Can Employees Get Experience Letters for Work Done Before Our Company Was Registered?

Hey, people. I'm new here on this forum, looking to learn something new and hopefully give back to the community as well. I have a question:

Company Registration and Employee Experience

We have been running an IT company for a year now, and after finally gathering the finances required, we have decided to register the company next month. However, we have had three people working for us for a year now, and we have been paying them out of our own pockets.

What I would like to ask is, are they eligible for an experience letter since the time of company registration or since the time they have been working? If we were to give them an offer letter after company registration, what date would the offer letter mention as the date of joining?

Any help is really appreciated. Thanks.

Offer and Experience Letters: Legal Considerations

If an offer letter has been issued after the registration of the company, then it is legal. If an offer letter has been issued before the registration of the company, i.e., when the employee joins, then also it is legal. However, if any of the employees file a case in court, you and your company could be in trouble, and it might lead to the cancellation of the license.

The same would apply to the experience letter, but usually, the experience letter is issued for the period the employee has worked for. If you give your employees an offer letter, you need to issue it from the time they have joined because the period of employment mentioned in their experience letter should match the date of their offer letter (the date of issuing the offer letter). If you do not issue the offer letter from their date of joining, then their experience will not be considered legal.

I suggest that before issuing them a letter, you consult your employees and take their suggestions.

Regards,
Ankit Chaturvedi
[Phone Number Removed For Privacy Reasons]
[Email Removed For Privacy Reasons]

First off, thank you, Ankit, for your response. It was very detailed and cleared most of my doubts.

Another thing I would like to know is, will the experience letter be valid? If the employee were to present this experience letter to another company, would it be considered valid even though he was working for one year in an unregistered company?

I welcome you to CiteHR.com and thank Ankit for providing the answers. To quell any further questions that you may have on this topic, I would like to inform you that an experience letter per se has nothing whatsoever to do with the registration of a company. Both are separate issues.

You can easily test this hypothesis on your own by asking the following questions and getting your own answers:

- Are employees working in unregistered companies not entitled to get experience letters?
- Can one ignore the experience if an employee has worked in such iconic start-ups as Microsoft and Dell before these companies were incorporated?

For future employees, you have already been provided suggestions. For employees (present or past) who had been with you, you can indicate the pre-registration tenure in the experience letter itself.

Warm regards.

Procedure for Issuing Experience Certificates

The correct procedure to overcome this problem is as follows:

Issue an experience certificate to employees who have been working in the organization before its incorporation. The certificate would read as follows:

This is to certify that Mr. xxxx has been associated with our organization since xxxxx. He was closely involved in his job profile even before the company's inception. As a founding employee, his services were commendable.

Regards,

My name is Raj Kishan, and I am presently working in an organization called Yes Energy Solution. My employer is willing to provide an experience certificate for one year, but our organization was registered only eight months ago. If he issues an experience certificate for one year, will it be considered valid? I am concerned about the background verification process from the company I am planning to join next.

Will there be any issues with the experience certificate and the organization's registration date during the background verification by my new company? If so, I kindly request you to suggest a solution.

Thank you for your assistance.

Regards,