Build your own Claude course for HR

Start with the policy that contradicts itself

Somewhere in your handbook a clause appears twice, in two versions that don't agree. You don't know where. You know it's there, because the hybrid-work agreement went into the handbook with its own leave rule and nobody went back to the older leave policy already in it. Hand that document over first, not because it's impressive but because the exercise has an answer you can check. Either there's a contradiction you can point at, or there isn't. Most AI-for-HR demos open with a job post, which is the one task where nothing tells you whether you learned anything.

What you practice on when the files are confidential

CVs, salary bands, medical notes and personnel files don't go into a tool your organization hasn't approved. The handbook holds no employee data, so you can start on it without waiting for anyone to approve employee files. For everything else, build a practice file: a headcount export with names swapped for employee IDs and the salary column removed, or three CVs you invented for a role you're hiring right now. Whatever you learn on that file holds for the real one, so on the day the tool is approved you already know what to do with it.

Four interviewers, one recommendation

The write-up a hiring manager gets is the next thing worth practicing, and the harder one. Take debrief notes from four interviewers on the same candidate, names stripped, plus the requirements for the role, and ask for one recommendation where every claim says which interviewer it came from. Then read it line by line. The claims with nothing behind them are the whole exercise, because those are the sentences that come back at you in three months. Usually the gap turns out to sit in the notes rather than in how you asked, which changes what you ask an interviewer to write down.

Your last review cycle is an exercise with an answer key

The performance reviews you wrote last cycle are the best study material you own, because you already know what a finished one looks like. Take two you wrote yourself, strip the names, and show Claude how they're built and what register they use. Then hand it raw notes on a third employee, names stripped there too, and ask for a draft. The gap between that draft and what you'd have written is your grade, and it's the grade a trainer would have given you. Whatever instruction closed the gap goes into your first Project, and that's where you come back next cycle.

The signal arrives in your inbox

You don't need to invent a measure. What employees ask you in a week is the measure. Once the handbook has become a set of answers, each pointing at the clause it came from, and the managers have them, most of the questions about leave days and sick notes stop reaching you. What still reaches you gets harder: the case the policy doesn't cover, the request no prepared answer settles. That's where your week was supposed to go.

Three lines you don't leave to a draft

The risk here isn't technical. There's no code and nothing to install. What needs care is how authoritative a draft can sound: a rejection reason you'd have to defend to the candidate, a number in an offer letter, any line that goes into an employee's file. Those you write yourself, even when the draft looks good. Who passes the interview is a person's decision. Knowing which drafts you can send and which you rewrite from scratch is most of the skill, and none of it is about the tool.

Where to go from here

All of the above you can start this morning, on your own. What you can't hand yourself is a syllabus to work through, or someone to tell you where the line sits. The online workshop section of the HR page says what is open right now, and if no HR run is open there's a waitlist. The topic map needs no signup, if you'd rather see how the material is laid out first. The HR page also covers bringing a session to the whole department, worth a look if you're not the only one working through the handbook and the review cycle.