Giving resignation notice with or without an official offer letter?
No, do not give notice without an offer letter. The very fact there is a 3 day delay in getting you the offer letter suggests the new company has some sticking point on their end. Maybe it’s a formality, but maybe it’s not. HR at my place can knock out an offer letter in 25 minutes. Ask HR woman at new company what the hold up is and tell her you will not give notice until you have it – an e-mailed scan of the letter is fine.
I was in a similar situation once, and the HR/recruiter guy kept telling me the job was mine, just needed to wait for the CEO to get back from a trip, it’s a formality then just this, then just this one more thing, etc. etc. And it did kind of seem like a formality because this was a company I had a freelance relationship with and everyone was super-excited to bring me on full time into this new position – i.e., I knew there wasn’t someone else up for the job because it was created for me. All this time he was encouraging me to go ahead and give notice so that I could start up with them as soon as possible. After a few days of increasingly-worrying delays, the job was gone. It turns out the CEO (who was relatively new and not one of the people I had a working relationship with) was against me working remotely (which was the basic foundation of the job offer in the first place). So yeah, good thing I didn’t give notice.
