How to sign offer letters and employment agreements

What gets signed when you hire

The documents that set the terms of a job are the ones worth having signed:

• Offer letters: the role, salary, start date and any conditions.
• Employment agreements: the full terms, such as duties, pay, hours, notice and benefits.
• Confidentiality and invention assignment agreements, signed before a new hire sees your plans or code.
• Promotion and pay change letters, later in the job.
• Independent contractor agreements, for people who work with you without being employees.

Each one is a PDF of up to 8 MB that you send for signature.

Salaries stay between you and the candidate

An offer letter holds some of the most confidential details in hiring: the salary, the bonus and the terms you negotiated. Most e-signature services describe encryption in transit and at rest, and describe no end-to-end mechanism, so their systems can decrypt the documents they store. We compared 21 e-signature services in October 2026, Attest and 20 others, and Attest was the only one that end-to-end encrypts every document, for every signer, by default.

With Attest, the offer is encrypted in your browser before upload and decrypted only in the browsers of its parties: you and the people you add as signers. Attest stores it only as ciphertext it can't read, and what the candidate fills in, such as their signature and name, is encrypted in their browser too.

Attest does see the information around a document: its title, file name, size and type, your note, the email addresses of your account and of the signers, the signers' names, where fields are placed and when each step happened. So keep the salary out of the title and the note: call it "Offer letter", not the role and the figure. And choose Private when you send: a public certificate shows anyone with its link details such as the title and each signer's name and signing time, never the document, while a private one is visible only to the parties. For more, see signing confidential agreements such as salary letters.

An offer with a deadline

• Expires (optional): set the offer's deadline, up to a year ahead. If the candidate hasn't signed by then, the offer closes, no one can sign it, and every party is emailed.
• Reminders: every 3 days by default, or every day, every 2 days or every week, at most 5 times, and each one states the expiry date when there is one.
• Signing order: check Add me as a signer (sign in-app, no email) and pick In order. Choose First to sign the offer before it goes to the candidate, or Last to countersign their acceptance.
• Decline: a candidate who turns the offer down can click Decline to sign, which closes it for every party and emails you.

Signing order also sets who gets emailed when: only the signer whose turn it is gets the email, and the next one is emailed when the previous one signs. You are never emailed to sign: your Sign button appears on the offer's row when it's your turn.

When the terms are questioned later

A year in, an employee remembers a different bonus, or says they never signed the confidentiality agreement. The signed copy answers with evidence. The candidate's passkey, a cryptographic key only they control, unlocked with Face ID, Touch ID, Windows Hello or the device PIN, signed a statement that begins "I have reviewed and I sign" and names the offer's fingerprint (a SHA-256 hash, a short code calculated from the file's contents), everything they entered and the time, with a passkey registered to the address you sent it to. The completed agreement is anchored on Horizen, a public blockchain, and change one byte of the document, of any signer's entries or of the signed pages, and verification fails.

You and the employee download the same sealed PDF: the signed pages, with a "Signed with Attest" stamp on each signature and a seal line at the foot of every page, a certificate of completion, the audit trail up to completion and a "Verify it yourself, without us" page, with the full evidence, the original document and a standalone verifier attached inside. Anyone can check it for free with that verifier, in any browser, even without Attest. The guide how employers prove an employee signed covers the evidence in detail.

Your new hire can prove the offer without sharing it

A new hire moving for the job may have to show a landlord or a lender that they have signed an employment agreement. If you signed it too, they can sign in to Attest with their email, find the completed agreement in their dashboard and click Share proof to create a zero-knowledge proof that they and you signed an agreement, and the date it was completed. The recipient sees both email addresses, the completion date, and that the proof is valid and where its record is anchored. The salary, the terms and the title are never shown. Each proof is submitted to zkVerify for independent verification, and anyone can check it for free. That is one more reason to add yourself as a signer.

Rules that differ by country

Electronic signatures are recognized for most agreements in the United States (the ESIGN Act and UETA) and the European Union (eIDAS). Some documents, such as wills or certain notarized deeds, have special rules in many places: check yours.

Germany is a clear example of employment rules of its own:

• The record of essential terms (Nachweisgesetz section 2) may be given in text form and sent electronically, if the employee can access, store and print it and is asked to confirm receipt. That doesn't apply in the sectors listed in section 2a(1) of the Schwarzarbeitsbekämpfungsgesetz, and the employee can ask for the record in written form.
• A fixed term in an employment contract takes effect only in written form (Teilzeit- und Befristungsgesetz section 14(4)), which electronically means a qualified electronic signature (BGB sections 126 and 126a); without it, the contract is treated as made for an indefinite period (section 16).

This is general information, not legal advice. For US law, see electronic signatures in the United States.

What it costs

Each offer, agreement or letter you send is one document. A company that hires 4 people in a month and sends each an offer letter, an employment agreement and a confidentiality agreement uses 12 documents, which fits the Signing plan: $5 a month for 20 documents. If you send more, Pro is $49 a month, and documents sent on Pro count as records, with 10,000 records a month and no separate document limit. Your first 2 documents are free, in total, and candidates never pay. For comparison, as published on October 11, 2026, DocuSign's Personal plan is $15 a month for 5 envelopes, and its Standard plan is $45 per user a month with up to 10 envelopes per user a month on monthly billing.

Send an offer letter, step by step

1. Go to attest.datahubz.com/sign, click Start free, sign in with your work email and set up your signing key once, with a passkey and a recovery phrase, on the Security page.
2. Click New agreement, give it the Title "Offer letter" and attach the PDF.
3. Under Signers, add the candidate's email address. Check Add me as a signer (sign in-app, no email), pick In order under Signing order, and choose First or Last.
4. Under Verification, choose Private, and set Expires (optional) to the offer's deadline.
5. Click Next: place the fields, place the candidate's signature, date signed and full name fields and your own signature, and click Create and send.
6. If you chose First, click Sign on the offer's row and approve with your passkey; the candidate is emailed as soon as you have signed.
7. When the candidate has set up their key, click Unlock it for … in Attest's email (or open the agreement in Attest), confirm, and approve with your passkey: your browser releases it to them, never Attest.
8. If you chose Last, the offer moves to Action needed once the candidate has signed: click Sign on its row. When both of you have signed, download the sealed copy and file it with your HR records.