Most Sample Employment Contracts Template Online Are Unenforceable

Employment Contract Samples, Examples, Templates Vetted

As a business professional, it's important to ensure that your employment contracts are compliant with up-to-date local laws and regulations. While it may be tempting to copy templates found on the internet, it's important to exercise caution when doing so.

As an experiment, I, an employment lawyer, was just browsing Google for “employment contracts templates" to test the strength of what’s out there on Google’s highly visible first page.

Included in the first page of Google results were various Word documents and PDFs from business advocacy groups, governments, regulators and universities. There were also some results from legal document builder software services like our company, goHeather. Full disclaimer, goHeather sells employment contract templates.

What I found was troubling, and I wanted to highlight the dangers of the various Word documents and PDFs that I found from the various business advocacy groups, governments, regulators and universities.

But first, this essay is not to say these organizations are bad or did something wrong. What I found were just documents that google crawled on these organizations' websites. There is no context, use case suggestions, date, or anything else to indicate they were intended to be copied by businesses, generally. In other words, I’m not criticizing these organizations, I’m highlighting that businesses should not use whatever they find on Google to copy an employment contract or any kind of legal document for that matter.  

Having said that, here are the problems I found:

Sample Employment Contract 1

The very first Word document, ranked number one on google for the keywords, “Ontario employment contract template”, was void for breach of minimum employment standards. This contract’s termination clause allowed the employer to terminate an employee without notice “for cause”.  This is illegal. “Cause” is not a reason not to provide notice to a terminated employee. Rather, under Ontario’s Employment Standards Act, employers don't have to provide notice only if the employee, “has been guilty of wilful misconduct, disobedience or wilful neglect of duty that is not trivial and has not been condoned by the employer.” This is a far higher burden than “cause” and the courts are clear on this subject - “cause provisions” void the employment contract in 2023 and beyond in Ontario, Canada.

Next, this very same employment contract was unenforceable because it allowed the employer to provide an employee “notice” upon termination, but not “severance”. In Ontario, eligible employees are entitled to both notice and severance, not just notice. The instant contract said this: “the Employer shall provide the Employee with notice in accordance with the requirements of the Employment Standards Act, 2000, as amended or replaced from time to time… The parties agree that this shall constitute the sole notice or payment in lieu of notice to which the Employee is entitled if the Employee’s employment with the Employer is terminated….” This language is illegal, however, because the contract implied the employee was entitled to receive notice only, and no severance.

There were other issues in this above-noted contract, but those were the biggest red flags. Indeed, all of the documents I highlight in this essay had many other problems that I will not discuss to keep this post short and to the point. Generally, I only highlight the gravest concerns to show how objectively bad they are. 

Sample Employment Contract 2

The next word document returned for the keywords “employment contracts templates” that I used on Google was also unenforceable. It had a termination clause that also implied no severance was to be given to employees: “If your employment with (full legal name of firm) is terminated, you will receive written notice of termination, pay in lieu of notice, or a combination of the two in accordance with (name the provincial or federal employment standards act or legislation that applies).” Nothing else was said about termination, which, same as above, implied severance wasn't to be provided, but even worse, for employers, this clause did not even actually oust the employee’s common law right to reasonable notice, as the one above tried to do. This termination clause should have said something to the effect of “and this minimum notice is all you get”. Because it did not, there was no explicate or implicit term that the employee could not claim common law reasonable notice. 

Sample Employment Contract 3

A third employment contract I found on the first page of Google for the same keywords as above was the worst. It had a termination clause that purported to provide an employee with a number of “days” of compensation in the event of termination, which is illegal because notice and severance are measured in weeks not days, and can be as high as 34 weeks under minimum employment standards in Ontario. 

You Get What You Pay For

Similarly, I found on Google various services for employment contracts PDFs from foreign jurisdictions like the United States. In almost all circumstances, an American employment contract is void in Canada because American contracts allow at-will employment, which Canada does not. 

Let this be a lesson that businesses shouldn't copy and paste employment contracts from the internet. Instead, organizations looking to save money by not hiring a lawyer to make an employment contract should use legal document software that is specific and local to the province they operate in, like goHeather, which uses lawyer-made templates that are custom-made for each jurisdiction in Canada we operate in and are updated constantly for any changes in the law. 

In summary, while searching for employment contract templates online can be a helpful starting point, it's important to exercise caution and either consult with a lawyer or use a purpose-built local employment contract builder (like goHeather) to ensure that the template you choose is suitable for your business and compliant with all relevant laws and regulations.