AI in HR: 15 ChatGPT Prompts for HR Operations

It’s time to embrace AI in HR - that’s according to 1000s of HR professionals who use ChatGPT prompts to automate key tasks associated with employee engagement and performance management.

Anyone working in HR will tell you how busy their roles can get. And the research backs them up - according to two separate studies, people working in HR operations spend somewhere between 20 and 55 hours per week on routine work that could be automated.

For most teams, the adoption of AI for HR is an attempt to streamline processes and alleviate overflowing workloads. By learning more about the ChatGPT app and embracing AI in human resources, HR teams can redirect time and energy to more strategic initiatives.

Interested in following their lead? We tried and tested hundreds of ChatGPT prompts and come up with 15 that are guaranteed to save HR teams time.

‍What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a language model developed by OpenAI, designed to simulate human-like conversation through natural language processing and response generation in real time.

Users send text-based queries or prompts and ChatGPT generates an automatic response. The user can send feedback or follow-up prompts to improve the quality of the responses.

What is an AI Chatbot?

An AI chatbot is a program that uses artificial intelligence techniques such as natural language processing, machine learning, and deep learning to simulate human-like conversations with users through a messaging interface.

ChatGPT is an example of an AI Chatbot and is now the 7th most used software application in business.

How Can HR Professionals Use AI Tools to Reduce Their Workload?

HR professionals can use AI tools like ChatGPT to automate routine work like collating survey responses and speed up time-consuming tasks like writing emails to job candidates.

‍We’re sharing our favourite use cases for HR professionals below, including 15 handy prompts we developed to speed up routine work.

Are There Any HR Tasks I Shouldn’t Use ChatGPT For?

At the time of writing (Spring 2023), there are significant limits to what ChatGPT can do. It’s not, for example, capable of writing unbiased feedback for employees based on human prompts, judging by an experiment conducted at Fast Company (3). So you won’t find “Write employee feedback ” or “Write a performance review” on our list of use cases.

Similarly, you don’t want to rely on AI tools for gathering information on labour laws, as they’re subject to knowledge cutoffs - at the time of writing, ChatGPT is only capable of reproducing information from more than 18 months ago. You could, on the other hand, use AI tools to summarise and explain labour laws based on information taken from an official, up-to-date source like a government website.

These may seem like small differences, but the impact is potentially huge - if you place too much trust in ChatGPT, you might find yourself making decisions based on incorrect or biased information.

What Are Some of the Best Use Cases for AI in HR?

• Understanding Employee Trends

HR professionals need to stay up to date on industry best practices, trends and challenges in order to make impactful changes across employee engagement, performance and development. But the sheer volume of employee research that's available can be overwhelming.

AI chatbots like ChatGPT can quickly find relevant reports and create instant summaries of the key takeaways, reducing reading time from hours to minutes.

• Screening Resumes

Sifting through resumes is easily one of the most laborious tasks in recruitment, but AI tools can help speed up the process.

For example, once you’ve provide ChatGPT with all the resumes you received, you can ask it to highlight the candidate with the most experience, or highlight all candidates with a certain qualification.

• Writing Job Interview Questions

There’s a fine art to conducting job interviews and it all starts with asking the right questions.

The ChatGPT app can suggest questions specific to the role and candidate’s experience, saving valuable time during the recruitment process.

• Writing Personalised Emails to Job Candidates

When writing offer letters or rejection emails to job applicants, generic templates can only take you so far.

AI can help you personalise these messages using notes you took during the interview process.

• Summarising Performance Review Feedback

One of the most time-consuming tasks associated with 360 performance reviews is reading, digesting and summarising feedback for employees, which may be done by managers and/or members of the HR team.

An AI chatbot like ChatGPT can instantly analyse and summarise feedback from multiple sources - manager, peers, direct reports, customers etc. - identifying key takeaways for the employee to work on.

• Collating Employee Survey Responses

Software tools like Frankli have already automated the process of creating, running and reporting on employee surveys.

ChatGPT can take one more job off the HR team’s plate, by analysing and summarising survey responses to highlight the key messages. This is particularly useful for identifying recurring themes or phrases in employee responses.

• Writing Email Reminder Templates

Most HR professionals will tell you that their least favourite part of the job is reminding employees to participate in surveys, reviews, initiatives, avail of training and benefits… the list goes on.

Employees are generally really busy with their work, so if you don’t use a platform like Frankli to automate these reminders for you, you can expect to spend a lot of your time writing and sending these friendly reminders. With AI tools, you can at least speed up the process by generating an email template with a subject line that will stand out in their inbox.

• Idea Generation

One of the most time-consuming jobs on a HR leader’s plate is developing initiatives to improve employee retention and engagement, which might involve anything from creating an employee recognition program to spearheading a series of wellbeing initiatives.

While ChatGPT can’t fully automate these programs (yet!), it can certainly help with idea generation - you could even follow up by requesting a detailed to-do list for executing these ideas.

• Creating Employee Development Plans

Helping employees advance to a new role or acquire a new competency can sometimes require in-depth knowledge that HR professionals just don’t have.

AI tools allow you to quickly generate ideas for skill and competency building outside of your field of expertise.

• Role-Playing Difficult Conversations

Sometimes, we have to have tough conversations with our people, but AI can help us be better prepared for them.

For example, we don’t recommend using AI tools to communicate layoffs at your company, but you can certainly use them to predict some of the questions you might get directly after the notice of layoffs, and prepare thoughtful responses.

• Creating Company Calendars

AI tools can be really useful in planning and scheduling, whether you’re looking to plot out pay periods for the year, or plan events around global days of celebration or awareness, e.g. World Mental Health Day.

You can use ChatGPT to create personal, team or company schedules - just be sure to provide specific information on what you’d like to see in your calendar, and remember to request that public and company holidays are accounted for.

• Comparing Software Tools

High-performing teams cannot survive on ChatGPT alone! They need performance management, employee engagement and employee development tools to help them achieve their goals, ideally all in one platform.

The ChatGPT app can be useful in suggesting software platforms during the research phase, as well as comparing their features, side-by-side.

• Goal-Setting and Tracking

We know that goal-setting is most effective when we track our goals digitally and hold regular accountability 1:1s with our manager through a dedicated platform. But setting clear, achievable goals is another important contributor to our success.

Goal-setting software like Frankli provides goal templates to work from, but you may need to go into more detail when tracking your progress. ChatGPT can generate the best metrics to track for your role, and even provide benchmarks to aim for.

• Calculating Employee Metrics, e.g. Retention Rates:

As well as providing formulas for calculating employee metrics like retention rates, cost-per hire rates and turnover costs, you can use AI to perform these calculations for you.

This is another use case for AI in human resources that offers a large time saving over the course of a year.

• Generating Data for HR Chatbots

If you’re thinking about using a HR chatbot to save time in communicating with your people, AI tools can help you populate it with the most useful data.

As well as asking ChatGPT to generate the most frequently-asked questions, you can request responses for each question.

Note: As ChatGPT is an AI language model, its responses won’t always be accurate. Be sure to review and edit any content you generate through AI chatbots and fact-check any important data.

Understanding Employee Trends:

“Suggest 5 essential pieces of research that all HR professionals should read in 2023. Summarise 5 key takeaways for each.”

Screening Resumes:

“Analyse these 14 resumes and answer the following questions: Which 3 candidates have the most experience in mobile app development? Can you identify all the candidates with proficiency in Java? Can you identify all the candidates that mention attention to detail in their cover letters? If any candidate appears in the answer to all 3 questions, please identify them."

Writing Job Interview Questions:

“I am interviewing this candidate (LinkedIn profile link) for the role of (role title) at (company name). Draft 10 questions I should ask in the interview.”

Writing Personalised Emails to Job Candidates:

“Write 3 rejection emails for 3 candidates who applied for a job at our company. Ask me 3 questions that will help you gather the information you need in order to personalise the emails.”

Summarising Performance Review Feedback:

“Summarise the following employee feedback in 200 words. Provide 5 key takeaways.”

Summarise Employee Survey Responses:

“Summarise the responses to this survey question. Highlight the most common issues mentioned in the responses.”

Writing Email Templates:

“Write an email to all employees reminding them to take part in the latest employee survey before May 30th. The email should be less than 125 words long. The tone should be friendly and informal. The subject line should be eye-catching and contain an emoji.”

Idea Generation:

“Suggest 15 ideas for an employee recognition program for a project management consultancy with 500 employees. Write a to-do list for executing each one.”

Creating Employee Development Plans:

“Suggest 10 ways an employee in software development can gain a competency in people management.”

Role-Playing Difficult Conversations:

“I have to tell an employee that they are being made redundant. Suggest 10 questions they might ask me during this conversation and write thoughtful, appropriate responses for each.”

Creating Company Calendars:

“Create a calendar for 2024 highlighting US public holidays and any holidays or global days that relate to employees, e.g. International Women's Day, Juneteenth, World Mental Health Day.”

Comparing Software Tools:

“Prepare a list of the top 10 most popular employee engagement tools. Create a comparison chart for all 10 tools. Be sure to include 2 of the tools I’m already interested in - Frankli and Workday.”

Goal-Setting and Tracking:

“Provide 10 essential metrics for HR success. Include benchmarks for all 10.”

Calculating Employee Metrics, e.g. Retention Rates:

“Calculate the retention rate for my company. We had 236 employees on January 1st 2021 and 219 employees on January 1st 2022. There were 10 new hires. All departures were voluntary.”

Generating Data for HR Chatbots:

“Suggest 10 commonly asked questions employees will ask HR. Provide template responses for each, leaving gaps where I can fill in the correct information.”

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Sources:

1. 2019 International Employee Survey Report, The Future of Work is Human. 2. Society for Human Resource Management, The High Cost of Low Value Work: Exploring the Impact of Administrative Tasks on the Workforce. 3. Fast Company, We asked ChatGPT to write performance reviews and they are wildly sexist (and racist).