1. Implementing Recruiting
  2. Create a Job Offer Letter Template

Create a Job Offer Letter Template

The Template Author creates the job offer letter template. The Template Author performs most of the work in Microsoft Word, but must have a reasonable understanding of BI Publisher.

Before you start

To create a job offer letter template, you'll need the OTBI Publisher plugin. See How to Download and Use the Microsfot Word BI Publisher Plugin (DOC ID 2478863.1)

Here's what to do

  1. Get the job offer letter template file.

  2. Get the sample file.

  3. Change text in the job offer letter template file.

  4. Add tokens in the job offer letter template file.

  5. Add conditions in the job offer letter template file.

  6. Preview the job offer letter.

  7. Prepare files to be uploaded in the Recruiting Content Library.

Get the Job Offer Letter Template File

A job offer letter template is a rich text format (.rtf) file that contains formatting, images, text as well as tokens, conditions, or other code which show or hide certain parts of the letter.

There are several ways to get a job offer letter template:

  • Use the original sample provided by Oracle. Download it from BI Publisher (Shared Folders > Human Capital Management > Recruiting > Job Offer > Job Offer Letter).

  • If the Recruiting Content Library has content items of type Job Offer Letter Template, download one of the .zip files. The .zip file contains a job offer letter template (.rtf file).

  • Get an example from the Oracle community on Customer Connect (https://cloudcustomerconnect.oracle.com).

You can also create a job offer letter template from scratch by creating a text document that can be very simple or highly formatted. Then, you can use the BI Publisher plugin for MS Office Word to insert tokens and conditions to personalize the output for each candidate's job offer letter. The template must be saved in rich text (.rtf) format within Microsoft Word. When you view the file in Word, tokens, conditions, and other code are highlighted in gray. Any users can view these highlighted elements. However, you must have the BI Publisher plugin to modify the tokens.

Get the Sample File

The sample file is an extensible markup language (.xml) file that contains all the tokens available for the job offer letter template. This file is necessary to author any new template because the tokens represent every field that can exist in a candidate's offer letter. The sample file also contains a set of sample values for these tokens, taken from an example job offer for an example candidate. These data values affect the preview that you can see of this job offer letter template. But they have no effect on the real offer letters generated for candidates. Previewing the offer letter shows how it looks with typical or unusual text, or tests how the conditions affect the display of various paragraphs.

There are several ways to get the sample file:

  • You can download the sample provided in the product, from BI Publisher:

    1. Go to Shared Folders > Human Capital Management > Recruiting > Job Offer > Data Models.

    2. Click Edit.

    3. Click the sample.xml link in the Attachment section.

    4. Change the extension of the resulting file to .xml before using it.

  • You can download your own sample file for your own typical job offer, from BI Publisher:

    1. Determine the ID of an existing job offer that will be used. Note the Offer ID of that offer.

      • In the application, find the candidate's name and offer title.

      • In BI Publisher, create an auxiliary data model, for instance in your My Folders area.

      • In BI Publisher's Data Sets node, on the Diagram tab, create a new SQL Query data set, and enter a query to retrieve offer information.

      • In BI Publisher's Data tab, run that query and choose one of your existing offers from the results to become your sample.

    2. Generate the sample.xml file for that offer.

      • Copy the data model JobOfferLetterDM from BI Publisher's Shared Folders area, for instance into your My Folders area.

      • In BI Publisher's Data Sets node, on the Data tab, provide the Offer ID as the second parameter, and click View.

      • Click Export and provide a file name with the extension .xml.

  • If the Recruiting Content Library has content items of type Job Offer Letter Template, you can download one of the .zip files. If your recruiting administrator has uploaded both a job offer letter template (.rtf file) and a relevant sample file (.xml file) into the .zip file, then you can use this sample file.

  • You can get an example from the Oracle community on Oracle Cloud Customer Connect.

The sample file can also contain example values that might exist in job offer fields. When you view the sample file in a simple editor such as Notepad, the sample.xml file contains the name of every token in brackets, and the example value for each field if any. For example: <JOB_OFFER_TITLE>Sales Associate</JOB_OFFER_TITLE>. You can change the values manually in the sample file, as long as the tokens within brackets remain unchanged. For example, changed to <JOB_OFFER_TITLE>Assistant Teller</JOB_OFFER_TITLE>.

Change Text in the Job Offer Letter Template File

You can make simple updates to an existing job offer letter template without having the BI Publisher plugin, without any connection to the database, and without using the sample file. This file is in rich text (.rtf) format, so you can simply use Microsoft Word or any tool to change the existing text, formatting, images, and branding. Any tokens or conditions present in the template can be seen, and can be deleted.

Add Tokens in the Job Offer Letter Template File

To add, view, and update tokens in the job offer letter template, the BI Publisher plugin must be installed in Microsoft Word and the sample file must be loaded. When the sample file is loaded, Microsoft Word is aware of all available offer-related fields and how they can be formatted. This work is done within Microsoft Word, which doesn't have to connect to a database.

First, open the job offer letter template file (.rtf file) in Microsoft Word. Then, to load the sample file in Microsoft Word:

  1. On the BI Publisher tab, click Sample XML.

  2. Select the sample.xml file. When the file is loaded, the "Data loaded successfully" message is displayed.

To add offer fields in the job offer letter template:

  1. On the BI Publisher tab, click Field. A window appears listing all the offer-related fields.

  2. Place the cursor in the document where you want to insert a field.

  3. Select the field.

  4. Click Insert. The field appears in the template as a token .highlighted in gray.

To see token properties, double-click a token. The BI Publisher Properties window appears and displays which field from the database will be shown in the offer letter. It also displays other properties which you can modify. For instance, when displaying fields of type date, a choice is offered among many different date formats.

Tokens that you can include in the job offer letter template are available in BI Publisher.

  1. On the BI Publisher Home page, click the Catalog link.

  2. In the Folders pane, navigate to Human Capital Management > Recruiting > Job Offer > Data Model.

  3. Click Edit.

  4. Select the data model named "JobOfferLetterDM".

  5. Click the Structure tab. You can view the list of tokens using the table view or the output view.

Note: Use the token <REQUISITION_TITLE> when you want to communicate the title of the requisition for which an offer is made, instead of the token <OFFER_NAME>.

Add Conditions in the Job Offer Letter Template File

You can add conditions in the job offer letter template to make specific regions of the template shown or hidden depending on a token's value in each job offer. For example, a template can generate a job offer letter that includes a list of the candidate's promised bonuses and other compensation, but which omits this whole section for candidates whose offer doesn't include any bonuses. Or a single template can include specific information about every possible work location, and for each candidate's offer letter it will display only the one section that's appropriate to that offer's promised work location. All of these variations can be contained within a single job offer letter template file, using conditions.

To work with conditions in the job offer letter template, the BI Publisher plugin must be installed in Microsoft Word and the sample file must be loaded.

  1. Highlight a region that you want to be displayed only in certain circumstances.

  2. On the BI Publisher tab, click Conditional Region. This brings up a BI Publisher window.

  3. On the Properties tab, specify which condition must be true for this section to appear.

    • In the General section, select a value from the available tokens.

    • In the Condition section, select a value from the available operations such as Equal to, Greater than, Less than.

  4. On the Advanced tab, use the Text to Display field to provide information to other users about the condition in which this region will appear.

    • By default, the letter C is displayed to indicate the start of a condition. You can replace this with a more legible label to explain the specific condition. For example, you can replace the C with "Condition if Work Location is New York". This label has no effect on the functionality of the condition.

  5. Click OK.

  6. At the end of the selected region a new tag labeled "EC" will now appear automatically. Click it to bring up a BI Publisher window.

    • In the Code field, the tag <?endif?> will appear indicating that the conditional region is finished and the following sections of the offer will be shown to all viewers. Don't make any changes to this value.

    • In the Text to Display field, you can provide information to other users about which condition is ending here. For example, you can replace the default letters EC with a more legible label such as "End of Condition about New York". This label has no effect on the functionality of the condition.

Note: If you want to retain the value of the candidate type throughout the hiring process, use the token Candidate Type When Applying.

You can configure the offer letter template to display information about who accepted the job offer and when, and display the information that is gathered from the light electronic signature of the candidate if this was obtained. Available fields include:

  • E_SIGNATURE_SIGNATURE_DATE

  • E_SIGNATURE_SIGNEE_IP_ADDRESS

  • ACCEPTED_DATE

  • ACCEPTED_ON_BEHALF_BY

  • OFFER_RECIPIENT/DISPLAY_NAME

  • MOSTRECENTEXTENDEDDATE

To make the whole section appear only if the offer has been accepted, a condition such as the following can work: 

<if:OFFER_DATES/MOSTRECENTOFFRWITHDRAWNDATE !="or ACCEPTED_ON_BEHALF_DATE !="or E_SIGNATURE_SIGNATURE_DATE !="?>

Note that this also prevents showing the section if the offer was initially accepted but it's currently redrafted and not yet re-accepted.

Preview the Job Offer Letter

You can generate a sample job offer letter to preview its content and see if the template is working as configured. The job offer letter template is merged with a set of sample job offer values. These values are contained in the sample file that was loaded into Microsoft Word. If you want different values, you can modify the sample file and reload it into Word. Then the preview replaces the tokens in the template with these sample data values, and conditional areas are displayed or hidden based on the values for that sample offer.

To generate a preview of the job offer letter:

  1. On the BI Publisher tab, in the Preview section, click the icon for the desired format to output the offer letter. For example, PDF, RTF, HTML.

To experiment with different variations of the job offer letter, you can modify the sample values in the sample.xml file. You can change and delete the example values for the example candidate's job offer. However, don't change the offer field names within brackets.

  1. Open the sample.xml file in a simple editor such as Notepad.

  2. Overwrite the desired values. For example, <JOB_OFFER_TITLE>Sales Associate</JOB_OFFER_TITLE>.

  3. Save the file in .xml format again.

  4. Load the new .xml file into Microsoft Word using the Sample XML button.

Prepare Files to Be Uploaded in the Recruiting Content Library

When you are satisfied with both the job offer letter template (.rtf file) and the sample file (.xml file), add them into a .zip file. This allows both files to be uploaded at the same time in the Recruiting Content Library. The .zip file must not exceed 100 Megabytes to successfully be uploaded in the library.