How to make a job offer: the call, the numbers, and what your interviewers saw.

Decide everything before you dial

Most offer calls go wrong before they start. The hiring manager picks up the phone with a number and a feeling, and the candidate hears a number and a feeling. The fix is to walk in with the decision already made in every dimension, so the call can be about the candidate.

Pave the road first. Do not make the offer until you are fairly certain the answer is yes. The last interview and the reference calls are where you find out what the candidate needs, what else they are weighing, and roughly what number works, so that the offer meeting confirms a decision rather than opening one. If you are still unsure how they will answer, you are not ready to make the offer; have that conversation first.

Have these in front of you:

• The evidence. The panel’s scorecards and the outcome of the debrief. Pick the three items the interviewers scored highest and agreed on, and write down the moment behind each one: what the candidate said or did, and who saw it.
• The number and the room. Base, variable, equity, and the start date, approved. Then the part people skip: the most you would pay for this candidate, decided now, while you are calm. The evidence sets it. A candidate who scored a 4 on the skill your team is weakest at is worth more room than one who cleared the bar evenly.
• The role, in a page. The company vision, what this person will own, and why the role matters to the plan right now. You will say it out loud, so prepare it the way you would prepare a pitch to a customer.
• The package as a document. Base, variable, equity, and benefits on a page you can share on screen and walk through line by line. The candidate reads along instead of trying to remember numbers.
• The written offer, ready. Drafted and reviewed before the meeting, so it can go out the minute they say yes and says exactly what you said. It is not mentioned until then, unless the candidate asks for it.

If you are choosing between two finalists, finish that first. Comparing candidates side by side on the same scorecard is the work that produces the three sentences you are about to say out loud.

From the verbal offer to the written one

The sequence is short and the timing is the whole thing.

1. The offer meeting. As above. You leave with a yes or with an agreed time for the decision. The written offer is not mentioned until you have agreed, unless the candidate asks to see it.
2. The written offer, the moment they say yes. Every term from the call, in writing, plus the contingencies and the expiry date. If the candidate asked a question on the call that the letter does not answer, answer it in the covering email. A written offer that arrives three days after the yes, or with a term the candidate did not hear, is where a yes turns back into “let me think about it.”
3. One touch from the panel. The next day, a short note from an interviewer who is not the hiring manager, saying one specific thing they are looking forward to working on with the candidate. Not a pitch, not a check-in on the decision. It tells the candidate the evidence on the call was shared, not scripted.
4. The signature and the start plan. The signed letter usually comes back within a day of the verbal yes. Then the start plan goes out within the week: who they meet on day one, what the first month is for. If the answer on the follow-up call is a no, ask a real question about why, because the answer is usually about your process, and you will run it again.

What goes in the written offer

The letter is not the persuasion; the call was. The letter’s job is to be exact. A complete one covers:

• Title, who the role reports to, and where the work happens (office, hybrid, remote, and the time zone you expect).
• Start date, and whether it is fixed or a target.
• Base salary and pay schedule. Variable pay with the plan it follows, or a sentence saying the plan will be provided before the start date.
• Equity, if any: the number of shares or the percentage, the vesting schedule, and the cliff, in the same words the board approved.
• Benefits in a summary line, with the detailed documents attached or linked.
• Any contingencies, named plainly: background check, reference check, work authorization, signing a confidentiality agreement.
• Employment-at-will language where your jurisdiction uses it, and the date the offer expires.
• Who signs for the company, and who the candidate should call with questions.

Have counsel read the at-will and contingency language before the first one goes out, and reuse that wording. The rest of the letter should read like the call did: plain, complete, and in your own voice.

Where the three sentences come from

The offer call above works because the panel produced evidence worth reading back. That is what Yardstick is built to produce. It designs the interview guide for the role, so each interviewer asks the questions that predict performance in this job rather than the ones they reach for by habit. Every candidate is scored by every interviewer on the same scale, with the notes attached, so the moment Ravi wrote down about coachability is sitting in the scorecard when you go looking for it.

You walk into the debrief already knowing where the interviewers agreed, where they split, and the evidence behind each score, because once the scorecards are in, the built-in agent Prepare a panel decision brief pulls them into one brief for the team to review. The team makes the decision; the strongest agreed items in the brief are usually the three sentences you open the call with.

Between the debrief and the call, the finalist sits in a stage of your hiring pipeline that you named, with the automations you set, so a decided candidate does not wait a week for someone to remember to call. And if you work with a coding agent, it can pull the finalist’s scorecards and interviewer notes through the Yardstick CLI or MCP and lay them out for you while you write the call. Advancing the candidate and communicating the decision stay with you.