My wife recently accepted a residency offer ~2.5 hours drive from our current home and my current place of work, so I have begun to search for jobs in the new area.
I had quite a successful interview last week, and received a job offer by email a couple days ago. The only thing keeping me from signing the offer and accepting the position is the utter lack of some things discussed in the interview on the offer letter.
The travel percentage expectation is not on the offer letter. I was assured it was around 5% and mostly local, but (given the industry) I would expect it to be a minimum of 20%. The expectation of hours worked per week is not present on the offer letter either. My expectation is 45-48 hours per week (for a salary position) with actual ranging from 40 to 60 based on need, but some companies will push for as many hours as possible out of their salaried employees.
The salary offered is on the low end for the position, but as I'm fairly unqualified (but capable, as demonstrated by my portfolio and interview performance), I expected right about the amount they offered.
Should I push to get clarification in writing of these things from the interview before signing the offer letter, and if so, how should I go about it?
The industry is Industrial/Automotive. The position I'm being offered is Controls Engineer. The move has to happen within the next couple months at the latest, with sooner being preferred.
As noted by @dbeer , casual overtime is not a typical thing in many industries. The industrial/automotive industry in my area tends to call for a small amount of casual overtime out of salaried employees as a matter of course. My current offer (for the job I've been working for 5 years) is one such letter that stipulates 45 hours/week is the norm, and the overtime is casual and considered a part of earning the salary offered, rather than additional to.
Edit:
It appears that, while I have received a letter with both the travel percentage expectation and the casual overtime stipulation in it, this is neither typical, nor particularly common, even in my industry.
Edit 2:
Quite a late update for anyone following this, but I did not get the travel and hours expectations in writing, and it backfired terribly. I left the position after 6 months in disgust, as my effective hourly pay was lower than the job I moved from, and the travel unsustainable. Travel provided no per deim (hourly employees earned $60/day for domestic, over $100/day international), and no road rate (my hourly co-workers received $4/hr road premium, I received nothing as a salaried employee). Despite verbal assurances, expected weekly hours generally exceeded 70, and travel was closer to 50% in the 6 months I was there, as measured against 125 working days (assuming 250 working days in a year). I spent over 50 days on the road in that time frame.
