21+ ChatGPT Prompts for HR To Accelerate Your Productivity
Writing effective ChatGPT prompts enables HR professionals to be up to 37% faster in their writing work and deliver 20% higher quality of work, according to a recent study by MIT.
In this guide, we’ll dive into the nitty-gritty of prompt engineering and share 23 ChatGPT prompts for HR you can use to assist you across a variety of HR tasks. Let’s go!
Contents
Before you start with the ChatGPT prompts for HR
What makes for a good or bad HR ChatGPT prompt
23 high-impact ChatGPT prompts for HR
ChatGPT prompts for HR cheat sheet
Before you start with the ChatGPT prompts for HR
Let’s first take a step back to understand what makes for an effective prompt. ChatGPT needs three input elements to generate good-quality results:
- Objective
- Context
- Format
Let’s look at a simple example to better explain.
- Objective – Make a shopping list…
- Context – … to feed a family of 4 living in Salt Lake City in Utah for two days with a budget of 20 USD…
- Format – … using bullet points with prices per item.
Important note: While the chatbot has access to a wealth of data, the results won’t be accurate and helpful without context.
ChatGPT prompts tips
Apart from these three elements, there are a couple of tips and tricks to keep in mind when using ChatGPT:
- Always use the latest, paid version of ChatGPT (currently ChatGPT-4). There are significant output quality improvements between versions, so using the latest version pays dividends.
- Don’t use ChatGPT as Google Search. Make sure to provide it with a clear task to complete.
- Be as specific as possible in your prompt to customize the response to your needs to avoid ChatGPT providing you with generic answers.
- Build on top of your query to get better results with additional instructions and follow-up questions. This is called prompt chaining.
What makes for a good or bad HR ChatGPT prompt
Take a look at the following prompt example. Remember the three elements that are important for ChatGPT to create a good outcome: objective, context, and format.
Here’s a sample prompt: “Draft 10 interview questions for a candidate for the role of [role title] at [company name].“
Before you read on, take a moment to analyze this prompt.
Is there anything you’d change? There is no right or wrong answer. The idea is simply to familiarize yourself with the way in which you can prompt the chatbot.
Some things you may have thought of:
- The type of interview questions could have been specified. For instance, ‘10 screening interview questions’.
- The person conducting the interview could have been specified. Is it a recruiter, a fellow colleague, or the hiring manager? For example, ‘Draft 10 questions the hiring manager should ask in the interview’.
- The job description could have been added instead of just the role title. This would guide the AI to be more precise in its output.
- Alternatively, you could add the specific skills to test. Are you assessing someone’s ability to manage people remotely, or are you evaluating for culture fit? The more specific you are, the more useful the output will be.
- If the company is relatively small and/or unknown, the type of company and industry could have been added. This would allow ChatGPT to better tailor its output to the question.
Now that you have a better idea of what makes for an effective ChatGPT prompt, let’s get prompting!
21 high-impact ChatGPT prompts for HR
HR professionals can use ChatGPT to be more productive in completing various tasks across the different stages of the employee life cycle:
Let’s have a look at 23 sample prompts for HR that will help you be more successful in your role.
1. Attraction
| Topic | ChatGPT prompt example | What you need to know |
| Writing a job description | “Create a job description for a [ insert name of position ]. Include [ A, B & C ] responsibilities.” | With this prompt, you can generate a template to use as the basis for your specific job description. Customize your prompt by including the name of the position and the responsibilities specific to the role. For more specific responses, you can also include, for instance, the industry or a brief description of your company. |
| Developing a career page | “List 10 important elements of a company career page.” | This prompt gives HR professionals an overview of the 10 most important elements to include on their organization’s career page. You can use this as a starting point when developing or optimizing your career site. |
| Employer branding messaging for social media | “List 7 best practices for employer branding posts on the company’s social media.” | Getting an overview of the most important employer branding elements for social media helps you get started on creating effective messaging for your audience. Again, you can specify the industry or type of company to get a better response. |
ChatGPT can be a powerful tool for brainstorming. It’s easy to generate a large number of ideas quickly, which you can then filter and refine.
For instance, you can use it to brainstorm questions for an employee survey, ideas for team-building activities, or ways to improve recruitment processes.
2. Recruitment
| Topic | ChatGPT prompt example | What you need to know |
| Screening interview questions | “Provide 10 screening interview questions for a [ add job title ].” | This prompt gives you 10 sample questions to choose from, use as inspiration, or add to your existing screening interview questions. |
| Specific interview questions | “List 5 interview questions that test someone’s managerial skills. For each question, indicate the answer a highly skilled candidate would give and the answer a low-skilled candidate would give.” | You can amend this to include different skills or more behavioral or technical interview questions based on the type of candidates or interview you are prepping for. |
| Writing job offer emails | “Write a job offer email for a [ add job title ] with a start date of [ insert start date ], including a starting salary of [ insert starting salary ].” | You can use a template generated with this prompt as the basis for your offer letter emails. Adding a tone of voice, such as formal, upbeat, or friendly, will help you tailor how the email is written. |
| Adopting inclusive hiring practices | “List 8 inclusive hiring practices. Based on these inclusive hiring practices, what challenges should HR anticipate?” | Separate this prompt into two queries. The first will provide you with 8 ideas for inclusive hiring that you can implement at your organization. The second question helps you consider the challenges you may face when implementing inclusive hiring practices. |
Use a two-step approach for more complex tasks. If you’re trying to generate complex or highly specialized content, consider using a two-step approach.
First, ask the AI to brainstorm or list ideas on the topic. Then, in a separate prompt, ask the chatbot to elaborate on those ideas or structure them into the final format you need.
3. Onboarding
| Topic | ChatGPT prompt example | What you need to know |
| Welcome emails | “Create a new hire welcome email for a [ insert type of position ] using [ insert your company’s name ] tone of voice.” | ChatGPT will accommodate various writing styles and tones of voice, including your own organization’s. Of course, you will need to sense-check this to ensure that the response conveys your brand voice. As we’ve already mentioned, you could also describe the tone of voice and choose a conversational, formal, or professional tone. |
| Frequently asked questions | “List 5 frequently asked questions by new hires.” | This prompt gives HR professionals a good idea of new hires’ most common questions. You could also customize the prompt by including a specific type of role, for example, an account executive or customer service representative or the industry, like retail or healthcare. |
| The onboarding process | “List 5 best practices for onboarding a new employee.” | The 5 generic factors to keep in mind when creating an onboarding process for new employees will get you on the right track when designing your onboarding process. To make the information provided by ChatGPT actionable, ask additional questions. Let’s say one of the best practices provided by ChatGPT is “Start the onboarding process before the employee’s start date.” An additional follow-up question to ask could be: “List the steps to take for onboarding before the employee’s start date.” |
| Onboarding survey | “Create an onboarding evaluation survey with 10 questions that the employee will get after their first 30 days.” | Adding inclusion criteria, for example, “Include at least one questions about manager feedback” will help to further customize the survey example to your need. |
If you find that the AI’s initial attempts to answer a complex or multi-part question are not satisfactory, you can break down your request into simpler, smaller prompts.Feeding the AI more manageable pieces of information at a time can sometimes yield better results.
4. Retention and engagement
| Topic | ChatGPT prompt example | What you need to know |
| Employee engagement | “Create 5 employee engagement survey questions. Focus on company culture and exclude questions about management.” | HR professionals can easily generate a list of several good, basic questions that they can include in their engagement survey. The response can be further customized by following up with other exclusion or inclusion criteria. |
| Compensation and benefits | “List 7 steps HR should follow when creating a compensation strategy.” | Using this prompt will help HR professionals get started with the compensation strategy of the company. To refine the prompt, you can add the company size, location, or level of seniority. |
| Employee recognition | “List 10 non-monetary ideas for employee recognition.” | This prompt can inspire HR professionals when developing an employee recognition program or adding new ways to recognize employees. |
| Developing policies and procedures | “Draft a work-from-home policy for an employee handbook.” | A ChatGPT-generated template allows HR practitioners to make sure their organization’s work-from-home policy is clear and comprehensive. Further iteration will help you adapt the policy to your company’s specific needs. |
| “List 10 key HR policies an organization with [ insert number ] of employees in [ insert industry ] should have.” | With this prompt, you’ll get an overview of HR policies you should have in place in your organization. That helps ensure compliance with labor laws and regulations and provides clarity to your employees on a number of HR-related matters. |
Remember ChatGPT’s limitations. Understand that while GPT-4 is a powerful language model, it’s not perfect.
It can produce incorrect or nonsensical responses, and it does not truly understand the content it generates. It doesn’t have access to real-time data or personal data unless provided in the prompt.
Always review the content it generates before using it in your HR efforts.
5. Development
| Topic | ChatGPT prompt example | What you need to know |
| Training programs | List 5 online training programs for HR Analytics and summarize each of them. | This prompt provides you with various courses specifically for HR Analytics. There is, however, a catch with these types of prompts. Remember that ChatGPT’s data is only as recent as September 2021, so some courses or training programs could no longer be available – or more recent courses won’t be included in your result. This illustrates the importance of conducting your own research after using ChatGPT. |
| Coaching questions | “List 10 employee coaching questions for a [ insert job title ].” | You can use this prompt to generate a list of questions to help, for example, managers lead effective performance review conversations with their team members. |
With experience, you may notice that certain ways of phrasing your HR prompts help you get better results.
Experiment with different styles, tones, or structures in your prompts. This is called prompt engineering and could significantly improve the ChatGPT’s responses.
6. Offboarding
| Topic | ChatGPT prompt example | What you need to know |
| Employee exit checklist | “Create an employee exit checklist for HR.” | This prompt provides HR professionals with a fairly comprehensive list of things to do – and boxes to tick off – when an employee leaves the company. If you need a Word or Excel document, you can download a free employee exit checklist template. |
| Employee exit questions | “List 7 employee exit interview questions.” | Generating a list of typical exit interview questions can create the basis for your exit interviews. |
| Email announcement | “Create a company email announcing an employee’s departure.” | HR and/or the manager of the exiting employee can use this prompt to create a template for their employee departure announcement emails. You can also add additional prompt specifications, such as tone of voice, or email personalization, such as including the position or the department. |
Don’t enter personal or confidential information unless you understand what will happen with your data.
Remember that all data you enter may be seen by others, so make sure to keep confidential information confidential.
ChatGPT prompts for HR cheat sheet
To help you become more effective in using ChatGPT to supercharge your HR efforts, we’ve created this helpful ChatGPT prompts cheat sheet for you!
Before you go
Using ChatGPT appears simple, but it does require skill. The answers the algorithm provides are only as good as the instruction prompts entered by the user.
That’s why, at the Academy to Innovate HR, we’ve developed a mini-course on using ChatGPT for HR. It teaches students how to use the tool in the HR context by walking through step-by-step examples of effective HR use cases and explains how to create compelling ‘instruction prompts’ that give you the best responses.
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