The Problem Every HR Team Recognises
It is Monday morning. There is an offer letter to draft, an onboarding plan for someone starting next week, three interview scorecards nobody has written yet, and a manager asking whether an employee can work from Greece for a fortnight.
None of this is difficult work. It is repetitive work. And it eats the hours you would rather spend actually talking to people.
Anthropic’s open-source Human Resources plugin is a collection of structured instructions that teaches Claude how to handle these workflows the same way every time. Think of it as an HR operating manual installed inside Claude — not an HRIS, not an applicant-tracking system, just a very well-briefed assistant.
This guide shows you exactly how to install it and what to type once it is running.
Installing the Plugin
If you use Cowork (easier, no terminal)
The repository is primarily designed for Anthropic’s Cowork environment. Cowork users can install plugins through Claude’s plugin catalogue — browse, click install, done. If you are not comfortable with a command line, start here.
If you use Claude Code (terminal)
Open your terminal and run these two commands:
claude plugin marketplace add anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins
claude plugin install human-resources@knowledge-work-plugins
Then reload your plugins inside Claude Code:
/reload-plugins
To confirm what installed and what the commands are actually called:
/plugin details human-resources
A note worth flagging: an older command appears inside the HR folder itself —
claude plugins add knowledge-work-plugins/human-resources
— which is inconsistent with the current marketplace-based documentation. Use the marketplace commands above unless Anthropic updates the HR-specific README.
Command names may be namespaced
Claude Code namespaces plugin skills by plugin name, so you may see:
/human-resources:onboarding
/human-resources:draft-offer
The repository examples show shorter versions like /onboarding. Both may work depending on your version — check with /plugin details rather than guessing.
Set Your Company Details Once
Before you run anything, save your standard company information so you stop retyping it. In Claude Code, this file lives at:
human-resources/.claude/settings.local.json
Here is a working example for a Cyprus company:
{
"company_name": "Aegis Technologies Ltd",
"headquarters": "Nicosia, Cyprus",
"employee_count": 84,
"annual_leave_days": 21,
"health_benefits": "Private medical insurance, employee + dependants",
"parental_leave": "Statutory Cyprus entitlement plus 4 weeks company top-up",
"compensation_currency": "EUR",
"equity_type": "Share options",
"vesting_schedule": "4 years, 1 year cliff"
}
Important: this file is for general approved settings only. No employee medical information, no passwords, no API keys, no candidate records.
If something is missing, the plugin will simply ask you for it.
The Nine Skills, and How to Actually Use Them
Each folder under human-resources/skills/ contains a SKILL.md file telling Claude when to use the skill, what to ask for, what steps to follow and what format to output. Claude loads a skill automatically when your request matches, or you can trigger it directly.
The workflows are draft-offer, onboarding, performance-review, policy-lookup, comp-analysis, people-report, interview-prep, org-planning and recruiting-pipeline.
Here is how each one looks in practice.
Drafting an offer letter
/draft-offer
Role: Senior Accountant
Location: Nicosia
Base salary: €42,000
Annual bonus: up to 10%
Start date: 1 September 2026
Manager: Finance Director
Employment type: Full time
You get back a compensation summary, employment terms, benefits summary, an offer-letter draft and notes for the hiring manager.
What you do not get is legal verification. The skill does not independently check whether your terms comply with Cyprus employment law. HR and legal counsel review the final document — always.
Planning onboarding
/onboarding Maria Georgiou, Customer Support Specialist
Start date: 3 August 2026
Team: Customer Experience
Manager: Andreas Nicolaou
Location: Limassol
Output covers a pre-employment checklist, equipment and access requirements, a first-day timetable, a first-week plan, proposed 30/60/90-day goals, and a list of meetings and contacts.
Running offices in more than one city? Say so and get location-specific versions:
/onboarding
Same role as above, but produce two variants:
1. Office-based, Limassol
2. Fully remote, employee located outside Cyprus
For the remote variant, include equipment delivery,
secure account access and a virtual introduction schedule.
Preparing interviews
/interview-prep
Role: Finance Manager
Level: Senior
Reporting to: Finance Director
Key requirements: IFRS reporting, team leadership,
ERP migration experience
Produce: competency questions, role-specific questions,
a candidate scorecard, interviewer instructions and a
debrief template.
The point here is consistency. Every candidate gets the same questions and the same scorecard, so hiring managers compare evidence instead of first impressions.
Reviewing the recruitment pipeline
With an ATS connected, just ask:
Give me a recruiting update for the Sales Manager vacancy.
Show candidates by stage, days in stage and interview bottlenecks.
Without an ATS, upload an anonymised spreadsheet in this shape:
Candidate ID | Vacancy | Stage | Date entered stage | Source
C-1042 | Sales Manager | Screen | 2026-07-02 | LinkedIn
C-1043 | Sales Manager | Interview | 2026-06-28 | Referral
C-1051 | Sales Manager | Sourced | 2026-07-14 | Agency
Then:
/recruiting-pipeline
Using the attached file, calculate pipeline velocity,
stage conversion, source effectiveness, offer acceptance
and time to fill. Flag any candidate stuck over 14 days.
Stages used by the skill: sourced, screen, interview, debrief, offer, accepted.
Answering policy questions
/policy-lookup
Can employees work remotely from another EU country
for two weeks?
The skill searches a connected knowledge base, or analyses handbook content you paste in. It gives a plain-language answer, quotes the relevant policy, identifies exceptions, names the right contact — and states clearly when no policy exists rather than inventing one.
Good for annual leave, sick leave, parental leave, remote work, expenses, business travel, benefits and professional-development budgets.
Preparing performance reviews
/performance-review
Employee: [initials only]
Role: Backend Engineer
Review period: Jan-Jun 2026
Objectives set: [paste]
Completed work: [paste]
Peer feedback notes: [paste]
Produce: self-assessment questions, manager-review template,
evidence-based feedback sections, development objectives
and calibration notes.
The skill organises evidence. It does not invent performance facts or assign ratings without management review. You supply the facts, it improves the structure.
Building people reports
/people-report
Prepare a Q2 people report showing headcount, hires,
departures, voluntary turnover, vacancies and time to hire
by department. Do not identify individual employees.
Add a Cyprus-specific breakdown when you need one:
Break down the same metrics by office: Nicosia, Limassol,
Larnaca, Paphos. Suppress any group smaller than five.
That last instruction matters. Small offices make individuals identifiable very quickly.
Check formulas, source dates and small-group privacy risks before anything gets distributed.
Compensation and organisation planning
/comp-analysis
Attached: approved salary bands (Levels 1-6, EUR).
Candidate offer: €42,000 base, Senior Accountant, Nicosia.
Show where this sits in band, compare to current team
members at the same level, and flag any compression risk.
/org-planning
Current: 84 employees across 6 departments (org chart attached).
Plan: 12 hires in H2 2026, weighted to Engineering and Support.
Show proposed reporting lines, span-of-control issues
and skills gaps.
These support the discussion. They do not decide anyone’s salary, promotion or place in the organisation.
Connecting Your Existing Systems
MCP connectors let Claude read from an authorised external system instead of relying on what you paste in. The plugin uses tool-independent placeholders:
--HRIS → Workday, BambooHR, Rippling...
--ATS → Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workable...
--calendar → Google Calendar, Outlook...
--email
--knowledge base → Notion, Confluence...
--compensation data
With connections approved and live, an onboarding run can retrieve the new employee’s details from the HRIS, identify their manager and department, pull onboarding documents from Notion or Confluence, prepare the first-week calendar, create proposed meeting invitations and produce an access checklist.
Two cautions. First, connecting an HRIS does not mean Claude should have access to every employee field — permissions are yours to scope. Second, plugins and their MCP connections are trusted software components that can access files and external services according to the permissions granted, which is why Anthropic recommends installing only from trusted sources and reviewing what they contain.
Do this phase last, not first.
A Sensible Rollout Order
Week one
Install, set settings.local.json, and run one skill on completely fictional data. Onboarding is the friendliest starting point.
Week two
Run the same skill on real-but-anonymised data. Note every place it guessed wrong or asked for something you had not thought to provide.
Week three
Add your own templates and required questions into the skill file. The repository uses plain Markdown and JSON, so you can edit it directly.
Before anyone else touches it
Decide:
- Which HR employees may use the tool
- Which company files it may access
- Which personal data may be entered
- Which actions require human approval
- How outputs will be checked
- How long uploaded information is retained
- Whether HRIS or ATS connections are genuinely necessary
Connections come later. You will get real value from manual uploads long before you need integration.
Where the Line Sits
Claude Code skills are for preparation and administration. First drafts, checklists, organising approved information, summarising non-sensitive data, interview documents, policy lookups, management reports, routine candidate emails.
They are not for deciding.
The plugin should never independently reject candidates, decide salaries, issue final contracts, assign performance ratings, approve dismissals, interpret employment law, or expose employee-specific information without authorisation.
The European Commission states that AI systems used to rank, filter or evaluate candidates may fall within the AI Act’s high-risk employment category, even where a recruiter can review or override the result. Purely administrative tasks such as interview scheduling may be treated differently, because they do not contribute to candidate selection. Onboarding support that provides policies, training schedules and answers to common questions is likewise distinguished from AI used to select candidates, provided it does not affect access to employment or employment conditions.
For Cyprus organisations specifically: candidate CVs, salary records, interview notes, performance reviews and absence data are all personal data. Limit access, avoid uploading what you do not need, and use approved business accounts. The Office of the Commissioner for Personal Data Protection is the independent authority monitoring GDPR implementation in Cyprus.
One rule covers most of it:
Claude prepares. HR verifies. An authorised person decides.
Useful official resources: the Cyprus Commissioner for Personal Data Protection, the European Commission’s AI Act employment guidance and Anthropic’s Human Resources plugin repository.
Photographs by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash, free to use under the Unsplash License.
