Copilot for HR: Two Tasks You Can Stop Doing by Hand
Every HR person I have taught has the same two piles. One is a folder of job descriptions written by eleven different hiring managers over nine years, no two of them in the same format. The other is a spreadsheet of open-ended survey or exit-interview comments that somebody upstairs wants “themes” from by Friday. Both piles usually get done by hand, at night, because there was never a quiet hour during the day.
That is exactly where Copilot for HR earns its license fee. Not the flashy demo stuff. The two grinding tasks above, which are mostly reading and reformatting — and reading and reformatting is the one thing these tools are genuinely good at.
Here is how I would do each one. Ten minutes apiece, no class required.
Copilot for HR, Tip 1: Rewrite Any Job Description Into Your House Format
Open the old job description in Word. On the Home tab, at the far right, click the Copilot button to open the chat pane on the right side of the document. Then type this:
Rewrite this job description using these five headings in this order: Position Summary, Key Responsibilities, Required Qualifications, Preferred Qualifications, Physical Requirements. Keep every duty that appears in the original and do not add any new ones. Under Key Responsibilities use bullet points, each starting with a present-tense action verb. At the end, list separately anything that reads like a requirement but is not measurable.
About twenty seconds later you have the whole thing in your standard structure. But the part I actually care about is that last list. It is where “must be able to work in a fast-paced environment” and “professional demeanor” show up — the vague phrases that make a job description hard to hire against and, in a few states, hard to defend. Copilot will pull them out and hand them to you as a punch list. Doing that manually across forty descriptions is a week of work.
The gotcha: if a section of the original is thin, Copilot will quietly invent duties to fill it out. That is why the prompt says “do not add any new ones,” and it is why you still read the output against the original before it goes anywhere near a posting. Also remember that Copilot in Word only sees the document that is open. If the description is sitting in an email or a PDF, paste it into a Word document first or Copilot will have nothing to work from.
Turn 400 Survey Comments Into Themes Without Reading All 400
This one runs in the Copilot chat pane at copilot.microsoft.com when you are signed in with your work account, or in ChatGPT if that is what your company has licensed. Copy the comment column out of Excel, paste it in, and ask:
Below are anonymous employee comments. Group them into no more than 8 themes. For each theme give me a short label, the number of comments in it, and three word-for-word quotes. Do not paraphrase the quotes. Then list separately any comment that does not fit into a theme.
Two things make this better than skimming the column yourself. The verbatim quotes mean you can put the summary in front of leadership and back every theme up with the actual words people used, which is the difference between a finding and an opinion. And the leftover pile at the end is where the one comment that genuinely needs attention this week tends to hide — the outlier that gets lost when you are averaging everything in your head.
The gotcha: strip identifying details before you paste. Names, employee IDs, and even a department name if the department is small enough that one comment points at one person. Use your organization’s work account so you are covered by Microsoft 365 commercial data protection rather than typing employee feedback into a personal consumer chatbot. And do not take the counts on faith — open two of the themes and spot-check that the comments assigned to them actually belong there. These tools are good at grouping and mediocre at arithmetic.
Plenty more on the calendar
If you want to watch both of these done live, with time to ask about your own situation, I am running ChatGPT and CoPilot for HR on Tuesday, September 8 at 1:00 PM Eastern. We go through job descriptions, screening summaries, policy drafting, offer and rejection correspondence, and the survey-comment workflow above, using real HR documents rather than tidy sample files.
The full current schedule lives on the front page of PCWebinars.com, and new dates go up there as they are confirmed. Register for this one, or have a look through the rest and pick whichever session lines up with the thing that is eating your week.
About your trainer
I’m Tom Fragale. I have been a computer trainer and consultant for more than 30 years, and I have taught well over 30,000 people how to get more out of the software they already own — Excel, Access, Power BI, Word, Outlook, and now the AI tools that sit on top of all of it: Claude, ChatGPT, and Microsoft Copilot. My background is applied, not theoretical. Alongside the teaching I build real databases and reporting systems for clients in Excel, Access, and Power BI, so the examples I use in class are the problems I ran into last week, not textbook exercises. I also publish free tutorials on YouTube and longer courses online.
You can find the full schedule, the recorded courses, and the free material at PCWebinars.com.
