and try again.

Tip Document Templates is the final topic of the second Customer Configuration webinar.