Over the years, human resources has evolved from basic recruiting and benefits management to become one of the most important parts of a successful business. Today, HR teams handle everything from onboarding and offboarding to employee retention, drug testing, insurance, and even shaping company culture and ethics.
With these new responsibilities comes a mountain of paperwork. HR departments are responsible for creating, organizing, and storing countless documents, many of which must be kept on file for years in order to meet their retention requirements. Time-off requests, benefits enrollment forms, payroll documents, and more pile up quickly, creating challenges for even the most organized human resources teams.
As businesses grow, HR departments are often left underfunded and understaffed, leaving smaller teams to handle an overwhelming volume of records. This can lead to manual data entry, lost or misfiled documents, compliance risks, and inefficient processes.
The underlying problem is clear: paper-based records are no longer practical for modern HR. Managing employee records stored on paper creates unnecessary hurdles, leading to inefficiency, compliance issues, and data security woes.
Transitioning your HR team to digital recordkeeping can help you address these issues. By converting your paper files into a text-searchable database of digital files, your HR team can work more efficiently, stay organized, and simplify compliance.
In this article, we will discuss the benefits of digitizing your HR records, the documents you can scan to save time and money, and how SecureScan’s HR records scanning service can help streamline your workflow.
What Are the Benefits of Scanning Human Resources Records?
Digitizing HR records offers a range of advantages, from better security and easier compliance to improved organization and significant cost savings. It also streamlines key processes like hiring, helping your team operate more efficiently.
Enhanced Security
HR teams manage some of the most sensitive data within a business, including employees’ personal and financial information. Storing these records on paper not only poses significant security risks but also makes it harder to meet legal and confidentiality obligations.
Paper records are inherently vulnerable. They can be stolen, damaged, or lost, and they provide minimal protection for sensitive information. These risks make paper-based record-keeping a challenge for businesses aiming to safeguard employee data.
Digitizing your HR records offers a more secure alternative. SecureScan’s HIPAA-compliant scanning service ensures your files are handled with care and converted into a secure digital format. Features like access controls, file encryption, and automatic backups provide robust protection against unauthorized access and data loss.
All scanning takes place in a highly secure, access-controlled facility equipped with 24/7 monitored surveillance. Our staff undergoes stringent hiring practices, including background checks and extensive HIPAA compliance training, ensuring your documents remain secure throughout the entire process.
Simplified Compliance
HR teams are legally required to store personal employee information for specific periods, depending on the type of document. Each record, including applications, resumes, background checks, and reference checks, has its own retention schedule that must be followed to comply with state and federal regulations.
These rules are often designed to support nondiscrimination and equal opportunity laws, ensuring fairness for all applicants. While beneficial, managing these requirements can be a time-consuming and complex process for HR teams. Sorting through paper files, ensuring compliance, and maintaining an organized system can take significant time and resources, leading to inefficiencies and extra costs.
Digitizing your records can simplify compliance by automating many of these tasks. For example, files that exceed retention requirements can be easily identified and deleted without the need for manual review. This reduces the burden on your team while helping you stay compliant with ease.
Switching to digital records also eliminates the need for manual filing, reducing errors and freeing up valuable storage space. Your team can spend less time on administrative tasks and focus on more meaningful work.
Better Organization
Managing the large volume of documents HR teams handle every day can be overwhelming. Data often ends up scattered across multiple systems, creating unnecessary complexity and making it harder to stay organized. This kind of disarray increases the likelihood of filing errors or even data loss, which can lead to compliance risks and wasted time.
A well-organized HR records system isn’t just about meeting legal requirements—it also empowers your team to better support employee actions and decision-making. When records are easy to access and manage, HR teams can work more efficiently and confidently.
Digitizing your records streamlines this process by consolidating multiple systems into one centralized, searchable database. With all your employee documents in one place, your team can quickly find what they need, reducing errors and improving overall workflow.
Long Term Cost Savings
Paper-based record-keeping may seem straightforward, but the costs add up quickly. As the volume of paper grows, so do the expenses for physical storage. From filing cabinets and storage boxes to offsite facilities, managing paper records consumes valuable office space and resources. When you factor in the cost of square footage and the hours employees spend searching for documents, the financial impact becomes hard to ignore.
Digital storage, on the other hand, offers a cost-effective solution. Over the last decade, advancements in technology have made long-term digital storage not only more accessible but also significantly cheaper. By transitioning to a digital system, you can eliminate the need for physical storage while giving your team instant access to the documents they need.
Going paperless helps businesses save money in more ways than one. It reduces storage and labor costs, streamlines workflows, and minimizes inefficiencies, leading to substantial savings over time. For HR departments, these benefits translate into a more productive team and a healthier bottom line.
Efficient Hiring Experience
Onboarding new employees requires significant time and effort. From reviewing inbound resumes to coordinating with managers and selecting candidates, the hiring process generates a mountain of paperwork that needs to be evaluated and shared.
Paper-based records can slow this process down. Since physical documents can only be accessed by one person at a time, collaboration becomes challenging, creating bottlenecks that delay hiring decisions.
Digitizing hiring documents allows your team to work more efficiently. Multiple team members can review resumes and credentials simultaneously, speeding up the evaluation process and reducing delays. Sharing documents becomes seamless, making it easier to collaborate and focus on selecting the best candidate.
Don’t let inefficiencies in your hiring process cause you to miss out on top talent. Scanning these documents simplifies every step, from reviewing applications to finalizing hires, so you can fill positions faster and keep your business running smoothly.
What Kinds of Human Resources Documents Can Be Scanned?
HR departments handle a wide variety of documents that need to be carefully managed and securely stored. Digitizing these records can simplify your workflow, enhance organization, and ensure compliance with retention requirements. With our document scanning services, your paper records can be converted into indexed, text-searchable PDFs, making it easy to access and manage your HR files.
Types of HR documents we can scan include:
- Employment applications and resumes
- Employee contracts, non-disclosure agreements, and signed confidentiality forms
- State and federal tax documents such as W-4s, 1099s, and I-9s
- Employee benefits eligibility and insurance-related documents
- Personnel files
- Benefits data, including 401(k) information
- Pre-payment authorization and direct deposit forms
- Training materials and mandatory certification documents
- Performance reviews, attendance records, and time-clock data
- Benefit change requests and related administration files
- Exit interview documents
- Archived employee records that must be retained for compliance
Why Choose SecureScan for Your HR Document Scanning?
Since 2003, SecureScan has been helping HR departments streamline their workflows, improve productivity, and cut costs with our secure and reliable document scanning services. Trusted by government agencies, medical facilities, law firms, and businesses of all shapes and sizes, we’re known for delivering high-quality results tailored to meet your unique needs.
Our team is here to make the process simple and stress-free. Call us at (877) SCAN-DOC to speak with one of our experts, who will guide you through the entire scanning process, answer your questions, and create a customized plan that works for your business and your budget. Or contact us to get a free quote for your scanning project.
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