How to use the Hiring Offer Review agent skill

What is an agent skill, and what does hiring-review do?

An agent skill is a folder containing a SKILL.md file with instructions that an AI agent loads when a request matches the skill's description. This one is part of the claude-for-legal employment-legal plugin and is written for the employer's side.

When you ask it to review an offer, the skill works through a fixed workflow: jurisdiction, classification, restrictive covenants, jurisdiction-specific requirements, and offer letter content. It does not store legal rules. For each hire it researches the currently operative rules and tags every citation with its source so a lawyer can check it.

• Jurisdiction: where the person actually works, not where headquarters is. Remote hires are governed by their home state or country; hybrid hires usually by home state, subject to the letter's choice-of-law clause.
• Classification: whether exempt or non-exempt status is supported by salary basis, salary level and the duties test for the role.
• Restrictive covenants: enforceability of non-competes, customer and employee non-solicits, and confidentiality or IP assignment terms in the employee's jurisdiction.
• Jurisdiction-specific items: pay transparency, ban-the-box, salary-history limits and required offer or onboarding notices.
• Offer letter content: for example, whether US letters include at-will language, and for UK or EU hires, the required written terms.

Install the hiring-review skill

Download the ZIP from this page and unzip it. The skill is a single file, SKILL.md. Put the unzipped folder in one of two places, depending on how you want to use it:

Use it for all your projects by placing it in ~/.claude/skills/. Use it for one project only by placing it in that project's .claude/skills/ folder.

If you use the Claude apps instead of Claude Code, you can upload the skill under Settings → Capabilities → Skills.

• Personal use across projects: ~/.claude/skills/
• Single project: the project's .claude/skills/ folder
• Claude apps: Settings → Capabilities → Skills, then upload

Set up the required configuration file

The skill reads your company's settings before it reviews anything. It loads a CLAUDE.md file at ~/.claude/plugins/config/claude-for-legal/employment-legal/ that should contain your jurisdictional footprint, hiring review triggers, restrictive covenant policy and offer letter template location.

The skill also expects the claude-for-legal employment-legal plugin to be installed. If the jurisdiction table in that file does not cover a state or country, the skill flags it as a new jurisdiction and says research is needed before the offer goes out.

• Required: Claude Code or a compatible agent with the employment-legal plugin installed
• Required: a configured CLAUDE.md at ~/.claude/plugins/config/claude-for-legal/employment-legal/ with jurisdictions, hiring triggers and restrictive covenant policy
• Optional: a legal research connector such as Westlaw or CourtListener for citations
• Required input: the offer letter file, or a description of the hire

Trigger the skill with natural requests

You can invoke the skill with the slash command /hiring-review followed by the offer letter file or a description of the hire. You can also just ask in plain language. The skill's description lists phrases such as "review this offer", "can we use a non-compete here", "check this offer letter" and "hiring in [state]", and it also triggers when you attach an offer.

• "Review this offer" with the letter attached
• "Can we use a non-compete here?" for a hire in a specific state
• "Check this offer letter for classification problems"
• "Hiring in Texas, remote engineer, what do we need to check?"

Understand the research and citation tags

The skill does not state the law from memory. It searches for current rules and cites primary sources. If a legal research tool returns few or no results for a topic, the skill reports what it found and stops. It does not quietly fill the gap from web search or its own knowledge. It asks you to choose between broadening the query, trying another tool, searching the web, or flagging the item as unverified.

Every citation carries a tag showing where it came from. Citations tagged verify need the most checking.

• [Westlaw] or [CourtListener]: retrieved from a legal research connector
• [web search — verify]: from a web search, to be checked against a primary source
• [model knowledge — verify]: recalled from training data, higher fabrication risk
• [user provided]: supplied by you

Read the output and decide next steps

The review is a checklist of findings, with jurisdiction and classification issues flagged and restrictive covenant questions answered for the employee's location. Anything that hits the jurisdiction-specific escalation table is flagged for attention. If you have matter workspaces enabled, outputs are written to the matter folder rather than a general location.

Treat the output as a draft for an attorney. The skill's own purpose statement is that offer letters are mostly boilerplate until they are not, and that the jurisdiction and covenant checks are where it adds value.

• Confirm each tagged citation against the primary source, starting with verify tags.
• Check the offer against the company's restrictive covenant policy before reading the research overlay.
• Escalate anything flagged by the escalation table to counsel.

Safety notes: scripts and network access

This skill does not run scripts. It does use the network: it can query a configured legal research connector, and it uses web search only if you approve. Web-search results are tagged so you can see them, but they should be verified before you rely on them.

Because the skill reads your CLAUDE.md, keep that file limited to what you intend the skill to use. The skill is written for the employer's side and assumes your company's policies are configured.

• No scripts are run by this skill.
• Network use: research connectors, and web search only with your approval.
• Do not paste confidential candidate data you are not permitted to share with your tools.