Your friend starts Monday at a place she has wanted to work at for four years. Or your former coworker finally landed something after seven months of applying, and you both know how bad the seven months were. You want to mark it. You are also unsure whether to make a fuss, because the last time you congratulated someone loudly on a job they left it in five months.
What is appropriate, and what is not
Week six is better than week one. The first week is a flood of congratulations and free lunches. Around week five or six, the new person is past the welcome and into the part where they do not yet know how anything works and have made their first visible mistake. Almost nobody checks in then.
Handle a post-layoff hire carefully. Do not congratulate them on being employed again, do not reference the gap, and do not say anything about how it all worked out. Congratulate them on the job itself, by name, as if the last seven months did not exist. If they want to talk about the gap, they will raise it.
Send to the home for the first one. A box arriving at a new office in week one, addressed to someone the mail room does not have in the system yet, can go missing for a week or land in front of people they have not met. If you want to send to the office, wait until they have been there a month.
Ask nothing about compensation, title level, or whether it is remote. People will tell you. A congratulations that ends in three questions is an interview.
What to send
If you'd rather bake it: double chocolate, in a tin they can carry into the office themselves. /ricette/. Send it to the home address, not the workplace — an unlabeled homemade tin on a break room table in someone's first week is a first impression they did not choose to make.
What to write
- You wanted this one specifically for four years. Congratulations.
- Sending this at week six on purpose, when everyone else has stopped asking how it's going.
- Congratulations on Meridian. Nothing about the last seven months in this card.
- Take this to the break room in week three and you'll be everyone's favorite by Friday.
- You'll be fine by March. Everybody is bad at a new job in February.
12 more lines for this occasion →
Timing
Two useful windows: the weekend before the start date, delivered to the home, or week five to week seven, delivered to either. Skip week one entirely, when the flood is already happening. If they moved cities for the job, wait until they confirm the new address; relocations run late and mail forwarding lags by one to two weeks. For a Sunday-night arrival, order early in the week before and allow a day of margin, because a Saturday delivery attempt at an apartment building often becomes Monday.
This page names no brand and earns nothing from what you decide. The bakeries that ship are listed alphabetically by state; our method is here, including what we would have to disclose if that ever changed.