The Art of Writing a Job Offer Letter
Written by Thomas Forstner, Head of People and Talent at Juro.
Sending an offer letter to a successful candidate is an exciting time for everyone involved. For the company, they’ve found an individual they believe will add a lot of value to their business and be an asset to their team. For the prospective employee, they’ve just been told that they’ve impressed and that there’s a role waiting for them.
However, with the market for talent growing ever more competitive, it’s going to take more than just a generic offer for businesses to secure great talent. Winning over talented candidates today often requires a more meaningful approach, and well-designed offer letters are the perfect place to start.
But how can companies design their offer letter to increase the chances of it being accepted? Let’s find out.
1. Make it personal
Often, offer letters are completely standardized, with no differentiation at all. This can cause candidates to become disengaged before they’ve even considered your job offer. Or worse, it can make candidates assume that they’re not memorable, or that they won’t hold much value within a company.
That’s why one of the most effective ways to create a winning offer letter is to make it personalized. This can mean anything from addressing the candidate by name throughout the letter to tweaking the terms and messaging to make it the offer letter tailored to the individual.
For hypergrowth companies hiring thick and fast, too much detail and personalization can be unattainable. However, for a smaller company with a more focused recruiting approach, adding a personal touch can be extremely effective.
When personalizing your offer letters, ask yourself: what was it that set the candidate you’re offering the role to apart from the rest?
Did they blow you away with a presentation during the final stage of the interview process? Did they demonstrate your company values better than any other candidate? Did they consistently outperform at every stage? Whatever it was, let them know.
By referring to the reasons behind your decision in the offer letter, you can increase a candidate’s confidence, communicate the reasons why they’ll be a good fit for the role and company and improve their overall experience.
2. Portray your brand personality
Too many employees offer letters that look just the same as the rest. Plain text, lengthy terms and no visual elements at all. That’s fine if you’re happy to blend in, but if you want to leave a lasting impression on an impressive candidate, why not inject some personality into the document?
If you’re keen to portray your company’s brand and culture within your offer letter, you could take advantage of visual interfaces, rich media and custom branding. Doing so will naturally set your offer letter apart from others received and will communicate the effort and attention to detail you’ve sought to achieve when offering the position.
Of course, this can understandably be difficult when you’re playing around with thousands of words in a Word document. However, if that’s holding you back, it’s well worth considering how contract management software with a rich-text editor and user-friendly interface could make your life easier and your offer letters better.
3. Use human-friendly language
Contracts are renowned for their jargon and legalese, so it’s unsurprising to see that most employment offer letters follow the same trend. However, when you consider the end-user for an offer letter, it’s typically going to be a candidate with minimal legal knowledge, if any.
It makes sense for the language used to reflect this. After all, an offer letter is designed to communicate important terms and attract the successful candidate. By cramming your offer letters with inaccessible language, you risk not only alienating the candidate, but also masking the employment terms too.
The benefits of plain language contracts are obvious. Not only will candidates have a more positive experience with the offer letter if they don’t have to wade through complex terminology and lengthy clauses, but they will also be able to understand the offer letter’s terms more quickly and easily, which eliminates misunderstandings in the future and likely leads to a faster acceptance.
In some cases it can even be appropriate to use more playful language, as this can help you to establish a connection with a candidate that’s unique to the connection they’ve had with other employers. Consider how your candidate wants to be presented with information and what kind of relationship you want to have with them.
4. Keep it brief – but cover the important details
Although brevity is key, it’s still paramount that the offer letter includes all of the crucial information required for the candidate to make an informed decision. For example, your offer letter should always cover the most important details, like their working hours, their terms of pay, who to report to and how long their probation period will last.
Of course you want the offer letter to sell the opportunity, but it’s also important that it goes beyond what benefits they’ll receive to cover all of the legal technicalities too, like taxes, working time regulations and salary. This is vital for compliance purposes, but also so that a prospective employee knows what to expect, and that there are no nasty surprises once they’ve signed. After all, the cost of losing an employee is very steep, so it’s important that you start your relationship on clear and honest terms.
5. Keep legal design in mind
The concept of legal design is on the rise, and rightfully so. Contracts are read, shared and signed by humans, so it’s only right that they’re designed with humans in mind. But what does this mean in terms of offer letters?
Well, for a start it’s about covering less information, not more. Too much information can overwhelm your prospective employee, rather than attracting them. This is particularly true if you don’t organize the offer letter’s content in a user-friendly way.
If there is important information to be included, bring it to the front of your offer letter, and ensure that your prospective employees don’t have to do too much searching to find it. You should also consider splitting up bulky chunks of text and presenting it more clearly, perhaps even with visual elements too.
Design will mean more than just what your text looks like on the page. It’s important to ensure that the way you design your offer letters reflects the values and character of your organization. An offer letter is a perfect opportunity to show a candidate what it’s like to work with you, and that every interaction is meaningful. Try to achieve this through the language you use, the terms you include, and the way you communicate these.
6. Add layering and linking
As much as you want to keep your offer letters brief for the sake of readability, that doesn’t mean you should limit a candidate’s access to more information. After all, accepting a new job is a major life decision, and candidates want to ensure that their decision to either accept or reject the offer is as informed as possible.
Fortunately, by layering and linking to external documents, you can achieve the perfect middle ground between transparency and readability. For instance, if you are mentioning stock options in your offer letter, you might want to add a link to a more detailed guide about stock options that opens in a separate page. Similarly, if you have a more detailed holiday policy, it’s worth linking to this rather than detailing it all in the offer letter.
Through layering and linking, you can provide candidates with a more intuitive experience whereby they can search and read the information that matters most to them, without having to trawl through the details that will have a very minimal effect on their decision.
7. Pay attention to the small details
If you’re sending an offer letter to a candidate, they obviously stood out in the recruitment process. That’s why it’s important to return the favour and show that the effort they spent in their application and interviews is reciprocated. The best way to do that? Pay attention to even the smallest of details.
Here are a few tips on how you can make your offer letter more special for successful candidates (and more likely to be accepted!):
- Make sure it’s been signed by the company boss, not a HR assistant. This prevents it from seeming like the decision was detached from the higher managers and makes prospective employees feel more welcome. Or you could even ask your CEO to write a personal introduction, to make the offer even more inviting.
- Provide some context about their onboarding, and what it might look like. This way, you can provide the reassurance that, if they choose to accept the offer, their onboarding will be smooth, structured and organized.
- Make sure the candidate receives the offer letter in a timely fashion. For every day you make a successful candidate wait for the offer letter, that’s another day where they could get swept up by another company. Show a candidate how keen you are to have them on your team by not waiting around and sharing the news as soon after the final stage as possible.
Summary
Ultimately, when creating an employment offer letter for successful candidates, their experience ought to be a top priority. Distinct from some other types of contracts, employment offers can afford to be less formal and more playful, so let the candidate get a real insight into who you are and what your company has to offer in a way that’s most accessible to them.
Striking the perfect balance between compliance and design can be tough, but we hope that these simple tips can help you get on your way to creating offer letters your candidates will love.