ChatGPT for HR: Interview Kits and Instant Policy Answers
Ask an HR person what actually eats their week and you get the same two answers. The first is hiring. A manager forwards a job description on Monday, wants a posting by Thursday, and also expects interview questions that are not the same five everyone has been asking since 2009. The second is the drip: how much PTO carries over, does bereavement leave cover a grandparent, what is the mileage rate this year. Each takes four minutes. Forty a week is most of a day.
Neither task is hard. Both are slow, and both land on top of the work you were actually hired to do. That is exactly where ChatGPT for HR earns its keep — not in the demos where somebody has it write a limerick about payroll, but in the two grinding jobs below.
One of these is a job for ChatGPT. The other is a job for Copilot, because Copilot can see your files and ChatGPT cannot. Knowing which is which is most of the skill.
ChatGPT for HR, Tip 1: Turn One Job Description Into a Complete Interview Kit
Most interview questions get written in the ten minutes before the interview. That is why two interviewers score the same candidate three points apart and nobody can explain afterward what the difference was.
Paste the job description into ChatGPT and ask for the whole kit at once. Wording matters, so use something close to this:
You are helping me build a structured interview. Below is a job description. For each of the top six requirements, write one behavioral question beginning with "Tell me about a time," plus two follow-up probes. Then give me a 1-5 scoring rubric for each question that describes, in one sentence each, what a 1 answer, a 3 answer, and a 5 answer actually sounds like. Do not invent requirements that are not in the description.
What comes back is six questions, twelve probes, and a scorecard — the thing that makes two interviewers agree. The rubric is the part people skip and the part that does the work.
Then run one follow-up prompt on the result:
Rewrite these at an eighth-grade reading level, and flag any question that could be read as asking about age, family status, health, disability, or national origin.
The gotcha: that flag step catches most of the obvious trouble, but it is a first pass, not a compliance review. A question like “how do you manage deadlines when things are busy at home?” sails right through and should not. A human still reads the list before it goes to a hiring manager. And keep candidate names, addresses and phone numbers out of a consumer ChatGPT account entirely — the job description is fine, the applicant’s personal details are not.
Tip 2: Let Copilot Answer Handbook Questions From the Actual Handbook
The reason those forty questions a week take four minutes each is not that the answer is complicated. It is that you open the handbook, scroll, find the section, and retype it in plain English. Copilot does that part, and unlike ChatGPT it can read the document sitting on your OneDrive.
Open the employee handbook in Word and use the Copilot button on the Home tab, or in Microsoft 365 Copilot chat type / and start typing the filename to attach it. Then ask the question the way an employee asked it:
What does this document say about carryover of unused PTO? Quote the exact sentences and give me the section heading they came from.
Asking for the quote and the section is the whole trick. You get an answer you can paste into an email and a citation you can check in ten seconds.
Once that works, build the FAQ you have been meaning to write for two years:
Using only this document, write a plain-English FAQ covering the 15 questions employees most often ask about leave and time off. After each answer, put the section number it came from. If this document does not answer a question, write "not covered" instead of guessing.
The gotcha: that last sentence is not optional. Without it, Copilot fills the gaps from general knowledge, and general knowledge about leave is mostly California — which is a genuinely bad thing to tell an employee in Ohio. Also, it only reads the file you point it at. If your real policy lives across a handbook, an intranet page and a 2019 memo, Copilot answers confidently from the one document it can see — and it has no idea your handbook was superseded in March.
Plenty more on the calendar
If you want to watch both of these built live, with the prompts on screen and time to ask about your own handbook, I am running ChatGPT and CoPilot for HR on Tuesday, September 8 at 1:00 PM Eastern. It covers the interview kit, the handbook Q&A, drafting and softening difficult employee communications, and summarizing open-ended survey comments.
The full current schedule is on the front page of PCWebinars.com, with new dates going up as they are confirmed. Register for this one, or browse the rest and find the session that matches the thing slowing you down this month.
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 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.
Come see the full list of upcoming live sessions and recorded courses at PCWebinars.com.
