Offer Letter Generator & Approval

The problem this kills

A great candidate says yes - and now the offer has to be exactly right. The right title. A base inside the approved band. A sign-on bonus the hiring manager promised but finance never saw. The correct equity grant for the level. The jurisdiction-specific clauses your legal team insists on. The version everyone actually approved, not the draft someone tweaked in a hallway.

In most teams this happens by hand: a recruiter copies last quarter's letter, pastes in new numbers, emails it around for "approvals" that live in a reply-all thread, and hopes nobody fat-fingered the salary. The failure modes are expensive: an offer goes out above band and now it's a precedent. A title doesn't match the req. A verbal promise on relocation never got finance sign-off. Two letters get sent to the same candidate with different numbers. And when comp asks "who approved this base?", the answer is buried in email.

This tool replaces the copy-paste-and-pray ritual with a controlled process: numbers are checked against your bands and the req before anyone signs off, the right people approve in the right order, and the letter is locked the moment it's fully approved so the terms can't quietly change before it reaches the candidate.

What you'll build

A small internal web app, just for your recruiting and comp team, that:

• Lets you pick an approved req and attach a candidate, so every offer is tied to a real opening and a real person.
• Captures the comp components - base, bonus/target, equity, sign-on, and any allowances - in structured fields, not free text.
• Checks the numbers automatically against the salary band for that role/level/location and against the req's budget, and flags anything out of band or over budget before it can move forward.
• Drafts the letter by merging the approved terms into the correct template for that location/entity, including the required clauses for that jurisdiction.
• Routes the draft through your approval chain - typically comp/finance plus the hiring leader (and an extra sign-off when something's out of band) - with the ability to return a draft for edits.
• Locks the letter on full approval so the title, salary, and terms can't silently change, then releases it for e-signature (or as a downloadable PDF in the no-integration path).
• Dedupes on candidate + req so a candidate can't have two active offers against the same opening.
• Exports the offer details as a CSV in the exact columns your HRIS/onboarding system expects.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a single markdown file you paste into Claude Code (a free AI coding agent). It walks the agent through building the whole tool, step by step, each step ending with a ready-to-paste prompt.

The most important part: the plan opens by interviewing you about your business. Before it writes a single line, the agent asks how you build offers today, what your salary bands and approval matrix actually look like, the real field names in your req and candidate data, your comp components and how they're capped, your typical and peak offer volumes, your exact out-of-band and approval rules, the required clauses per jurisdiction, and your messiest edge cases (counteroffers, multiple locations, equity refreshes, an expired band). It reads a short tailored spec back to you, you confirm it, and only then does it build - so you get a tool shaped to your offer process, not a generic template you have to bend to fit.

Inside you'll find:

• The discovery interview and how the agent turns your answers into the data model.
• The full build: database, login, req + candidate selection, structured comp entry, the band/budget checker, the template merge, the approval chain, the lock-on-approval, the e-signature release, and the audit trail.
• The hard human approval gate and the lock that freezes terms once everyone has signed off.
• Verification steps so you can prove it works, and the CSV/PDF fallback so it's fully usable even before you connect it to an ATS, HRIS, or e-signature provider.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a toy. The plan builds in the controls an HR and comp team actually needs:

• Login so only your team can see or touch anything.
• Row-level security so people only see the reqs, candidates, and offers that belong to your organization.
• A complete audit trail - every comp entry, band check, draft, approval, return-for-edits, lock, and release is logged with who and when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop gate - the AI drafts and checks, but comp/finance and the hiring leader must review and approve; nothing is finalized or released without the required sign-offs.
• Out-of-band and threshold rules enforced in code - an offer above band or over the req's budget physically cannot reach "finalized" without the extra approval your policy requires.
• A lock on the approved letter so the title, salary, and terms can't silently change between sign-off and signature.
• Duplicate guards so the same candidate can't have two active offers against the same req.

Who it's for

Recruiters, HR business partners, and comp/finance approvers who assemble offers by hand and carry the risk of a wrong title, an out-of-band salary, or a promise that was never approved. If you've ever sent an offer and then held your breath, this is for you. You don't need to write code. You need your req and candidate data, your salary bands and approval matrix, your letter templates, and an afternoon-to-a-weekend.

You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the agent interview you.