10 Generative AI Prompts for HR

Since generative AI (genAI) exploded into the business world in 2023, professions of all kinds have seen massive impacts, including HR. HR professionals have quickly discovered that genAI isn’t just a tool for content creators but that by carefully crafting AI prompts, they can get assistance and support across a broad range of HR-related tasks and deliverables from candidate screening to data analysis to onboarding, performance management, and more.  

But, not all organizations are using genAI effectively, or at all. Research from Deel indicates that companies with 500+ employees have been more likely to adopt AI for HR than smaller companies. Only 38% of all HR decision-makers reported that they currently use AI, with 23% saying they plan to adopt it within the next year. Among non-AI users, 70% say they’re unlikely to implement AI within 12 months. That’s unfortunate because the potential for productivity enhancement and cost savings are significant.

Here are 10 prompts and examples to help you discover new ways to introduce genAI into your workflows and business practices.

Save time while gaining useful insights

Generative AI is a tool that HR should definitely leverage because it holds the potential to save time and streamline processes in various ways. Josh Bersin is one of several HR experts already pointing to a wide range of potential applications for generative AI in HR.

Generative AI prompts for HR can range from the simple, typed into a tool like ChatGPT: 

“What are some best practices for onboarding remote employees?” 

…to the complex and detailed, something you could ask a GenAI tool made specifically for your dataset: 

“Based on the data we provide, analyze the effectiveness of various talent acquisition channels for the past three years, including average cost-per-hire, and average time-to-fill for each channel. Recommend how we should allocate our budget across these channels for the next quarter to achieve the most cost-effective results.”

In fact, the more detailed and specific your prompts, the better the outputs you’ll receive.

Creating AI prompts for HR use cases

Here, we provide a starting point for crafting AI prompts for HR. To ensure your output is as useful as possible, you’ll want to edit these prompts to provide more specific details about how you will use the information, your audience or who the information is intended for, and any other important details specific to your organization and your intended objectives.

The possibilities are endless when it comes to prompting GenAI tools to respond to HR-related questions. For instance:

1. What is the average compensation rate for [role] in [city]? 

2. Tell me about the compliance requirements for [labor law] and where I can find more information.

3. What are three tips for having a difficult conversation with a [type of] employee who is underperforming? Provide three options for beginning the discussion and for wrapping up the discussion. 

4. What is a strategy for creating an employee engagement plan for new hires?

5. We’d like to improve collaboration between our on-site staff members and those working remotely across various time zones. What are some things we could do to build better connections between all employees?

By now, though, these types of prompts have become somewhat commonplace. To maximize the value of your genAI-generated responses and insights, you’ll want to craft more detailed prompts. This is a skill known as intelligent interrogation—using research-based prompting techniques to obtain accurate and relevant results.  

10 AI prompts for specific HR use cases

The more information you can provide to whatever genAI tool you’re using, about your audience, your goals, what you will be using the output for, etc., the better the results you’ll attain. Keep in mind that your initial prompt is a starting point—the initial output you receive can often be enhanced by providing more in-depth context and asking follow-up questions to guide the tool to the most specific and useful outputs.

Here are 10 initial prompts that can start you down the path to the detailed outputs you need to enhance your decision-making and your ability to influence leadership decisions.

Prompts to talent acquisition and onboarding

1. Talent acquisition: Filling senior-level positions efficiently is critical to our overall performance and the ability to attract and acquire top talent. For our CHRO and executive recruitment teams, provide an indication of which factors predict faster hiring for senior leadership roles to help us ensure faster recruitment for critical leadership positions. This output will be used to adjust recruitment strategies to focus on the most effective channels and selection processes. 

2. Talent pipeline: We believe we have some talent bottlenecks in parts of our organization. For our talent acquisition teams and regional managers, please calculate the conversion rate from job offer to acceptance across all regions of our organization. Which areas are most efficient? Which areas lag? What best practices might we implement to reduce the time between offer and acceptance?

3. New hire onboarding analysis: Based on employee input and questions during their first three months of employment, what are the most common challenges faced during this time? Which areas of the organization experience the greatest challenges? Which may represent areas of best practices that could be emulated? How could we better personalize onboarding content based on each employee’s role and team?

Prompts to analyze talent development and L&D

1. Skills gap analysis: I’m providing you with two documents: a list of strategic organizational priorities for the next 18 months and a skills analysis for key positions. Based on these reports, please identify areas of skills gaps where skills development is needed to meet long-term business development. Then, provide a list of possible upskilling and reskilling initiatives to close these gaps.

2. Learning and development: As we look at upskilling and reskilling our staff to take on new roles and responsibilities, we’re interested in understanding which training programs are most appropriate and likely to be most efficient for various teams. Please evaluate the effectiveness of past training programs, based on the outcomes provided, to identify the employees and departments that have shown the best results. Which learning formats—e.g., video, live, asynchronous, self-paced, externally provided, etc., have shown the best results? Which have shown the highest completion rates?

Prompts to analyze employee retention, DEI, and more

1. Employee retention: Senior leaders are concerned with turnover and feel we’ve seen an increase, especially in certain departments. We want to start by gathering information for our HR business unit leaders to help them identify root causes and strategies to improve retention. Please provide input on the specific factors causing employee turnover by division, with an indication of how these factors are experienced by division.

2. DEIB: What are the demographic trends across our organization over the past three years? Please provide a detailed breakdown of demographics, including age, gender, ethnicity, race, length of service, and level of the organization. What are the demographics of the employees who have been promoted over this time? Which areas have the greatest gender pay gaps? Can you determine what contributes to these pay gaps? 

3. Employee experience: Employee engagement is an outcome we've long been concerned about. But to build a case for senior leaders to invest in more activities and benefits to drive engagement, we need to quantify its bottom-line impact. For senior leaders, please prepare a report to indicate how employee engagement scores correlate with revenue growth over the past three years.  

Advanced analytics prompts

1. How engagement impacts turnover: We are interested in any correlations between employee engagement data and turnover rates based on divisions, departments, roles, and employee demographics. What aspects of engagement are most correlated with longevity/lower turnover? 

2. Work location and productivity: Senior leaders are contemplating a return-to-work (RTW) mandate. Based on productivity data, please indicate any variation in productivity between remote and on-site employees overall, by department and role, and by demographics. 

These are just a few examples of how genAI tools can help you gain immediate and useful insights into your workforce, helping you drive better, more data-informed decisions.

Visier’s generative AI digital assistant, Vee, can respond to prompts and provide answers drawn from your own people data in natural language. Best of all, with Vee, you can have confidence that your data will be kept private and secure with answers available only to those with the right level of permission—and only to those within your company. Your data will not be added to any public dataset.

Best practice tips for generating better answers from genAI

In addition to being as specific as possible with your original prompts, here are a couple of additional tips to help you get maximum value from your generative AI output: 

• After creating a prompt, ask: “Do you understand?” or “Do you have any questions for me?”

• Ask follow-up questions. The tool will retain the information you previously provided as well as its responses so you can ask it to add/change/reformat/refine its responses until it’s exactly what you need.

And a couple of caveats to be aware of when using generative AI tools:

• Be aware that some tools (like ChatGPT) are only trained on content up to September 2023, so if your information needs are more current, certain generative AI tools may not work well for those specific purposes.

• Users are finding that generative AI tools hallucinate. In short, they make up answers, providing information that isn’t exactly true. While some vendors claim that their products guard against hallucinations, it’s still important to be aware of this tendency and to exercise caution. Carefully review outputs to check for any potential inaccuracies.

• After generating an answer, always thoroughly check to ensure that anything you publish or share doesn’t contain personal information or proprietary data. 

• Finally, refine the writing to sound less robotic and more human and ensure that it adheres to any style guidelines established for your brand or company. 

While AI will never replace the “human” in “human resources,” as we hope you can see from the examples above, it certainly can help HR pros save time and amplify their impact in a number of ways. This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the potential of generative AI to streamline and inform your HR processes. 

More questions to ask AI

• Generative AI can transform and enhance your HR and people analytics processes. With accurate data and clear, concise questions, you can gain deeper data-driven insights into the most important aspects of your business. Here are 10 people analytics questions to ask genAI.

• On any given day CHROs have myriad questions they need answers to—fast. GAI tools like Vee can deliver rapid responses in real-time during the course of a leadership meeting, for instance, and then it will offer additional suggestions to drill down even deeper. Here are 10 real examples of answers from Vee.

• Generative AI helps line managers be effective leaders by giving them instant answers about their team and direct reports. Line managers can use GAI tools to get real-time insights on employee performance, collaboration, skills, and much more.

Generative AI prompts FAQ

1. How can AI prompts help in assessing employee retention risks?

AI prompts can be used in a number of ways to assess the risk of employee retention based on factors ranging from the length of service to specific employee demographics to the area of the company, to satisfaction levels, and more. For instance, Please analyze employee sentiment from the last three engagement surveys and predict potential retention risks by department and length of service.

2. How can generative AI help with drafting employee communication or policy documents?

GenAI is most often considered as a content creation tool and it excels for this use. Drafting employee communication and policy documents can be vastly simplified by using GenAI, whether you’re providing past documents to review and update or asking it to create fresh content based on specific prompts. For example: Draft an email for employees to inform them about updates to our remote work policy (attached), emphasizing the benefits they will experience because of the new policy.

3. How can I use AI prompts to streamline the recruitment process?

In recruitment, genAI can be used to automate candidate screening, schedule interviews, create personalized communications, and more. Try: Summarize the applications of the top 10 candidates for the marketing director position, highlighting the specific aspects of their application that set them apart.

4. What are the best prompts for improving employee performance management?

GenAI can be used to analyze employee and manager feedback, establish SMART goals based on performance management documents, or identify areas of opportunity for improvement. It can also create personalized feedback based on performance metrics and suggest individual development plans. For instance: Based on input from Employee X, and feedback from Employee X’s direct manager, direct reports, and 360-degree inputs, provide a list of areas where Employee X excels and where there are opportunities for improvement. Based on areas of opportunities for improvement, create some SMART goals.