Offer Letter Best Practices
I am currently researching best practices for offer letters and wanted to get some feedback on the following:
1. Do you put salary in the offer letter for exempt hires at an annual, monthly, or bi-weekly rate?
2. Do you have your new hires sign their offer letter?
Any information would be greatly appreciated.
Jessica
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Hi Jessica!
Our company puts the salary in the offer letter for our exempt positions at an annual rate. If we put it in for an every pay period amount, I imagine that recipients would want to do the math anyways to get that annual number.
We have our new hires sign both the offer letter and an employment agreement.
Grace
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Hi, Jessica
We provide pay information based on the rate paid, so if it's an hourly employee, we provide the hourly rate of pay. If it is a salary exempt employee, we provide the semi-monthly rate, calculated annually at $x. This is in response to a case where an employee claimed an implied contract of a total dollar figure based on the verbiage in the offer letter stating they would make $x per year.
For example, let's say you have an offer for $65,000. This is how it would be stated in our offer letter: Your pay rate for this position is $2,708.33 per semi-monthly pay period, calculated annually at $65,000.
Yes, we do have them sign or if received electronically in a PDF, at least reply with an acknowledgement and acceptance of the terms of the offer.
Thanks!
Nicole
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Thanks for the feedback - it is very helpful.
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Our compensation is stated in monthly amounts for our exempts. We do not ask them to sign the offer/hire letter.
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We include the bi-weekly rate and the annual rate and also have them sign the offer letter.
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We put the bi-weekly rate in the offer letter and we do have new hires sign their offer letter.
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Hi Jessica (and all) - We do put the "annual (biweekly)" amounts for exempt and "hourly rate (and annual)" for non-exempt in our offer letters. Recently we implemented an offer letter that now requires the candidate's signature and date upon acceptance. Before we would send the offer letter, then upon acceptance, send out a new hire letter. We sought legal advice (as we were updating our procedures, etc.) and the recommendation was to use only one letter, the offer letter with acceptance signature - it not only reduces the potential for differing data between the letters, but also simplifies our process a bit. Good luck!
