HR Prompts: Job Postings, Interviews, and Replies to Candidates

You paste six lines of job description into a chatbot and ask for a job posting. You get back "Join a dynamic and passionate team within a fast-growing company," followed by a list of qualities that would suit any job at any company. No serious candidate will know whether the job is right for them.

AI isn't short on talent for writing. It's short on material: you told it nothing about the typical day, the team, what hurts in the job. In HR, the material is in-house anyway, in the manager's head and in conversations with the person who held the job before. The prompts below are for drawing it out and putting it into shape.

Before you paste anything

A résumé contains personal data, often more than is necessary: address, age, family situation, photo. Don't send it into a tool whose terms of use you don't know, and check what your company allows. Our article on data privacy details the settings to look at. For the exercises below, you need no identifying data.

Another point: the law forbids basing a hiring decision on certain criteria, such as origin, sex, age, family situation, or health status. An AI picks up writing habits that contain these biases, for example postings that ask for a "young" or "highly flexible" candidate, which can exclude without saying so. For a specific case, ask your legal department or an employment lawyer.

Write a posting that describes the real job

Take the manager of a bike shop in Nantes who is looking for a mechanic. She knows the workshop is noisy in season, that Saturdays are mandatory, and that the job includes greeting customers. If she doesn't say so, she'll get applications that won't last three months.

You're helping me write a job posting for [COMPANY], [ONE-LINE DESCRIPTION: INDUSTRY, CITY, SIZE].

The job: [TITLE], on a [TYPE OF CONTRACT] contract, [WORKING HOURS].
A typical day: [WHAT THE PERSON ACTUALLY DOES, IN ORDER].
The real constraints: [HOURS, WEEKENDS, TRAVEL, NOISE, LIFTING...].
What they need to be able to do from the first month: [SHORT LIST].
What can be learned on the job: [SHORT LIST].
Compensation: [RANGE OR AMOUNT, BENEFITS].

Write the posting in four blocks: the company in two sentences, the responsibilities, the profile sought, the conditions. Address the reader directly as "you" and use action verbs. State the constraints without softening them.
Don't use the phrases "dynamic team," "passionate," or "fast-growing," and don't add any information that is absent from what I gave you.
Write the title and the criteria neutrally: no mention of age, sex, or personal situation, and clearly distinguish what is essential from what is desirable.

Then reread, looking for a detail that isn't in your notes. If the AI slipped one in, delete it. For the prompt to work, the list of constraints matters more than everything else: giving context is precisely that.

Prepare an identical interview guide for everyone

Asking the same questions in the same order makes candidates comparable, and avoids hiring the person with whom the conversation was most pleasant. AI quickly proposes a first guide, which you adapt.

I'm hiring a [TITLE] at a [TYPE OF COMPANY]. The three decisive skills for this job are: [SKILL 1], [SKILL 2], [SKILL 3].

Prepare a 45-minute interview guide:
- for each skill, two questions based on real situations ("Tell me about a time when...") and one concrete scenario drawn from the job
- for each question, what a good answer contains and what should raise a flag, in observable behaviors
- a scoring scale from 1 to 4, described for each level
- one motivation question about the job itself, not about private life

Ask no questions about family, age, origin, health, plans for pregnancy, or opinions. Add a short instruction to take factual notes during the interview and to score afterward, not during.

A guide doesn't replace your judgment. It forces it to rest on what the candidate said, rather than on an impression. If you want to see how this kind of bias slips into the tool's own answers, read the article on AI bias.

Replying to candidates, including the ones you don't hire

Many candidates never get an answer, and that's what they remember about your company. A short, honest message takes two minutes with a good prompt.

Write a rejection reply to a candidate, in 90 words maximum, warm but restrained tone.

Position: [TITLE]. Stage reached: [RÉSUMÉ / PHONE INTERVIEW / FINAL INTERVIEW].
Real reason, which I want to word honestly: [E.G. A PROFILE CLOSER TO OUR NEED IN E-BIKE MAINTENANCE].
One positive point about their application: [SPECIFIC FACT].
Possible follow-up: [KEEPING THEIR RÉSUMÉ YES/NO, TIMEFRAME].

No stock phrase like "despite your impressive background." No promise I won't keep. Mention no personal data.

Keep the freedom to edit the message: a candidate who spent three hours at your place deserves a few words of your own. For more general message templates, also look at the prompts for professional emails.

What you don't hand to AI

Screening applications and evaluating employees are uses of their own. The GDPR governs decisions made solely by automated processing, and the European AI regulation places some recruitment tools among high-risk systems, with specific obligations. The EU AI Act Explained Simply takes stock of what this changes for an employer. Until you've checked the framework with your lawyer or your data protection officer, keep the decision human: AI writes, prepares, rephrases, and you're the one who chooses.

To start this week

Take the last posting your company published. Underline every sentence a competitor could repeat word for word, then rewrite the posting with the first prompt, filling in the "real constraints" section without a filter. Send both versions to an employee in that role and ask which one matches their daily life.