Copilot for HR: Two Ways to Cut the Policy Paperwork

Every HR person I have ever trained has the same folder. It is called “Policies” or “Templates,” and it holds last year’s version of a document that is about to become this year’s version. The attendance policy. The PTO policy. The job posting you ran back in March. When people ask me whether Copilot for HR is worth the license, that folder is where I point, because the work sitting in it is almost never writing from scratch. It is rewriting, carefully, without breaking the parts legal already signed off on.

That is exactly the job these tools are good at, and it is the job most people never hand to them. Instead they open a blank chat window, type “write me an attendance policy,” get back something generic that mentions a company which does not exist, and decide AI is not ready for HR work yet. The tool was not the problem. Starting from nothing instead of starting from the document you already have was the problem.

Here are two things I demonstrate in class that people go back to their desks and use the same afternoon. Neither one takes more than ten minutes to try.

Copilot for HR, Tip One: Rewrite This Year’s Policy From Last Year’s File

Open Word, start a blank document, and the Draft with Copilot box should be sitting right at the top of the empty page. If it is not there, go to the Home tab, click Copilot, then Draft with Copilot.

Here is the part almost everyone misses. Inside that box, type a forward slash. Copilot drops down a list of your recent files, and whichever one you pick becomes the source material for the draft. Now you are not asking it to invent a policy. You are asking it to revise yours.

Try wording like this:

/Attendance Policy 2025.docx Rewrite this policy for 2026. Keep the same section order, the same headings, and the same defined terms. Change the carryover limit from 40 hours to 80 hours. Add one short paragraph under Section 3 covering employees who work remotely. Do not add any new sections and do not change anything else.

Copilot writes the full draft straight into the document and offers you Keep it, Regenerate, or the trash icon. Keep it, then go to Review > Compare, put the original on one side and the new draft on the other, and Word marks every single change in the margin. That takes about ninety seconds, and it is the step that makes this safe to use on a policy that real people are going to be held to.

The gotcha: the forward-slash file picker only sees files stored in OneDrive or SharePoint. If last year’s policy is sitting on your C: drive or on a network share, it will not show up in that list at all. Save a copy to OneDrive first. And be specific about structure in the prompt. If you do not say “keep the same section order and headings,” Copilot will cheerfully reorganize the document and quietly fold two sections into one.

Tip Two: Turn a Tired Job Description Into a Posting and a Phone Screen

This one I usually demonstrate in ChatGPT, though Copilot handles it the same way. Take the job description you used the last time you filled the role, paste it in, and ask for the two things you actually need rather than the one thing you were going to ask for.

Below is the job description we used the last time we filled this role. Rewrite it as a job posting for a hybrid position. Give me: a two-sentence summary of the role, six bullet responsibilities written as outcomes rather than duties, required and preferred qualifications as two separate lists, and five phone-screen questions with a note on what a strong answer sounds like. Do not invent any salary, benefit, location, or requirement that is not in the text I pasted.

Two phrases are doing the heavy lifting there. “Outcomes rather than duties” turns a line like “maintain the HRIS” into “keep employee records accurate enough that payroll runs without manual corrections,” which is both a better advertisement and a far better interview question. And “do not invent” is the single most useful instruction in HR prompting. Without it, these tools will confidently hand you a benefits paragraph describing a 401(k) match you do not actually offer.

The gotcha: strip the input before you paste it. No candidate names, no individual salaries, no employee ID numbers, nothing lifted out of a personnel file. And check which tool you are permitted to use. Plenty of companies allow the licensed Microsoft 365 Copilot, which keeps your data inside your own tenant, but prohibit the free public chatbots for anything work-related. That is a conversation to have with IT before you paste, not after.

Plenty more on the calendar

If you want to watch both of these done live, with the menus up on screen and your own questions answered as we go, I am running CoPilot and ChatGPT for HR Professionals on Thursday, October 8. We cover policy and document drafting, writing and screening for open roles, summarizing long email threads and meeting notes, and where each of the two tools is the better choice for a given task.

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 if HR is your world, or browse the others while you are there. There are sessions on Excel, Power BI, Word, Outlook, Claude, ChatGPT and Copilot running most weeks.

About your trainer

I’m Tom Fragale. I’ve been a computer trainer and consultant for more than 30 years, and I’ve 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, including 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.

You can find the full schedule, the recordings, and all the ways to reach me over at PCWebinars.com.