An offer is a proposal of employment listing the position, pay, schedule and start date. Legally it does not replace the employment contract, but practically it is what the candidate decides on — so any gap between the offer and the contract costs more than it appears to.
Why candidates decline after an offer
Usually for two reasons. Time: while the company spends a week approving terms, the candidate accepts something else — in frontline hiring that takes days. And discrepancy: one thing was discussed at interview, another appeared in the offer, most often around the schedule and the variable part of pay.
Hence the rule: an offer should state what will actually appear in the contract and on the payslip. This matters most for variable pay — "up to 5 million" with no conditions attached reads to a candidate as 5 million, and the first payslip then looks like a deception.
What an offer should contain
Offers are not formally regulated, but the set of items that prevents later disputes is fairly stable.
- Position, department and immediate manager.
- Fixed pay, and the conditions of variable pay — what exactly it is made of and on what result it is paid.
- Schedule: shifts or a five-day week, shift length, location.
- Start date, length of probation, and what to bring on day one.
How this works in Verifix
In Verifix Recruit the offer is a funnel stage: it has a send date and a status, so it is visible how many candidates are lost at it and how long internal approval takes.
An accepted offer moves straight into paperwork: the candidate record becomes an employee file, hiring documents are generated in E-Docs from the same data, and the offer's terms reach the contract without being re-entered — which is to say, without discrepancies.
In short
An offer should state only what will reach the contract and the payslip. Variable pay with no stated conditions is the commonest reason for a first-month departure.