I’m running a webinar to answer exactly that, and I’m offering it to this group at $39.

Monday, 18 May

12:00 -1:30 PM Eastern

11:00-12:30 PM Central

10:00-11:30 AM Mountain

9:00-10:30 AM Pacific

**Get Real HR Work Done with Claude: Prompts, Pitfalls, and Practical Use Cases**

If you’ve tried ChatGPT and wonder whether Claude is worth a second look — or you’ve heard Claude is “the safer one” and want to know what that actually means in practice — this is for you.

What we’ll cover:

• Writing job descriptions, performance reviews, and PIPs that hold up under scrutiny
• Planning difficult conversations and rewriting risky manager emails before they go out
• Reviewing long documents (handbooks, investigations) for risks, inconsistencies, and themes
• Turning survey data, exit interviews, and notes into something actionable
• Where Claude gets you in trouble — bias, hallucinations, confident nonsense
• Side-by-side Claude vs. ChatGPT outputs, so you can judge for yourself

This is a practical session, not a sales pitch. You’ll leave knowing whether Claude belongs in your workflow, when it’s safer than ChatGPT (and when it isn’t), and how to use either tool without creating a legal, ethical, or reputational mess.

Hope to see you there.

Suzanne

(The Evil HR Lady)

Register here: Get Real Work Done With Claude

What You’ll Learn

How to Use Claude for High-Stakes HR Work

• Write and revise job descriptions, performance reviews, and PIPs that hold up under scrutiny
• Plan difficult conversations and rewrite risky manager communications

How to Use Claude for Analysis (Where It Actually Shines)

• Review long documents (handbooks, investigations) and extract risks, inconsistencies, and key themes
• Compare policies or contracts and clearly identify what changed

How to Work Faster Without Losing Control

• Turn survey data, exit interviews, and notes into actionable insights
• Use Projects to standardize tone, policies, and internal frameworks

Where Claude Can Get You in Trouble

• Bias, hallucinations, and “confident nonsense”
• What you should never trust it to do without review

Claude vs. ChatGPT—When It Actually Matters

• Side-by-side outputs so you can evaluate the difference yourself

Why You Should Attend

If you’re an HR pro who’s overwhelmed, curious, or already using AI but wondering if you’re using the right one, this session will give you a clear-eyed view — not a sales pitch — of what Claude can and can’t do. Examine

• Whether Claude is worth adding to your workflow
• When it’s safer than ChatGPT—and when it’s not
• How to use either tool without creating legal, ethical, or reputational risk

Who Should Attend?

• HR professionals and business partners who write, draft, coach, and review for a living
• Managers and supervisors already using AI and wanting to use it better
• Small business owners and executives doing HR work without a dedicated HR team
• Compliance officers and in-house counsel assessing AI risk in people processes
• Operations and team leads looking to cut hours of writing and admin
• Anyone who has wondered:
  • “Is Claude actually different from ChatGPT, or is that just marketing?”
  • “Can I trust this thing with sensitive employee information?”
  • “What happens if it gets the law wrong?”
  • “Will this make me sound like a robot?”

About Our Speaker

Suzanne Lucas, known worldwide as the Evil HR Lady, brings a refreshingly candid, no-nonsense perspective to the often-confusing world of HR and employment law.

A former corporate HR leader turned writer, speaker, and consultant, Suzanne has spent more than two decades helping organizations navigate the tricky intersection of compliance, common sense, and compassion. She’s written thousands of articles on workplace issues for publications like Inc., CBS News, The New York Times, and Comstock’s, earning a loyal following of HR professionals, managers, and employees who value her clear-eyed, practical advice.

With a gift for translating complex laws into plain English — and a sense of humor about the chaos that comes with managing people — Suzanne’s webinars and keynotes are equal parts enlightening and entertaining.

The post Get Things Done with Claude for HR appeared first on Improve Your HR.

A Monster survey found that 80 percent of US workers felt their employers had catfished them. Career or job catfishing is a dumb game employers play where they lie to candidates. It’s also called “bait and switch,” and it’s costing your company.

The post Why 80 Percent of Workers Claim They Were ‘Catfished’ (and How it Costs You $50,000) appeared first on Improve Your HR.

If your hiring managers and recruiters are using AI tools to evaluate resumes, you’ll hire the best robots out there.

The post AI Resume Screeners Have a Favorite Candidate: Other AI appeared first on Improve Your HR.

I informed her that many people had successfully done this job without this certification and that we had several internal candidates who were more than capable of doing it and lacked the certification.

She insisted. She said I was trying to violate her managerial authority by telling her not to include the certification requirement.

I didn’t have the authority to remove the certification requirement, so the job search continued.

Internal people who lacked the certification didn’t apply because she made it very clear they wouldn’t be considered.

She ended up hiring an external person who (wait for it) also did not have the certification. Now, this person can absolutely do the job. But the current staff is furious. Not at the new hire–they recognize it’s not her fault–but at the manager. They didn’t apply for the job because the manager made it very clear she would not consider them.

Now we have a morale issue. Lesson from this: If you’re going to make a rule, you need to enforce it. Making a rule and then not enforcing it is incredibly damaging to your employees.

The post The Reason You Can’t Break Rules appeared first on Improve Your HR.

One hour, 59 minutes, and 30 seconds. That’s the winning time for Sunday’s London Marathon winner, Sebastian Sawe, who did something no human had ever done before: run a marathon in an official race in under two hours. In case you were wondering, that is an average pace of 4:33 per mile or 13.16 miles per hour. (For comparison, in 1862, a runner named George Farran set the world record for the mile by running at 4:33.)

The post Two Men Broke a Barrier No Human Had Ever Broken. Neither Did It Alone. appeared first on Improve Your HR.

No eating hair

No climbing on the table

Everyone goes potty before we leave the house

The post Why The Rules Exist appeared first on Improve Your HR.

If you’ve ever felt like you couldn’t compete with the big companies, things are shifting.

The post Deloitte Is Cutting Perks. Your Small Business Just Got More Competitive appeared first on Improve Your HR.

A job interview is a conversation between two liars. 

It’s a fairly common phrase, and we can all chuckle at it because, of course, the candidate overstates qualifications while the hiring manager understates the amount of work to be done. But it’s more than just a little bragging that is the problem. It’s that candidates describe what they think they can do, and hiring managers describe what they think they need. Both are wrong, and the stats show it.

A recent McKinsey study found that one in five new hires in Europe leave the company before their probationary period passes. 

That means there was a mismatch somewhere. 

One of the hardest parts of hiring is writing the job description, and it’s often done by a recruiter using AI to take the notes from the hiring manager and put it into the company’s standard format.

The result is this type of mismatch. A situation where both the candidate and the hiring manager think they are a match, and when the new hire starts, everyone realizes this just isn’t working out. 

It’s not just that you’re hiring the wrong people; you’re interviewing the wrong people.

The system filters on proxies (resumes, credentials) instead of capability, so the wrong people enter the funnel. This results in what we think of as talent shortages. It’s not that the talent doesn’t exist; it’s that you can’t find the talent needle in the applicant haystack.

Alex Rashkovan, CEO of Atalef.ai explains:

“Most companies don’t have a tech talent shortage. They have a skills measurement and role-matching gap. Skills-based validation replaces CV assumptions with real data about what candidates can do and how they fit the role. At Atalef.ai, that’s exactly what we built DeepMatch for, our skills-validation and matching engine that compares candidates against role requirements. It gives hiring managers a defensible, skills-based reason for every shortlist decision.”

Instead of looking at skills, recruiters look at resumes. And for most jobs, the day-to-day tasks don’t involve resume writing, so resumes come in three categories: 

• Written by an (expensive) professional resume writer who will make the resume sound great, but that reflects the paid writer’s talents more than the candidate’s
• Written by AI tools to optimize for keywords in a poorly written job description
• Terrible

There are people out there who can fill your vacant position, but they won’t make it past the screeners (human or AI) because their resumes don’t match what you’re looking for. Maybe they don’t have the right degree, didn’t work for the right company, or use clunky language to describe their knowledge, skills, and abilities.

The better way to fill technical roles is with skills matching, rather than keyword matching. When skills tests are available, you can even get candidates who wouldn’t meet the “on paper” qualifications but go ahead and take and pass the test with flying colors.

Knowing what people can actually do, rather than what they talk about doing, is the difference between a good new hire and a new hire who will struggle in the position. 

The problem isn’t that candidates are lying or that hiring managers are unrealistic. It’s that both sides are working with incomplete signals. If you can create a skill evaluation that really works, you’ll find your talent shortage shrinking and your early-stage retention increasing. While hiring managers and candidates may still lean toward exaggerations, a solid test gets you to the truth.

The post The Real Hiring Problem Isn’t Talent—It’s That You’re Measuring the Wrong Things appeared first on Improve Your HR.

While scrolling through X, I saw a video that made my HR blood boil. The scene is a young woman speaking with her boss through a computer screen. The boss tells her to turn on her camera. She objects, he pushes. She counters.

The post Why This Startup CEO is Using Rage-Bait to Grow His Business appeared first on Improve Your HR.

“You should know that they need gym shoes in third grade.”

This was an actual line my son’s teacher said to me (albeit in German).

Please understand that from Kindergarten (two years’ worth) through second grade, gym shoes were forbidden, and they needed “Stoppersocken” (those socks with rubber on the bottom).

I asked her how I could have known that there was a change in grade three when there had been no list sent home. She replied, “Because academics start in grade three, and so we are serious about gym.”

I still didn’t see the logic, but she acted like it was the most obvious thing in the world to her.

And it was obvious to her. But I’d never had a third grader in the Swiss school system before. There was no way for me to know without someone telling me. And most of the other parents knew as well–because they were Swiss and knew that grade three was a big academic change and that it related to gym shoes. So the teacher looked around and thought, “20 kids in the class and 18 knew to bring gym shoes. These two mothers are idiots.” No, we were just foreigners who weren’t raised in that system.

So often we do this to our employees. We make up rules in our heads, and then we just expect people to know them and punish them for not knowing.

We say, “Oh, we don’t need a dress code, we just tell people to ‘dress for your day.'” Or “Don’t sexually harass people,” but we don’t lay out what the boundaries are.

Just because it’s in your head and very clear to you and the executive team doesn’t mean it will be clear to everyone.

Say what you mean. And follow that up with meaning what you say. It’s a kindness for everyone to have clear understanding of expectations.

The post Say what you mean appeared first on Improve Your HR.