Offer letters that match what was agreed

A letter is generated from the placement record, so the candidate name, the role title as it appears on the requisition, the salary or the charge rate, the start date, the reporting line, the location, the working pattern and the notice period all come from fields that were agreed and recorded rather than remembered.

Where a field is missing, generation stops and says which field is missing. That is a deliberate choice. A template engine that renders an empty placeholder produces a document that looks finished and is not, and somebody sends it. Refusing to render an incomplete letter is less convenient and considerably safer.

Offer letters carry commercial and legal weight, and most firms already have an internal rule about who may issue one. A consultant drafts, a manager approves, and above a fee or salary threshold a director approves as well. That rule usually lives in someone's head.

In Surhires the chain is configured and enforced. A draft moves to an approvals queue, each approver sees the letter and the underlying placement side by side, and approval or rejection is recorded with a comment. A rejected letter goes back to the drafter with the reason attached rather than by way of a corridor conversation. Nothing is sent until the chain completes.

Approvals are delegable. An approver who is on leave nominates a cover, and the delegation is recorded on every letter it touches rather than being a private arrangement between two people. Where a firm operates several brands or entities, the chain can differ per entity, so a placement made under one trading name follows that name's sign-off rule rather than a group default. Approvals can also be cleared from the mobile app, which is usually what decides whether an offer goes out on Friday afternoon or on Monday morning.

Every generated letter is retained as a version: the template it came from, the merge values at the time, who approved it, and when it was issued. When a candidate negotiates and a second letter is issued, the first does not disappear. The record shows two letters, the difference between them, and the sequence.

This matters in the small number of cases where it matters a great deal. A dispute about what was offered is settled by opening the record. A client asking why the start date moved gets a documented answer. An internal review of why a placement was mispriced can see the version where the fee basis was wrong and the version where it was corrected.

Templates are edited in the product. A firm typically ends up with a handful: permanent offer, fixed-term offer, contractor engagement, and a variant or two for clients who insist on their own paperwork. Each holds fixed text, merge fields and conditional blocks so a relocation clause appears only where relocation applies.

Templates are versioned as well. When the standard benefits paragraph changes, letters already issued keep the wording they were issued with. Changing a template does not silently rewrite history, and the version stamp on an old letter tells you which wording was current when it was sent.

An issued offer creates an offer record on the placement with a value, a response deadline and an acceptance state. That record is what makes the pipeline honest: an offer past its response deadline appears as an exception, not as a green card on a board.

Signature itself is handled by your signature provider. Surhires generates, approves, versions and tracks the offer; it does not embed a signing surface today, and the integration pages state where each signature connector actually stands. Post-offer engagement, the period between acceptance and start where drop-outs happen, is a separate workflow with its own page.