Use this free template to delight successful candidates with a readable, jargon-free employment offer letter that actually gets new joiners excited to sign. Download the template to get started.
Sending and receiving an offer letter should be a moment of joy for both parties.
However, regulatory burdens and time pressure mean that job offer letters often look more like a checklist exercise where the employer just wants to fulfill some legal obligations, cram the envelope with stuff, stick it in the post and forget it ever happened.
However, overloading people with information, while skimping on personal warmth, sets a bad tone for your new relationship.
Employment offer letters are the perfect opportunity to delight a prospective employee, and welcome them to the team, so don't let the opportunity to do so pass you by.
Here's everything you need to know about employment offer letters, including how to write, negotiate and automate the perfect offer letter.
An employment offer letter is a document sent out by a company to offer a job to a successful candidate.
Offer letters are just one way of contacting candidates that impress during a hiring process to offer them a position at your company, and they can be sent either digitally (e.g via Juro) or through the post.
Depending on the jurisdiction, an employment letter is sometimes known as an: employment contract, offer letter, employment verification letter, or a proof of employment document. But they all exist for the same reason.
If you’re an employer, the employment letter is used to formalize the hire. It usually confirms the job details for the candidate, with information on salary, working hours, employment terms and conditions, and more.
It might be followed by a separate, more detailed employment contract; or it might form the legal basis of your employment on its own.
The main purpose of an employment offer letter is to explain exactly what you're offering a candidate if they choose to accept the role at your company, as well as what will be expected of them if they do decide to accept your offer.
It will often include the benefits you would make available to them, the nature of the work they'd be doing, and what they'll be paid for this work. The more appealing this offer is, the more likely they are to accept.
Another, perhaps less obvious purpose of an employment letter is to delight and impress the candidate, both with the contents of your offer and how it's being presented. If you're offering a candidate a role, you obviously want them.
A well-drafted, meaningful and attractive offer letter is the perfect way to showcase what your company is like and convince them to get on board!
The main difference between an offer letter and an employment contract is the level of detail. Employment contracts tend to be more detailed and granular than offer letters, for example.
Employment offer letters are a great way to extend an offer to a successful candidate. Meanwhile, employment contracts are often used to formalize the future employee's acceptance of the offer and willingness to comply with the terms outlined in the agreement.
"Securing a new hire should be an exciting moment for both the candidate and the employer - so make sure this excitement is reflected in your employment letter"
The people who use employment letters often fall under three categories.
There are several features that are common to most employment letters. These include:
Your employment offer letter should include a personalized note confirming that you're offering them the position and congratulating the candidate on this achievement.
For a more personalized feel, you might even want to elaborate on how they impressed, if you haven't already.
The employment offer letter will also need to lay out specifically what the offer entails. For example, you should place the following details clearly at the top of your offer letter:
Since you're using the offer letter as an opportunity to showcase what the company can offer an employee, it makes sense to include a brief overview of the most important benefits on offer. This might include free healthcare, share options, fitness budgets, unlimited holiday, or something else.
If there's too much information to include, which is probably a good thing, then consider using links to other documents within the offer letter to keep it concise. We usually link to our Notion page that describes our employee benefits.
If you're offering a candidate a role, they're inevitably going to know what it involves and what they'll be responsible for if they choose to accept. Use the offer letter as an opportunity to familiarise them with this information and provide an insight into what will be expected of them once they've joined.
Securing a new hire should be an exciting moment for both the candidate and the employer - so make sure this excitement is reflected in your employment letter. Here’s how you can write a good employment letter that candidates want to sign.
Legal jargon in an offer letter doesn't reflect well on your company culture, so don’t start your employee/employer relationship by bombarding them with it.
You only get one chance to make a first impression in writing so keep it accessible, clear, concise, to the point, and above all, friendly. Opt for plain language contracts instead.
You need to convey all the information the candidate needs to make an informed decision.
Keep this front and centre, so there’s no ambiguity. Cover practical details like the effective date, what to expect on arrival, who they'll report to, when they'll be paid, the length of any probation period, and so on.
Let them get excited about the role by giving them a sneak peek into what onboarding will look like with some details about their first week.
Think hard about the acceptance date – make sure you give them enough time to properly consider the offer, whilst also establishing a timeframe that lets your business move forward.
If their onboarding will be remote, it’s worth sharing a few details about that too.
Every candidate is different. The one you chose obviously had something none of the others did – otherwise you wouldn’t be offering them the role. So make your offer to them personal too.
“With the exception of the odd hypergrowth company hiring fifty people at a time, there’s really no reason to make your offer letters 100 per cent standardised”
If you had them present a strategy in the final round interview, and their creativity blew you away, then refer to it. If the interview panelists had specific positive feedback, share it.
If you want them to accept the offer then make sure you let them know that they aren’t just one more headcount receiving a mass-produced template.
With the exception of the odd hypergrowth company hiring fifty people at a time, there’s really no reason to make your offer letters 100 per cent standardised. Make it personal.
An employment offer letter is just the tip of an iceberg of information that candidates need to make an informed choice about the role, and to know what to expect if they accept.
But cramming in detailed information about (for example) options schemes, pension schemes, data security policies, and so on, is only going to lead to information overload and a slower decision-making process.
Use layering or linking to external documents to give them access to the information they need, without compromising the readability and accessibility of the offer you’re making to them.
Check out Monzo’s terms and conditions or Juro’s privacy notice for an example of how this might look.
Any other key company document, like a sales brochure, a fundraising deck or a customer email, would be branded consistently.
An employment offer letter should be no different – make sure your marketing and design colleagues have signed off on the visual direction, and that your offer letters reflect the most up-to-date public identity of your company.
Companies like Slack, Monzo and Stripe know when to incorporate emojis, illustrations, playful language and personalisation better than anyone.
Adding little touches – like having the CEO hand-sign it and write a personal intro – to make a job offer letter a great experience could raise your candidate’s experience by a few percent and make an attractive offer even more irresistable.
Startups face a tough time competing for talent – one little touch could be the difference between landing a great hire and missing out.
You'll need to incorporate all of these elements without compromising one of the most fundamental must-haves: brevity.
Shorter legal documents increase the likelihood of securing a signature. Improving your time-to-hire metric by optimising for length could be the edge your company needs in a competitive hiring market. Give people the key information up front and they’ll get to signing faster.
“With an automated workflow, a feasible end-to-end time for generating, issuing and securing signature on an offer letter is less than one hour”
If you really want to reduce time-to-hire, an automated process is a must-have. Contract automation empowers businesses to create employment offer letters in just two minutes.
Rather than drafting employment offer letters from scratch for individual candidates, Juro users can generate offer letters in seconds using pre-approved contract templates and the information provided either through a simple Q&A form or an integration with a HRIS or ATS like Greenhouse, Workable and Bullhorn.
“It was taking up to 15 minutes to create and send an offer letter. Now, with Juro, it takes two” - David Swenton, Director of Business Ops, Cleo
“The time I spend replying to candidates and negotiating terms has been reduced by 75 per cent thanks to Juro” - HR Business Partner, Curve
Want to find out more about how contract automation can reduce time-to-hire and make the process more scalable? Get in touch to see how Juro's CLM for HR teams empowers them to agree contracts up to ten times faster.
Once you've sent the candidate an employment offer letter, you have to sit back and wait to hear.
Most often, candidates will either accept or reject an offer letter outright. However, in certain situations, there might be some contract negotiation involved surrounding the terms you provided. But what then?
When you’re trying to secure good candidates, they are likely involved in more than one hiring process, so it’s essential to provide a streamlined experience and to negotiate the best terms for both them and the company. We've written a detailed guide on how to negotiate a job offer letter. But if you want a few quick and easy tips, keep reading.
Fortunately, there are a few ways that businesses can make offer letter negotiation simple.
Remember, negotiation and willingness to be flexible is important in reaching agreement. Candidates can feel disengaged and frustrated if there’s no discussion, and you run the risk of losing them altogether. Equally, there will be things you simply can't move on as a business.
Knowing what these things are before a candidate begins to negotiate terms is essential, as it will prevent delays and friction if and when it does come to that.
User-friendly design and language can play a big role in making offer letter negotiations easier. The faster the candidate can access and understand information, the less likely they are to spend time clarifying terms and digging around for information.
Ditch the legal jargon and use friendly, approachable and easy-to-understand language that excites the candidate and reflects your business culture. Make sure the most important information is clearly visible – this will prevent miscommunication and encourage the candidate to sign.
Look through previous offer letters and identify the points that were heavily negotiated – can you make changes to these now to minimize back-and-forth later on?
One way to improve your offer letter process is to make it more visible internally. Integrations with collaboration apps like Slack and Juro’s timeline feature mean that relevant teams in the business can keep track of the contract, its status and any updates, and how the counterparty has engaged with it.
This insight is invaluable and can make negotiations much easier by opening up channels of communication; for example, employers can see whether the candidate has opened the letter and can then suggest a call to discuss it.
Another effective way to improve efficiency and reduce friction during employment offer negotiations is to automate the letters to begin with, making them easy to negotiate directly onto, edit and sign.
With contract management software like Juro, users can benefit leave internally and externally facing comments directly onto the offer letter, add additional attachments when requested and see a complete audit trail of the amendments made. This helps legal, business and HR teams to quickly agree terms with prospective employees that work for both parties, and with ease.
What happens when your business starts scaling rapidly and the volume of job offer letters needed rises significantly? How can you balance producing the right quality and quantity of offer letters without becoming a drain on legal's time?
If your business is hiring at a steady level, onboarding good candidates and meeting its growth targets, you might think that a scalable process isn’t necessary. But as the company continues to grow, your current process could suddenly stall.
When it does, so will your growth. But how can you build an offer letter workflow that's built to scale? Here are a few of our tips on how to create a collaborative, scaleable and friction-free workflow using Juro's AI contract management tool:
We discussed how to perfect your offer letters earlier in this post, but as your business scales, it will be more about perfecting the templates used to create offer letters.
Your offer letter templates will serve every single offer letter you send out, so it’s worth getting the details just right. Think about usability, readability, and visual design, as well as where to put and how best to signpost important information.
By using a Q&A flow to automatically populate key fields, you can give teams the ability to create their own dynamic and engaging offer letters. This can save time spent on contract administration, giving users greater control and oversight, and streamlining the process.
By using a contract collaboration platform like Juro, you can integrate your contract workflow with services such as Slack, Google Drive and Greenhouse.
These integrations can help you track applicants and spot where things are getting stuck or slowing down, all while giving you and the necessary people complete visibility of any contract updates.
Make sure you start small and allow teams to adapt before diving into large-scale automation. Work out where the bottlenecks are using dashboard and analytic features in your contract repository. And most importantly, review the process regularly and iterate: this will help make sure that your scalable workflow stays scalable.
With these features in place, your supercharged offer letter workflow will be able to handle whatever you throw at it, regardless of how fast your company grows.
If you're interested in scaling your contract workflow for employment offer letters, your best bet is to adopt a CLM solution like Juro. Without a robust contract process, offer letters can cause pain points that frustrate hiring teams and candidates alike. More often than not, they become frustrated due to duplication of work, poor data integrity, wasted time, and poor candidate experience.
Here's what you need to know in order to improve your employment offer letter workflow:
Offer letters are used in certain jurisdictions in conjunction with employment contracts. In other jurisdictions (like the US) there is typically no separate employment contract. As such they should still have oversight from the legal team. Typically they will own the wording of key provisions.
Templates often also have involvement from marketing and communications teams, as they represent a key touchpoint for the brand. An attractive, dynamic document with engaging branding can be the difference between an offer being accepted quickly or left unanswered.
Talent acquisition teams usually work with hiring managers and senior leadership (depending on the role being hired) to nail down the specific details of the contract.
They’ll use a Q&A flow to quickly enter data in smartfields like candidate name, contact details, remuneration, bonus, equity, start date and so on. This data will autopopulate the automated contract template, and be searchable afterwards.
Unless there’s a culture of departing significantly from templates, legal may not need to approve every Offer Letter that goes out. Senior hires like a VP or C-suite role might require more scrutiny, both from legal and the leadership team, but hiring managers are usually empowered to approve Offer Letters for the majority of roles.
It’s still commonplace for CEOs to be the ultimate signatory for employment contracts. It’s good for both branding and candidate experience.
However, depending on company size and structure, department or function heads may be empowered to sign Offer Letters. In a high-growth environment, if a business is adding dozens of employees each month, an eSignature flow is common to make sure signatories can speed through their backlog.
Juro’s AI contract collaboration platform enables your team to create, execute and manage contracts 10x faster than traditional tools. With Juro, you can:
To find out more about how Juro can speed up the process of creating, signing and managing contracts for your HR team, book your personalized demo today.
Employment offer letters will be legally binding so long as the contract contains all of the usual elements of a contract. However, if the job offer letter doesn't contain these elements, it won't form a legally binding contract.
Employment offer letters will usually be confidential. Only the parties to the contract or contract stakeholders should have access to it.
All candidates have the right to reject an employment offer letter. This simply means that they won't accept the offer of employment on the terms provided. They are also welcome to negotiate an employment offer letter, too.
An employer can rescind an employment offer letter up until the offer has been accepted by the candidate. However, once the offer has been accepted, they may already have entered into a legally binding contract.
According to the GOV.UK, employment offers do not need to be in writing, which means they don't necessarily need to be signed either. However, it's a good idea to have the offer in writing, and sign it using either wet ink signatures or electronic signatures.
It is common for employers to add an expiration date to employment offer letters. This is to speed up the candidate's decision-making process and encourage them to decide sooner.
Like this template? Grab our other popular employment contract templates:
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