This article explains how to send an employment offer with a contract to a successful candidate as part of the recruitment process and request the necessary signatures from all parties electronically. To initiate the signature process, use contract templates with placeholders for the signatures. 

To request signatures for documents, the requesting employee must have the necessary permissions. For the offer process, you can define these via recruiting roles. Employees need at least viewing rights for Candidates and editing rights for Offers. 

Create a document template with signature placeholders

The first step for using signatures in recruiting is to create a suitable contract template with the corresponding placeholders. Use placeholders to define where signatures need to be inserted and in what sequence they need to be provided. For more information on how to create a document template with signature placeholders and how to incorporate placeholders for the location and date of digital signatures into a contract offer, read this Help Center article.

The template must always be stored in the Work contracts document category.

Send an employment offer with a signature

You can request electronic signatures from internal employees as well as from the candidate as part of your offer process.

To request these signatures, follow these steps:

1. Go to Recruiting > Applications and select the relevant candidate.
2. Click Offer > New offer > Offer with a contract document. Select a template with signature placeholders.
3. Enter the info for all the other placeholders within the document. Once ready, click Save and continue.
4. To request signatures, click Send contract document with e-signature.
5. Select the candidate and any responsible employees who need to sign the document. The candidate must always be defined as one of the signatories. You need to assign the required signatories manually to the signature placeholders. This is not done automatically by naming (adding designations to) the placeholders. Designations serve as indicators of who needs to sign a document where. You can add a note for the signatories in the comment field. This will be included in the email request for their signature.
6. Click Send offer to start the signature process.
7. To update the offer and send an updated contract, cancel the pending signature request and send a new offer.

Neither the email request nor the comment will be stored under the Messages tab in the candidate profile.

To learn more about creating, editing and managing employment offers in Personio, read this Help Center article.

Sign a contract digitally

Once you send an offer, the process of requesting signatures from the various parties is launched. The offer status in the candidate profile changes from Created to Pending. Click View offer to check the progress and whether any signatures are still outstanding.

For more information about obtaining electronic signatures from all parties, read this Help Center article.

Note:
The employee who requests a signature will not be notified about its status unless they are also a signatory.

Employees with the corresponding permissions will be able to check the status of a signature through the Offer tab in the candidate profile.

However, only Admins can check the status of all open signatures through both the Automations area and the Signatures Overview page.