Assemble the offer and get it signed

The gap between deciding to hire someone and them receiving an offer is where candidates get away. It is rarely a decision problem by that point; it is that the packet has to be assembled, checked, and sent by people who are busy.

A day of that gap is expensive. Three is often fatal.

Have the templates ready before you need them

Offer letter, contract, any policy documents that go with them, in Documents. Include the variants: different seniorities, contractor versus employee, whatever your real cases are.

Assembling a packet from templates is fast. Writing a template while a candidate waits is not.

Assemble from the decision

Assemble an offer packet for [name] as Senior Designer.

Terms: [salary], starting [date], reporting to [person], [location /
arrangement].

Use our standard offer letter and employment contract for this level, plus
the policy documents that go with them.

Fill in everything I have given you. Leave anything else as [MISSING] and
list what is missing at the top.

Do not infer a start date, a probation period, a notice period or any
benefit I have not stated. Do not alter the contract's standard clauses.

Hold it for my approval. Do not send.

"Do not alter the standard clauses" is the boundary that matters most here. An offer packet is a legal document that somebody signs, and small helpful rewording of a notice or IP clause produces a contract your lawyer did not write and nobody knew had changed. Filling in blanks and altering terms are different acts, and only one of them belongs here.

Read the numbers, then send for signature

Check the salary, the date and the name. Those are the three that get transposed, and they are the three the candidate will notice.

Then route it through DocuSign. The employee can send it and track whether it has been opened and signed.

Chase gently, once

If an offer has not been signed after three working days, tell me. Do not
chase the candidate directly.

A candidate sitting on an offer is having a conversation somewhere else, and that is a call for a person to make, not an automated reminder.

What good looks like

The offer goes out the same day it is agreed, correct, with nothing invented.

The measure is elapsed hours from decision to sent. If it is still measured in days, the delay is in your approval step rather than in assembly, and that is worth looking at separately.