HR e-document workflow for a group with thousands of employees

Take paper out of the HR process so that signing works for everyone — including employees without a work computer.

An HR document used to travel a long paper route through the group: print it, collect signatures across several legal entities, scan it, file it in the archive. Nobody could see the approval timeline, and a lost page meant another round.

The staffing structure lived in spreadsheets: re-assigning a department meant editing a file by hand and mailing out a new version. Answering “how many positions are filled and open right now” meant counting everything again.

Vacation schedules were built the same way — spreadsheets and email. Kazakhstan's rules (at least 14 consecutive calendar days, public holidays excluded from the count, days accrued per month worked) lived in the HR manager's head, and employees found out they'd broken one only after a rejection.

Line employees are a challenge of their own. Most staff at the factories and dealerships have no work computer, so signing and acknowledgement had to work from a phone, within a minute and with zero training.

Two users — two interfaces: control for HR, one button for the employee.

• – Aligned the business goals directly with the business — the Motor company, HR, directors and line managers: design started from an agreed problem, not from a mockup.
• – Went out with the team to the factories, dealerships and the distribution arm — collecting feedback, joining business meetings and running research on site, where documents actually get signed.
• – Split the two scenarios into separate interfaces: HR gets the structure, routes, statuses and bulk operations; the employee gets a short “to sign” list without HR jargon, built for signing from a phone within a minute and with zero training.
• – Designed the staffing structure as a draft-first editor — bulk edits to the structure carry a high cost of error: edits accumulate and are flagged, any move can be undone step by step, and one deliberate batch of changes becomes an order instead of every mouse movement.
• – Built the vacation rules into the interface rather than the manual: the balance for each entitlement, the 14-consecutive-days requirement and the holiday exclusion are all calculated on the planning screen — before the request is sent, not after it's rejected.
• – Built digital signing and mass acknowledgements around visibility of state: the employee sees exactly what they are signing and what to do if the certificate fails, while HR sees coverage progress for an order spanning hundreds of people — instead of a hundred separate tasks.
• – Reused components and patterns from the shared MyLink design system — statuses, tables and forms match the group's other products, so HR doesn't have to relearn when switching modules.

40%

of paper forms automated

25,000+

contracts signed in the system

• – The core HR flows run in the system: contract generation and signing, the org structure and vacations — instead of spreadsheets, printing and message threads.
• – Contracts are signed by employees without a work computer too — the people who used to sign only on paper.
• – New-hire onboarding runs through the system: a clear digital first day strengthened trust in the company and eased the way into work processes.
• – Vacation rules are calculated in the interface: employees see their balance and limits before sending a request, rather than learning about them from a rejection.
• – The staffing structure is edited as a batch with any move reversible until it's saved — bulk changes stopped being a risk.
• – The module was built on the shared design system, which reduced the amount of new UI and sped up handoff to development.