4 Ways ChatGPT for HR Can Make You Smarter and Faster (+7 ChatGPT Prompts to Try)

AI has been shaping workplaces, affecting everything from generating job descriptions to selecting which applicants make it past the resume submission phase.

It’s also becoming a necessary job skill, with 90% of companies wanting to hire people with ChatGPT experience. Two-thirds of business leaders also believe these employees give companies a competitive edge. And that means HR professionals need to learn how to use it too.

From writing help to competitive analysis to connecting with and engaging employees, here’s how ChatGPT can enhance your day-to-day HR work.

What Is ChatGPT?

Created and owned by OpenAI, ChatGPT is a chat-based large language model, or LLM, an AI tool that processes, analyzes, and generates language. ChatGPT’s claim to fame is that it does this in a conversational, interactive way.

Because of its ability to process and learn from human input, ChatGPT has a number of capabilities that make it a great tool to use at work, including:

• Translating between two or more languages
• Learning or conversing in new languages
• Summarizing, analyzing, and composing text
• Researching facts and creating content from that knowledge
• Referencing content from earlier ChatGPT sessions
• Using follow-up prompts to better refine generated content

These very capabilities are the reason ChatGPT has enjoyed such a meteoric rise. Having surpassed one million users within five days of its launch and garnered 100 million users just two months later, ChatGPT is the fastest-growing consumer application in digital history.

4 Ways ChatGPT Makes HR Tasks Faster and Easier

From generating content to automating repetitive tasks to analyzing data and engaging employees, ChatGPT has the potential to help you make quick work of a lot of your daily HR tasks.

Writing Help

Automatically generating content from a detailed prompt is one of ChatGPT’s specialties, and it has many applications for HR professionals, including the following:

• Job descriptions: Share general information about qualifications and responsibilities and watch ChatGPT craft a detailed job description for job sites and recruiting events.
• Policies: Use common information found online or your own index of sample policies to automatically create detailed documents for your company.
• Announcements: Tell ChatGPT the “what,” “where,” and “why” and allow it to generate engaging language to announce events, policy changes, new hires, and more.
• Email Templates: ChatGPT can craft anything from candidate rejection letters to emails aimed at generating interest for a job opening.

Competitive Analysis & Industry Research

Collecting and analyzing data can be a time-consuming process. ChatGPT can not only pull data from various sources, but it can synthesize it and communicate insight as well.

• Time Off Policies: Make sure your vacation, personal, and sick time policies are in line with industry standards.
• Compensation Planning: Gather and analyze data on average salaries to ensure your offers are the best in the business.
• Laws Around HR Challenges: Ask ChatGPT for the most updated information on regulatory compliance issues such as firing and family leave.
• Create Pros and Cons Lists: Make informed, data-driven decisions with the help of AI-generated analysis.

However, it's critical to note that ChatGPT users should always fact check the platform's claims with official sources. This is especially important for topics related to labor laws and legal compliance.

Employee Engagement

Let ChatGPT help you build solid relationships with employees and ensure they have what they need to thrive.

• Build Surveys: Ensure that employees feel heard by crafting well-written surveys according to trending topics or identified employee concerns.
• Create Employee Development Plans: Pull information from your own databases to find training gaps and ensure employees are educated on the latest best practices.

Data Analysis

From employee satisfaction to performance tracking, ChatGPT can help you make more strategic decisions based on concrete data.

• Trends in eNPS Results: Analyze employee Net Promoter Scores to determine where your organization can improve and how you can boost morale.
• Performance Metrics: Analyze an employee’s strengths and weaknesses, set and track KPIs, and generate actionable steps for coaching and improvement.

7 ChatGPT Prompts to Try

ChatGPT can help HR professionals save time and boost productivity by automatically generating content, analyzing data, and ensuring employees are happy, engaged, and productive.

However, the quality of ChatGPT’s output relies heavily on the prompts you give it. Here’s a list of seven prompts HR professionals can try out to start automating processes today:

• Write a rejection letter for a candidate. Let them know we’ll keep their resume on file if they choose to apply in the future.
• Summarize the responses to the second survey question and show the most common issues employees mention.
• Provide five of the top metrics for measuring performance for a product development specialist.
• I am interviewing a candidate for a business consultant role. Draft 10 interview questions and one interview exercise for them to complete.
• Suggest three influential pieces of research all HR professionals should read, and summarize four critical points for each.
• Suggest five ways a sales employee can gain competency in setting sales appointments.
• Write 10 engaging email subject lines for a new product announcement.

What Are ChatGPT’s Limitations?

While ChatGPT can help you work faster, it can't replace your human brain or face-to-face interactions with your employees.

Here are a few ChatGPT examples of the software’s limitations in the workplace.

No Deep Knowledge of Your Organization

ChatGPT is trained using large amounts of public data and any private data you feed it. It doesn’t understand the nuances or culture of your organization, so you’ll still have to review outputs for cultural accuracy and corporate voice.

Lacks Context About Specific Employees

In order to protect sensitive employee data, you should never use it in public AI tools like ChatGPT. But that means there’s no way for ChatGPT to know anything about your specific employees, such as a recent death in Adam’s family being the cause of his disengagement or Katie’s long-term career change goal shaping her career development plan.

Can’t Offer a Shoulder to Cry On

ChatGPT may use natural language processing, but it isn’t human and it’s incapable of showing emotion. It’s best to handle sensitive employee situations without it.

Biased

ChatGPT picks up on the biases in the public texts it’s trained by. Significant evidence has shown that ChatGPT sometimes assumes employee gender based on role, fails to accurately identify people of color, and extends lower credit limits to women.

There are currently very few controls for identifying and eliminating bias in AI tools like ChatGPT, so take care when using them.

Fortunately, AI researchers are actively working to improve AI safety. For example, New York City recently enacted a law that requires employers and employment agencies to complete a bias audit and provide required notices—otherwise, automated employment decision tools are prohibited.

Helping Your Employees Use ChatGPT Responsibly

As the HR manager, you have a responsibility to use this new technology wisely and protect your employees’ personal information. It’s also your job to set the tone for how employees use ChatGPT and other large language models in the workplace.

Educate your employees on the benefits and risks, especially with regard to how ChatGPT stores information. For example, if an individual at your company poses a question or feeds a prompt to the ChatGPT software, it may store that data and later use it to refine answers and update its language model.

While this trains ChatGPT to become more accurate over time, it also means the information is available to OpenAI, which has come under fire for its data privacy practices.

To mitigate risks, consider crafting an AI usage policy for your workplace that addresses the specifics of what employees can and can’t use to prompt ChatGPT. This helps protect data and ensure your company and employees remain safe.

There are also opt-outs available to ensure that ChatGPT (and other platforms) don't train on your data. This is typically the default for API and enterprise versions of popular tools—and is one of the key reasons businesses choose to enroll in paid or upgraded plans, rather than allowing individual employees to use free versions of the tools.