How do I stop new hires sending back onboarding forms with blanks still in them?

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Incomplete onboarding paperwork is one of the more avoidable sources of last-minute scrambling before a new hire's start date. It happens almost every time for the same reason: the form doesn't actually stop someone from submitting it half-finished, so a new hire who's skimming through a stack of documents on their lunch break skips a field, doesn't notice, and sends it back looking done. Nobody catches it until someone on your end reviews the file, often close to the start date when there's no slack left to fix it. The full list of documents is in the new hire paperwork checklist.

The no-tool way first

For a one-off hire or two a year, manually reviewing each submitted form and emailing back a quick "you missed this field" note is a reasonable amount of friction. It stops being reasonable once you're hiring regularly, because the manual review step itself becomes a repeated task someone has to remember to do every time, and it's exactly the kind of check that gets skipped when things are busy, right before it would have actually mattered.

Options, from least to most effort

Paper, by hand. You can manually check a printed form for blanks before accepting it, but that's a person doing a job a required-field setting does automatically and consistently.

Jotform Sign. Jotform Sign is part of Jotform's broader form platform, which is a natural fit for onboarding since Jotform's core strength is building out detailed forms with required fields, conditional logic, and file uploads together. Confirmed live on its pricing page: Starter is free for 10 signed documents a month, Bronze runs $39 a month for 100, Silver runs $49 a month for 250, Gold runs $129 a month for 1,000.

DocuSeal. DocuSeal is an open-source e-signature platform, self-hosted free or hosted in the cloud. Confirmed live on its pricing page: Basic is free for 10 signature request emails a month, Pro runs $20 a user per month ($200 a year annually) with API access, useful if you want onboarding packets triggered automatically from your HR system the moment a new hire is added.

SignWell. SignWell is an e-signature platform with flat pricing rather than per-signer fees. Its Free plan, confirmed live on signwell.com/pricing, covers 3 documents a month with 1 sender and 1 template.

QuickSigner. QuickSigner, an e-signature platform for signing PDFs and Word documents from any device, supports signature, date, text, checkbox, attachment and stamp fields, pre-assignable to each signer, confirmed live on its site. Its Free plan includes signature and stamp fields; text and date fields require a paid plan, confirmed on its pricing page. Business runs $5 a month per user (or $48 a year annually) and includes 10 saved templates, useful for a standard onboarding packet reused for every new hire.

The actual steps

1. List every form a new hire must complete. Tax withholding forms, direct deposit, emergency contact, any role-specific acknowledgments. Get the full list once rather than discovering missing pieces hire by hire.
2. Mark every required field as required in your tool. This is the step that actually prevents incomplete submissions, not a reminder email, an actual structural block on submitting with blanks.
3. Send the pack on day one, or ideally before. Give the new hire real time to fill it out properly rather than rushing it the morning they start.
4. Check whether any form, a tax form like a W-9 especially, needs its own official format. Don't substitute a generic signing template for a document that has a specific required layout.

When to skip the tool

Certain tax and compliance forms, a W-9 or similar, have an official government-issued format that shouldn't be recreated as a custom field layout inside a general e-signature tool. Most e-signature platforms, including the ones here, let you upload the official PDF and just add a signature field to it rather than rebuilding the form's layout yourself, which is the safer approach: use the real form, add the signature on top of it, don't attempt to reconstruct it as a lookalike. The IRS's W-9 in particular has a specific, recognizable layout, and a reconstructed version that looks close but isn't the actual form can create confusion down the line if anyone ever needs to verify it against the original. Paperwork is only part of the first week; the rest is laid out in how to onboard a new employee in the first week.

A worked example

Say you're onboarding four new hires in the same week, each needing roughly six forms: tax withholding, direct deposit, an employee handbook acknowledgment, emergency contact, a role-specific NDA, and a benefits enrollment form. That's 24 individual documents moving through your process at once. Without required fields, reviewing all 24 for completeness by hand, and then following up individually with whoever missed something, easily eats an hour or two of someone's week, right during the busiest onboarding stretch. With required fields set once on a reusable template, that review time drops close to zero, since a submitted form is, by definition, a complete one. The setup cost is paid once; the time saved compounds every single hire after that. For a whole crew starting at once, see signing seasonal crew onboarding forms fast.

The part everyone glosses over

Required fields stop a form from being submitted blank, but they don't stop someone from typing garbage into a required field just to get past it, a fake phone number, a nonsense answer to a text field they didn't want to think about. I've seen this happen specifically with emergency contact fields, required, technically filled in, but with information nobody would actually be able to use in a real emergency. A required field solves the "did they skip this" problem. It doesn't solve the "did they actually answer this honestly and carefully" problem, and for anything genuinely important, an emergency contact being the clearest example, it's worth a quick human spot-check rather than trusting the required-field setting alone to guarantee quality. A simple pattern that catches a lot of this cheaply: ask for two pieces of contact information per emergency contact, a name and a phone number at minimum, and glance at whether the phone number is even formatted like a real one before filing it away. To collect ID copies or certificates in the same step, see collecting an ID copy or insurance certificate with a signed form.

How I'd approach this

Required fields fix the most common and most avoidable version of this problem, cheaply and permanently, with almost no ongoing effort once set up. This is one of the clearer cases in this whole pack where a ten-minute setup task, going through your onboarding packet once and marking every field required, pays off on literally the next hire, not some distant future one. Where I'd keep a human in the loop is specifically on the handful of fields where correctness matters more than mere completeness, emergency contacts, anything tied to compliance, rather than assuming every field that got filled in was filled in well. Get in touch if your onboarding packet has grown complex enough, multiple roles, multiple document sets, that reusing one template for everyone has stopped working cleanly.