When the HR department formally communicates with employees, those documents become part of the record of the relationship between your company and its workers. That is why it is very important to write each HR letter carefully. Even in “at will” environments, it is possible to inadvertently create a contractual obligation with poorly planned communication. This is one of the reasons to use templates for correspondence whenever possible.
For example, you can send rejection letters to candidates who were not selected for an open position. With a standard form letter, you can ensure that the message is courteous and clear and does not contain information that could be misconstrued as a discriminatory hiring practice. It’s not like your office manager would write “Sorry, but we’re looking for someone younger to fill this position,” but you can’t be too careful!
HR Letters Serve Many Purposes
Other letters you can send include job offer letters, welcome letters to new employees, termination letters to former employees, etc. Information about employee benefits is another area where being able to generate an HR letter from a template is very helpful. In some cases (such as with COBRA notices), the law requires written notices to be sent to a former employee’s last known address. From time to time, you can also send out special announcements about upcoming company events, such as a company’s 10th anniversary, a retirement/appreciation party for a longtime employee, or a summer picnic.
Reduce lettering/label creation time
In some situations, you need to send a HR letter to only one employee. In others, it may be necessary to convey information to your entire workforce. Either way, HR must have the ability to generate letters with employee-specific information. Even copying and pasting individual names into each letter salutation can be an unnecessarily slow task. It makes more sense to use a program that allows you to automatically fill in such fields in a letter template from the corresponding fields in your electronic personnel records. The same applies to address labels. Instead of copying data into Excel or Word and going through the label creation wizard in those programs, it makes sense to keep all employee information safely in your HR database and print labels directly from that application.