Offer Letter Templates & Best Practices
Ready to learn even more about offer letters and how sending them directly via Hire can benefit your organization? Please scroll down to read our best practices and suggestions!
Are you looking for an in-depth how-to guide on Hire's offer letter feature? Click here!
Looking for the offer letter template? Click here to jump to the bottom of the article.
Crafting the Offer Letter
You’ve worked to find the resumes for your ideal candidates, interviewed them using a hiring team, and scored them based on your company culture, and now you need to do your final task: writing an offer letter. When you find the new employee you want to bring into your company, writing a perfect offer letter can be the difference between getting your ideal candidate and going elsewhere.
According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), the offer letter is the "foundation of a respectful employment relationship and sets the tone for all future communication." A good offer letter is a few things:
- Clear
- Consistent
- Timely (get it there fast!)
- Legal
When crafting an offer letter, you will likely use a template to start and then go on to personalize and fit the offer letter to the candidate and the role. There are many things to keep in mind when crafting both the template and the final offer letter, so it’s essential to do some research before you send one out.
Offer Letters Building Blocks
The offer letter is one final communication with a prospect before they sign to become an employee. Everything that leads up to this offer matters a little more than the letter itself, but you don’t want to get your offer letter wrong. If you get it wrong, it could undo all your work throughout the hiring process.
If something doesn’t look right, potential employees may have second thoughts about leaving their jobs or picking your offer over someone else’s offer.
A strong foundation for your offer letter is the best place to start. All offer letters should have some of the same components, including:
- Branding that gives the offer letter weight and value.
- A standard letter format, including the date, company name, contact information, and more.
- An opening statement where you concisely mention the offer, position title, and company name.
- A brief description of the job where you include the expected hour, work location, start date, and a copy of the shortened job description from the job posting.
- All salary and benefits information they need to decide, mainly if the salary was never discussed and you had a range on the job description.
- At-will statement to announce that the company may terminate employment for any lawful reason – this is standard practice and will not scare away potential employees.
- A final closing section where you give contact information for anyone who can answer questions, including the HR department and that employee’s direct supervisor.
Hire's offer letter templates helps you to streamline this process, making it even easier and faster to send the offer letter out to your candidates. Here's an example of what an offer letter template in Hire could look like - remember, everything in curly brackets is a fillable field that can be customized before sending it out to the new hire!
Create An Emotional Connection
The time is long gone for boring, by-the-book offer letters. While we suggest you start with a template so that you remember the pertinent details, you should still go off-book if you can! Get your candidate excited about working with your company and for their new role. There is always a slight doubt for many new employees, and bringing in some energy is always helpful to erase some of that doubt. Add this information to the email accompanying the offer letter to set your company apart truly!
What can you do to make your new hire excited and emotionally attached to their new position?
- Send a picture of their fellow employees so they can put names with faces
- Attach a video where you go a little more into detail about what they can expect during onboarding
- Talk about why you hired them
- Add some visuals to your letter that help introduce your company or the role
While yes, offer letters are severe and technically legal documents, you are still allowed to have some personality!
Final Steps Right Before You Send
Right before you send your offer letters, there are a few more steps you want to take. These can help you find any errors and ensure everyone is on the same page before the letter goes to the applicant.
Proofread & Edit
Be sure to proof and edit your offer letter! Take a few hours away from it, if you can, and come back with a fresh set of eyes. Have someone on the hiring team look at it so they can fill in any information you may have missed or talk about fun ways to personalize the email.
A good edit is more than just a glance at the grammar: you want to check for consistency, tone, and overall emotional value.
Run It By Legal
While offer letters aren’t necessarily legal documents, there are terms and conditions in them that the employer is legally bound to in most situations. If you promise things in your offer letter that you either do not intend to deliver on or fail to deliver on, you could find yourself in legal trouble.
Even if you are working from a template, it is best to have your legal team review all offer letters that go outside the norm. Legal should be able to help you draft a template that won’t go against any current laws, but they should review your templates regularly as employment laws change regularly. HR leaders should stay on top of legal changes, but sometimes things will slip through the cracks.
Generally, the higher the position is, and the more salary someone earns, the more likely they are to run it by a lawyer, but that isn’t always the case, so do your due diligence on every offer letter and template.
If you don’t have a legal department, there are some online resources you can use to help understand the legal implications of writing offer letters.
Remember that getting your new employee is just the beginning! You want to ensure that you welcome them into your organization with a fantastic onboarding experience, build them up as leaders and employees with consistent training, and give them valuable feedback regarding their original job description and why they were hired.
Creating Offer Letter Templates
You can customize your offer letter in any word processing program if you save the DOCX file. Feel free to use your organization's fonts, formatting, and logo! You'll want to add the relevant placeholders - this allows the offer letter to be customized for every candidate. Learn more about that process here.
Add as many offer letter templates as you need if your account - one for different positions, part-time versus full-time, offices, departments, and more.
The offer letter has the following required placeholders that must be included in the template:
- Candidate First Name {{candidate-first-name}}
- Candidate Last Name {{candidate-last-name}}
- Company Name {{company-name}}
- Opening {{opening}}
- Offer Expiration Date {{offer-expiry-date}}
- Salary {{salary}}
- Candidate eSign {{candidate-esign}
- Offer Signatory Name {{offer-signatory-name}}
- Offer Signatory eSign {{offer-signatory-esign}}
