offrd.co
An offer letter is an early read on hiring
Most employment data in India arrives late. The Periodic Labour Force Survey from the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation is the broadest official read on who is working, but it largely describes the year that just ended. EPFO payroll figures land monthly, closer to the present, though they record formal registration rather than the moment a company decides to hire.
An offer letter sits earlier than both. It comes before the first salary run, before the PF account opens, before the joining form is filled. It is the first written act of a hiring decision. So the flow of offer letters works as a kind of bellwether. It catches the market at the point a company commits a hire to paper, firm by firm, close to real time.
That is why the shape of HR document activity on Offrd is more than a usage chart. It is an early read on the health of India's SME and startup hiring, caught before the official ledgers register it.
The growth curve, from cautious hiring to routine paperwork
When Offrd first started processing offer letters in late 2022, volumes were modest. A small set of early companies used the platform to produce clean documents. The hiring was real but tentative, in keeping with the mood after the 2021 over hiring, when many young companies spent 2022 recalibrating headcount.
From early 2023 the picture changed. Letter activity climbed and held that climb through 2024 and into 2025. By 2025 and 2026 the running total of HR documents on Offrd had grown several times over from where it began, a curve that tracks the wider move toward formal employment across the SME economy.
The shape matters as much as the totals. This was not one spike and a plateau. It was steady month on month accumulation, with sharper steps each time a larger cohort of companies arrived and began treating formal documents as the default rather than the exception.
What the 2024 to 2025 acceleration lines up with
The fastest stretch of growth fell across 2024 and into 2025, and it was not random. It met a set of forces that made formal hiring both more common and more consequential.
The Startup India programme, run by the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade since 2016, had recognised more than 1,40,000 startups by the middle of 2024, among the largest pools of formally registered young companies anywhere. Each recognised startup is a company with legal standing. Companies with legal standing issue offer letters, run documented payslips, and hand out experience letters when people leave. The recognition drive is, in effect, a formalisation engine, and Offrd's curve reflects its output.
Alongside it, the EPFO kept reporting net additions to formal payroll each month, the downstream record of hiring that begins with an offer. The two move together. As more workers enter the formal fold, the pool of companies issuing structured paperwork grows with them.
The same period saw the e-Shram register for unorganised workers expand, pulling parts of the workforce that were once invisible into a digital record. That segment is not Offrd's SME base, yet the direction is shared. Government policy has pushed formality at every tier, which has made proper HR documents both more expected and more valued.
Free to paid, the signal inside the signal
The most telling pattern is not raw growth. It is how the mix of free and paying companies has shifted over time.
Most companies meet Offrd on the free credits. They issue a first offer, then a second, perhaps a few internship letters. At that stage documents are a tactical tool, reached for when a specific need lands.
The move to a paid plan says something larger. It is the point a company decides formal documentation is a standing function, not a one off. The share of companies crossing that line has risen steadily over the platform's life. Firms that began with a hesitant first offer now issue payslips, increment letters, probation confirmations, and experience letters as routine.
That shift, from occasional to systematic, is one of the strongest signals in the data. It reflects not just more hiring, but sturdier employment relationships. A company that runs the whole document arc, offer to exit, is building a workforce, not filling a seat.
From offer letter to experience letter, the whole arc
By 2025 and 2026 the spread of document types on Offrd had widened. In the early months almost everything was an offer letter. Offer letters still lead by volume, by a wide margin. But the rest of the lifecycle now shows up in earnest: onboarding letters, probation confirmations, payslips, increment letters, resignation acceptances, relieving and experience letters, internship letters, and more.
That spread tells its own story. An increment letter can only go to someone who has stayed long enough to earn a raise, usually a year or more. When increment letters accrue real volume, it means companies that issued their first offers in 2023 are now managing a maturing team. Their earliest hires stayed, grew, and are being paid more. Experience and relieving letters mark the other end, the close of a relationship that only exists because an offer opened it.
The document arc is a proxy for the employment arc. As the mix on Offrd broadens, it mirrors the companies themselves growing up, and the SME hiring market maturing with them.
350+ cities, where formal hiring is spreading
One of the more striking lines in Offrd's history is geography. Early on, most documents traced to a handful of metros: Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Chennai, Pune. Offrd is now used across more than 350 cities and towns in India, with offers landing far beyond those first few.
This says something real about where the ecosystem is putting down a foothold. Better connectivity through BharatNet and the Digital India work under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has made it workable to run, hire, and manage teams across tier 2 and tier 3 towns. Jaipur, Kochi, Bhubaneswar, Chandigarh, Coimbatore, Indore. These are no longer outliers in the data, they are regular hiring locations.
That widening is one of the more important shifts in the market. For years, the question of where companies were hiring had roughly five answers. The data now reads to several hundred. Our companion page on the top cities for job offers in India breaks that geography down further.
What this points to for 2026 and beyond
India's formal employment story has been positive but uneven. PLFS has shown formal urban employment improving. EPFO has shown steady monthly additions. Startup India has shown a young company base growing about as fast as any in the world.
Offrd's document data is one more reading in that set. But because it sits right at the start of the chain, at the signed offer, it carries a forward lean the other sources lack. For a closer look at pay, our page on the average CTC offered by Indian startups sits on the same data.
The company issuing its first offer on Offrd today is the one issuing its hundredth in three years. The town showing up for the first time this quarter is a hiring hub by 2028. The document types only now appearing, contract letters, probation letters, internship experience letters, point to working arrangements that will be ordinary across a much wider stretch of the SME economy soon enough. Measured through HR documents, India's hiring pulse is brisk, widening, and still picking up. The formal employment base the country has spent a decade building policy around is now throwing off data at the company level, one offer letter at a time.