During our recent '2-Minute Talks: AI in HR Workflows' event, one question lit up the chat: "Can we get a prompt library based on this webinar?"

You asked – we delivered. This library is packed with practical AI prompts directly from and inspired by the insights shared during the event. Each section includes copy-and-paste-ready examples designed to help you save time, reduce risk, and streamline your HR workflows.

These prompts work across tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. Just remember: clarity and context matter, and results may vary slightly by tool – so feel free to experiment. Swap out anything in {curly braces}, and you’re ready to go.

⚠️ Before You Prompt: Protect Employee Privacy

Before using any prompts in this library, remove sensitive employee data – like names, emails, comp details, or health info – and use placeholders instead (e.g. {Employee Name}). AI is powerful, but it must be used responsibly to maintain trust and meet privacy standards.

If you’re using ChartHop AI, you don’t have to worry about exposing the wrong data. With Access Guard, every query follows existing permissions, so people only see what they’re allowed to. Your org’s data stays private, secure, and never used to train external models. 

Because when it comes to people data, safety isn’t optional.

The 4-Part Prompt Structure for HR Leaders

Not all prompts are created equal, when you’re clear and specific, AI tools are far more likely to give you useful, relevant results.

When it comes to crafting your own prompts for AI, we recommend following this four-part prompt structure, which addresses the role you want AI to embody to answer the prompt, and the context, objective, and constraints of your query, to get the best results.

1. Role – Who should the AI act like?
   
   This sets the tone, assumptions, and lens for analysis.
   
   “Act like a DEI advocate…”
   
   “You are a VP of People reviewing a policy…”
   
   “You are an experienced HRBP…”
   
   
2. Context – What information does it need?
   
   Describe the situation briefly: the company, the goal, or the challenge.
   
   “You’re reviewing feedback from our Q2 engagement survey at a 300-person SaaS company.”
   
   “We’re rolling out a new performance review cycle with a 4-point rating scale.”
   
   “Supporting an employee who is having performance issues due to tardiness and lack of follow through”
   
   
3. Objective – What do you want it to do?
   
   Be clear: summarize, critique, compare, rewrite, generate ideas, etc.
   
   “Flag anything that might confuse employees.”
   
   “Draft a summary of key takeaways for execs.”
   
   “Create a-six week performance improvement plan.”
   
   

Constraints – How should the output be delivered?

Define tone, format, length, or any other limits. “Bullet points, under 150 words.” “Use plain language, like you’d write in Slack.”“In a single page with clear objectives”

Before vs. After

Now that you’ve seen the four key parts of a strong AI prompt – Role, Context, Objective, and Constraints – here’s what it looks like in action.

Before (vague):

“Review this HR policy and give feedback.”

After (structured):

“Act like a frontline manager. You just received this draft hybrid work policy. What questions or concerns would your team raise? Summarize your feedback in a bulleted list, under 100 words.”

48 AI Prompts for HR and People Ops

Use AI to Summarize and Synthesize People Data

 “AI isn't here to replace our instincts. It's here to cut through the noise so we can spend less time digging through that data and more time being human with our people,” says Stephanie Smith, Chief People Officer at Tagboard.

“This is where AI, in my opinion, earns its keep. Not as a robot strategist that's going to come take all of our jobs, but as a clarity engine.” Her prompt helps cut down on hours of time spent digging through employee survey feedback: 

• I ask ChatGPT to summarize the top three to five recurring themes from {insert your topic}, group it by topic, note any change from last quarter and include a quote to represent each.

Here are # more prompts to summarize and synthesize people data: 

• Act as a VP of People looking to do an engagement survey read out to their organization. Summarize the key themes in this survey feedback: {insert text or CSV}
  
  • What’s working, what’s not, and what should we do next?
  • Turn this raw engagement data into a brief narrative suitable for an all-hands presentation. Highlight key takeaways in plain language.
  • Create a SWOT-style summary of the results: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats based on employee sentiment.
  • Write an FAQ that answers the 5 most likely questions employees will have after reading the survey summary
  • Predict how results might change in the next survey based on the trends shown here. What’s at risk if no action is taken?
• Act as a People Ops leader preparing a report for your leadership team. Summarize the key themes from these exit interview notes and draft a single-slide takeaway. Use concise, plain language and bullet points.
  
  • What are 3 actionable improvements we should implement based on this data? Limit to 1 sentence per item.
• Act as a People Data Analyst. Analyze this attrition data and identify 3 meaningful patterns that require deeper investigation. Output as a bulleted list under 100 words.

Comparing and Evaluating HR Tools 

“Comparing HR tech vendors used to mean endless spreadsheets for us, biased demos and hoping the references are real. But the truth? Most platforms don't fail on features, they fail on experience because vendor claims rarely match post launch reality,” says Sandhiya Thiruvengadam, SR. HRBP at Apexon. 

“We have all been there and that's exactly where AI comes in for us. Not as a feature you're buying, but as a tool to validate the ones you are.” Sandhiya’s advice is to ask two kinds of questions, one to AI and one to the vendor you’re evaluating: 

• Ask AI any common complaints about the hidden cost.
• Then go back and ask the vendor, “What's your transparent pricing model and what triggers additional charges?” 

Here are # more prompts to help you compare and evaluate HR tools:  

• Act like a Procurement Manager evaluating vendors. Compare {Vendor A} and {Vendor B} across implementation, support, and cost. Create a side-by-side summary table.
• Act like an HR leader presenting to the CFO. What are the risks and benefits of moving from annual to quarterly performance reviews? Present in two columns.
• Act like a Change Management lead. Write a 1-paragraph summary of the tradeoffs between keeping {Existing Tool} and switching to {New Tool}, focusing on stakeholder priorities.
• Act like an IT and Security stakeholder preparing for an {product} vendor demo. List the top 5 questions you’d ask about security, permissions, and integrations.
• Act like a Procurement Analyst reviewing public vendor feedback. Based on the G2 reviews below, write a brief summary of strengths and risks of {Vendor A}. Use bullets.

Draft Onboarding Tasks and Comms 

‍“When AI gets the opportunity to handle all the busy work of employee onboarding you free up the time and the energy for what really matters,” says Sarika Lamont, VP of People and Culture at Vidyard. 

Sarika explains that AI can be used to personalize the content that's being shared with a new hire, based on their experience. Use prompts to help AI generate and deliver tailored onboarding plans or messages based off of a “whole host of different criteria.”

• Act like an experienced HR onboarding specialist. A new employee is joining {your company} as a {Job Title}. Create a personalized 30-day onboarding plan that covers key training, team introductions, and milestone check-ins. Use clear, friendly language and format the plan as a simple checklist.
  
  • To truly personalize the plan, you could provide AI with resume highlights and skills, key tasks, team context, and training resources available for the employee. 
• Act like a People Ops coordinator onboarding a new {Job Title}. Draft a 30-day onboarding checklist that includes week-by-week tasks for IT, manager, and HR.
• Act like a hiring manager writing a welcome email to their new report. Draft an email that reflects our values of {company value} and {company value}. Keep it warm and under 200 words.
• Act like a People Ops coordinator. Generate  Slack-based onboarding prompts and reminders to a new hire, IT, HR, and the hiring manager. Create a schedule across a new hire’s first 2 weeks at the organization.

Pressure-Test Your Communications

“AI is going to be like a blind spot detector for HR. It's going to help catch what you might miss on your own. Not just clarity issues or tone missteps, but some of the deeper stuff too,” says Stephanie Shuler, Chief People Officer of LifeLabs Learning. 

“This is becoming increasingly important because with stakeholder scrutiny high and employer trust shaky, your HR initiatives need more than just good intentions. They have to resonate.” Stephanie’s guidance is to use AI like your “rehearsal space” for pressure testing communications and strategies. 

Stephanie’s pressure-testing prompts include: 

• Take the perspective of a high performing employee. What in this feels confusing, frustrating or demotivating?
• Act like a frontline manager who has to explain this to their team. What questions or pushback might they anticipate? What's the bottom line for their operational goals?
• Ask AI to imagine you're a board member or an investor reviewing this change. What would you want to see clarified, and what additional data would you want to explore?
  
  • Flip it. Which stakeholders in the organization might be aligned with this shift? Why? If this were to land poorly, what might be the front-page headline? And where are we unintentionally quelling risk-taking or innovation?

• Here's a summary of a new career progression model along with bulleted goals, philosophy, and issues we want to solve. Based on this sample, representative employee feedback, and sentiments, where are we likely to see the most resistance and why? What is most likely to catch us off guard?
• If you're in a paid version or a more confidential, contained version with your information, here's another example: take the following Q&A transcripts from our leadership calls pertaining to the rollout of our new performance management system. Details and goals are attached in a document—name the document. Which individuals and teams are asking the most forward-thinking questions? Which individuals and teams might be the best champions? And what language and talking points might we give them to effectively gain support?

Here are # more prompts to help you pressure test comms and strategy:  

• Act like a frontline manager. You’ve been given {this} new policy to explain to your team. What questions or pushback might your team raise? List 3-5 items.
  
  • What’s the operational impact of this policy? Summarize how it affects your team’s day-to-day goals.
• Act like a People leader writing comms support for managers. Summarize the rationale behind this policy change into 2-3 talking points they can use in team meetings.
  
  • Take the perspective of a high-performing employee. What in this policy or announcement feels unclear, frustrating, or demotivating?
  • Same perspective: Rewrite the policy or announcement so it better resonates with engaged, high-performing employees. Use a respectful but honest tone.
• Act like a board member reviewing {this} proposed compensation structure plan. What key areas would you want clarified before approving the rollout?
  
  • What supporting data or analysis would you request before making a decision?
• Act like a Chief of Staff preparing a stakeholder analysis for a shift to a new performance review process. Identify which department leads are likely to support the change, who might resist it, and why. Provide a short rationale for each.
• Act like a DEI and innovation advocate. Where might this policy or comms unintentionally stifle risk-taking, innovation, or inclusion?

• Act like an Internal Comms specialist. Rewrite this announcement in plain language, using 150 words or fewer.
• Act like a curious employee reading this new policy. What questions would you ask HR before fully understanding or accepting it?
• Act like a skeptical executive reviewing a headcount budget proposal. What are the weak spots or ROI concerns with this program?
• Act like a new hire on Day 1. What parts of this communication are likely to be confusing, irrelevant, or overwhelming?
• Act like a DEI advisor. What groups or individuals might feel excluded, unseen, or negatively impacted by this message or policy?
• Act like an Internal Comms lead. Rewrite this message 3 ways: for Slack, for an all-hands slide, and for a 1:1 manager conversation.
• Act like a brand manager. What tone is this communication written in? Is it clear, inclusive, and aligned with our culture?
• Act like an HRBP. How might this message be received differently by new hires, frontline employees, and senior leaders?
• Act like a clarity coach. Highlight jargon, buzzwords, or vague language in this draft. Suggest plain language replacements.
• Act like a storyteller. Suggest a metaphor or analogy to complement {this announcement} that would make this concept easier for employees to understand and relate to.
• Act like a skeptical employee. Predict how this message might land with someone who doubts leadership’s intent or transparency.

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Additional Tips & Tricks for Using AI for HR

Beyond just sharing great prompts, our 2-Minute Talks panelists offered real-world tips to help HR and People teams get more out of AI.

These takeaways go beyond the prompt box–covering mindset shifts, testing strategies, and best practices that boost confidence and impact. Whether you’re just starting out or looking to refine your approach, these insights can help you use AI more effectively day-to-day.

Ask the model to show its work

When your AI model isn’t formatting data the way you need, try asking: “How did you get from point A to point B?” 

• When Payal was working with AI to summarize data from 360 reviews as well as format it, she was running into issues with formatting. She would input what she wanted verbatim but it would hallucinate and make things up or summarize the verbatim.
• To solve this, she asked AI a few times to explain how it got from point A to point B. This prompt encourages the model to explain the logic and rules it’s using to provide your outputs. 
• Once you understand its approach, you can rewrite the rules to better suit your needs. You can even ask it to update its memory (if applicable) and get faster, more accurate results moving forward.

Create an AI Slack channel to help employees use AI safely 

• To help level the field for AI-usage within your company, try starting an AI discussion channel in Slack. 
• At Vidyard, their “A Aye Aye Captain” channel is a place for anyone in the company to share prompts and discuss how they’re working with AI. 
• “Everyone just thinks everybody else is so much further ahead in how they use AI. Then you're realizing, we're all learning,” says Sarika. The channel is now one of their most popular and she says it’s creating more cross-functional connections in a remote-first organization.  

How to start with prompts and move towards strategy 

Explore the art of prompting to enable an AI-empowered talent strategy by following these four steps from Taylor Bradley, VP of Talent Strategy & Success at Turing: 

1. Begin with daily prompting. Invite your team to regularly use enterprise LLMs in their day-to-day work as a hands-on way for them to experiment with AI. “Some of our most valuable—and honestly unexpected—use cases began with nothing more than a single-line prompt,” says Taylor.  
2. Build a prompt library. “This helps your team understand what good prompting looks like and learn from each other’s use of LLMs in their individual workflows,” explains Taylor. “Our library covers everything from HRBP prompting to talent development. What starts as individual discovery evolves into team ingenuity.”
3. Create custom GPTs. Once you or your team are confident with prompt writing, you can create custom GPTs without the need to code. This makes it easy to quickly build proof-of-concept tools that enhance workflows or automate routine tasks. Taylor advises that this step, “This isn’t about promise—it’s about proof: tangible results you can take to your executive leadership team to ask for investment and scale the impact of AI.”
4. Move from prototypes to production. To round out your strategy, “Choose, build, or buy AI features or products backed by the ROI you've already established,” says Taylor. “From there, embed AI into workflows, freeing up your team to focus on higher-value work.”  

Try a Prompt Sprint Challenge

A sprint challenge focuses on two goals: solving actual problems with AI and learning the importance of how you communicate with AI (known as prompt engineering), says Nelson Spencer, CEO & Founder of efora.io. 

Here’s Nelson’s play-by-play on how it works: 

1. Lay the foundation for psychological safety. Some employees might feel like this is a fun and exciting exercise, but others may find it nerve-wracking and scary. “Folks need to feel safe getting it wrong. They need to feel safe asking questions and then certainly just learning out loud,” says Nelson. 
2. Split into small teams and assign a real work task. “For example, in talent acquisition, that could be something like turning your notes from a hiring manager into an actual job description.” Before you start, set two constraints: a time limit (15-20 minutes is good) and a limit to the number of prompts they have to complete the task (5-7 is good). 
3. Set the timer and dive in! “You will quickly see it creates a healthy tension between planning and executing,” says Nelson. 
4. When time is up, reflect. “Share what worked, what didn't, and what surprised you during this exercise,” advises Nelson. Document this step as a way to inform your guidelines on how you expect people to work with AI. 

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Run Queries Directly in Ask ChartHop, Safer & Quicker

While tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are excellent for building prompt fluency and experimentation, they aren’t designed to manage sensitive employee data in a secure, compliant way. That’s why we created Ask ChartHop – your AI copilot built specifically for People teams.

✅ Safer by design: With Access Guard, Ask ChartHop respects existing permissions, so employees only see what they’re allowed to. Sensitive data stays protected, even in AI queries.

✅ Private by default: Your data is never used to train AI models. Ask ChartHop keeps your organization’s data siloed, secure, and private.

✅ Org-specific answers: Unlike generic tools, Ask ChartHop pulls from your org chart, comp plans, performance reviews, and more. No uploading or exporting required.

Whether you’re looking to understand attrition trends, prep for performance reviews, or surface insights for execs – Ask ChartHop gives you fast, accurate answers directly from your people data.

Learn more about ChartHop AI