AI for HR Capstone Exercise
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- Apply skills from across this course in a single realistic professional scenario
- Produce a concrete, role-relevant deliverable using AI tools
- Self-assess your output against professional quality criteria
This course has covered AI across the full HR lifecycle: recruiting, onboarding, performance management, learning and development, ethics and bias, workforce planning, HRIS automation, and employee communications. The capstone tests your ability to apply that range in a scenario where speed, fairness, and legal exposure all compete for attention at the same time.
Performance management process changes are among the most communication-intensive HR projects. Getting the messaging wrong does not just cause confusion: it creates legal risk, damages manager confidence, and signals to employees that the change was not thought through. Your job in this exercise is to use AI to draft the full communication pack efficiently, while applying the judgment framework you have built across this course about where AI requires human oversight.
Capstone Exercise
Performance Management Rollout: Communication Pack in Three Days
Context
You are an HR business partner at a 200-person technology company. The leadership team has approved a new performance management process that replaces the annual review cycle with quarterly check-ins, introduces a structured feedback framework, and removes the previous performance rating scale. The all-hands announcement is in three days. You need to produce three documents: a company-wide announcement email, a manager briefing document, and an employee FAQ. Your CEO has reviewed the process design but has not seen the communications yet. The legal team has flagged that any reference to performance improvement plans or capability processes in these documents must be reviewed by employment counsel before publication.
Your Task
Using Claude, ChatGPT, or Copilot, draft all three documents below. After each document, write a brief annotation (two to four sentences) identifying which sections required human review due to sensitivity, legal exposure, or fairness considerations, and what that review must check. Document 1: a company-wide announcement email of approximately 250 words, written from the CEO's voice, explaining the change, the rationale, and the timeline. Document 2: a manager briefing document of approximately 400 words covering the process change in plain language, how to give effective feedback within the new framework, and two or three specific things managers should not say when introducing this to their teams. Document 3: an employee FAQ of 10 questions and answers covering the most likely concerns: what changes, what stays the same, how performance will be assessed, what happens if someone is struggling, and how to raise a concern.
Your notes (optional)
Deliverable
Three documents (announcement email, manager briefing, employee FAQ), each clearly labelled, with a two-to-four-sentence annotation after each document identifying the sections that required human review, the nature of the risk, and what that review must check.
The capstone tells you to write the ten FAQ questions yourself before asking the AI to draft any answers. What does it say goes wrong if you let the model pick the questions?
Select one answer.
- AI drafts of HR communications are a starting point for speed, not a finished product: the human review layer is where legal exposure, tone accuracy, and fairness considerations are applied, and that review must be documented
- The brief quality determines the draft quality in HR communications more than in almost any other domain, because tone, audience, and legal constraints are all context-dependent in ways that a generic prompt cannot capture
- Knowing which questions to ask in an employee FAQ is a professional skill AI cannot replicate: it requires knowledge of what your specific workforce is anxious about, which varies by organisation, history, and recent events
- Communications that touch performance, capability, or employment status require employment counsel review before they are published, regardless of how carefully they were AI-drafted: this is a non-negotiable professional standard, not an optional quality check
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