An offer letter is the last thing a candidate reads before they walk into their manager's office and resign. Everything it leaves vague turns into an argument two months later, by which time the person is on your payroll and has nowhere to go back to.
What the letter has to survive
There is a gap between the offer and the joining date, and in India it is usually a long one — 30, 60 or 90 days of notice served at the previous employer. During that window the candidate does irreversible things on the strength of your letter. They resign. They may show it to a landlord, or to a bank assessing a loan. They stop taking calls from other recruiters.
That is the standard the document has to meet. Not "does it read well", but "is it safe to act on this before anyone from our side speaks to you again".
It is also, on most readings, contractual. Whatever the letter says about salary, notice or probation is what you have agreed to, and a phrase that felt diplomatic when you wrote it is the phrase you will be held to. Here is the minimum it has to carry.
| Field | Why it is there |
|---|---|
| Job title | The one that will appear in payroll and on the appointment letter |
| Department and reporting line | By role if the manager is not yet named |
| Work location | Including whether it is hybrid or remote, and from where |
| Start date | A specific date. "Early September" is not one |
| Compensation | Broken into components, not a single CTC figure |
| Probation | Length, and what happens at the end of it |
| Notice period | Separately for probation and after confirmation |
| Leave | Days per year, and whether public holidays are additional |
| Conditions | Background verification, references, documents required |
| Acceptance deadline | A date, after which the offer lapses |
| Signatory | Name and title of someone authorised to make the offer |
If you would rather not assemble that list by hand each time, our free offer letter template has these as bound fields, so the values come from one place rather than from whoever edited the document last.
Compensation is a structure, not a number
The most common cause of a bad first month is a letter that states a CTC and nothing else. A candidate offered "₹16,40,000 CTC" divides by twelve, gets ₹1,36,667, and builds a budget around it. What actually reaches their account is closer to ₹1,00,000 after employer contributions that never leave the company, a bonus that pays once a year, and tax.
Nobody lied. The letter just failed to explain itself. So break it out:
| Component | Annual |
|---|---|
| Basic | ₹7,20,000 |
| House rent allowance | ₹3,60,000 |
| Special allowance | ₹2,58,985 |
| Employer provident fund contribution | ₹86,400 |
| Gratuity provision | ₹34,615 |
| Performance bonus (variable, paid annually) | ₹1,80,000 |
| Total cost to company | ₹16,40,000 |
Then state the monthly fixed gross explicitly — ₹1,11,582 here — because that is the number the candidate actually needs. Four lines of arithmetic in the letter prevent a conversation in week one that neither of you enjoys.
Two more things belong next to the table. Say whether the variable component is formula-driven or discretionary, when it is assessed, when it is paid, and what happens if the person leaves before the payout date. And if there is a joining bonus with a clawback, state the clawback in the offer, not in a separate undertaking produced on day one. A condition that arrives after the resignation has been submitted is a condition the person could not weigh.
Probation and notice are two separate promises
These get collapsed into one line constantly, and they are different commitments with different numbers.
Probation is a period. State its length, and state what happens when it ends. If confirmation is automatic unless extended in writing, say so. If confirmation requires an affirmative act by the manager, say that instead — because if the letter is silent, the employee assumes the first and the organisation assumes the second, and the disagreement surfaces at exactly the wrong moment.
Notice is a quantity, and there are usually two of them. Notice during probation is typically shorter — a week, or fifteen days — than notice after confirmation, which may be 30, 60 or 90 days. Write both. Say whether the obligation is reciprocal. If payment in lieu of notice is permitted, say whether it is calculated on basic or on gross, because the difference between those two is often more than a month's rent.
One practical check while you are here: the start date you wrote has to be reachable given the notice the candidate told you they have to serve. If it is not, you are implicitly asking them to negotiate an early release or buy out their notice, and it is better to discuss that before the letter goes out than to watch the date slip twice.
Conditions and deadlines: the two paragraphs people soften
Most offers are conditional on something — background verification, reference checks, document verification, right to work. Recruiters often soften this into "subject to formalities" because a hard sentence feels like it undermines the offer.
It does the opposite. If the letter is silent and you withdraw the offer after a failed verification, you are withdrawing what reads as an unconditional offer from a person who has already resigned. That is a bad position to be in, and it is a worse story than the one you were trying to avoid telling. Written plainly, the condition lets the candidate decide when to serve notice — and a candidate who chooses to wait for clearance before resigning is behaving sensibly, not distrustfully.
Be specific about what is being checked and what "satisfactory" means. Employment dates and titles matching what was declared. Education certificates. PAN and previous Form 16 or salary slips. A relieving letter from the current employer, if you require one. "Satisfactory in the company's sole discretion" is legally comfortable and reads to the candidate as a trapdoor.
The acceptance deadline is the other paragraph that gets dropped. An offer with no expiry is a free option the candidate can hold while they finish other processes. Give it a date, five to seven working days out, and say what happens after: the offer lapses and any extension is at the organisation's discretion. Say how acceptance is made, too — a signed copy returned to a named email address — so you never have to reconcile "I told the recruiter yes on a call" against an applicant tracking system that shows nothing.
When the offer letter and the appointment letter disagree
This is the failure that costs the most and gets the least attention, because the two documents are produced by different people at different times from different sources. The offer comes out of recruitment during a negotiation. The appointment letter comes out of HR operations on joining day, often from a template that has not been touched in two years.
The divergences are always the same handful. Notice period is 30 days in the offer and 90 in the appointment letter. Probation is three months in one and six in the other. The variable component reads as expected in the offer and discretionary in the appointment letter. The title has drifted. The location clause quietly added a transfer right.
What makes this dangerous is the moment of signing. The appointment letter is signed on day one, in an induction room, in a stack of forms, usually with a clause stating that it supersedes all prior communications. The employee has just traded away the terms they resigned on, and neither side noticed.
Two rules keep this from happening. Generate both documents from the same values, so the notice period exists once and is used twice rather than being retyped by two teams. And if a term genuinely has to change between offer and appointment, raise it in writing before the joining date and get it agreed. Discovering it in the induction pack is how you lose someone in month two, and how the rest of that cohort hears about it.
Before you send it
Read the letter as the candidate would. Divide the CTC by twelve and ask whether the number you get resembles what will land in their account — if it does not, the letter has not explained its own compensation. Check the start date against the notice they have to serve. Check that the title, probation and notice match the appointment letter you will generate eight weeks from now; if you cannot check that, the fact that you cannot is the finding.
Then confirm someone authorised has signed it. An offer letter is cheap to get right and expensive to get wrong, and the expense always arrives after the person has already resigned.