Claude for HR: Plugin, Skills and Connectors Explained

Claude for HR means using Anthropic's Claude for people work: drafting offer letters and policies, building onboarding plans, preparing performance reviews, answering policy questions and analysing people data. Three features do most of the work. Plugins bundle ready-made HR workflows. Skills hold your own instructions for repeated tasks. Connectors let Claude read from and write to the HR tools you already use.

This guide covers what Anthropic's HR plugin includes, what happened to Claude Cowork, which HR connectors exist, how to set Claude up for an HR team, and what should stay out of it. For AI in HR more broadly, see AI for HR.

What HR teams use Claude for

• Hiring: job descriptions, interview plans and scorecards, offer letters.
• Onboarding: a checklist and first-week plan per new hire, welcome emails, 30/60/90-day plans.
• Performance reviews: self-assessment prompts, manager templates, summaries of peer feedback, calibration prep.
• Policies: handbook drafts, plain-language rewrites, answers to "what's our PTO policy?"
• People data: headcount and attrition reports, survey comment themes.

The work is the same as with any AI assistant. What makes Claude different for HR is how much of the setup can be saved and reused: your company context, your processes and your tools, so you aren't re-explaining the company in every chat. The general idea is covered in AI HR assistant.

The Claude HR plugin

Anthropic publishes a free Human Resources plugin as part of its knowledge-work plugins. Anthropic launched it on 24 February 2026 with other department plugins. A plugin is a package of commands, skills and connector settings you install once.

According to its README, the HR plugin includes six commands:

• /draft-offer: an offer letter with compensation details, start date and terms.
• /onboarding: an onboarding checklist and first-week plan for a new hire.
• /performance-review: self-assessment prompts, a manager template and calibration prep.
• /policy-lookup: finds and explains company policies such as PTO, benefits, expenses and remote work.
• /comp-analysis: benchmarking, band placement and equity refresh modelling.
• /people-report: headcount, attrition, diversity or org health reports.

It also has six skills Claude uses on its own when a request fits: recruiting pipeline, employee handbook, compensation benchmarking, org planning, people analytics and interview prep.

The README lists example connectors by category: HRIS (Workday, BambooHR, Rippling), ATS (Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby), compensation (Pave, Radford), plus Slack, Teams, calendar and email. The plugin only knows your data if those tools are connected. Without them, it works from what you paste or upload.

Anthropic says the plugin is designed for Cowork and also works in Claude Code. You install it from its page on claude.com. Companies can also run private plugin marketplaces for plugins built around their own processes.

Claude Cowork for HR: what changed

Cowork was Claude's agent mode: it could work through multi-step tasks, use your files and connected apps, and run plugins. In September 2026 Anthropic merged Cowork and chat into one Claude, so you no longer pick a mode. The rollout started on Pro and Max, with Team and Free to follow.

What this means for an HR team:

• You need a paid plan. Anthropic's help centre lists Cowork on Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise.
• Plugins and skills work on web, desktop and mobile. Plugins that use local connectors or local MCP servers work only through the desktop app.
• Local files need the desktop app open. If Claude should read a folder of policies on your laptop, the Claude desktop app has to be running.

Skills, plugins and connectors: what each one is

• Skill: written instructions for one job, such as "build an onboarding plan the way we do it." Claude loads it when the task matches. You can write your own.
• Plugin: a bundle of skills, commands and connector settings, shared as one install. Anthropic's HR plugin is one; companies can build private plugins for their own processes.
• Connector: a link between Claude and another app, such as your HRIS, ATS or performance tool. It lets Claude read data and, where allowed, take actions there.

For an HR team, the order that works is: context first (who the company is, how you do things), then skills for the tasks you repeat, then connectors so Claude stops working from copy-paste.

HR connectors for Claude

A connector usually acts with the permissions you already have in that app. Two HR examples:

• BambooHR announced a Claude connector on 8 October 2026, in open beta and included for BambooHR customers with a Claude account. HR admins can run saved reports and check headcount and hiring data; managers and employees can check time off and look up colleagues. Each person sees only what they can already see in BambooHR.
• Effy AI, our own product, has a Claude connector for performance and people work. It's listed in Anthropic's connector directory, and you can also add it in Claude's connector settings with the URL go.effy.ai/mcp. Once connected, Claude can look people up in your Effy employee directory, read the performance review reports you have access to, read and edit career tracks with their levels and competencies, draft growth plans for a period such as "Q2 2026", log 1-on-1 notes, and run Effy's HR skills for 1-on-1s, career frameworks, onboarding, AI usage policy and AI context files. Access follows your Effy permissions. The connector is part of the new Effy platform at go.effy.ai.

Before connecting any HR system, check what the connector can change, not only what it can read, and switch off actions you don't want Claude to take.

How to set up Claude for HR

1. Agree on a plan and an AI policy. Use a Team or Enterprise plan for company HR work (see the data section below), and write down what data never goes in.
2. Give Claude your context once. A short set of files on the company, your policies and your HR processes. Effy AI's free skill for HR context files builds them with you.
3. Install the HR plugin for the common tasks: offers, onboarding, reviews, policy questions.
4. Add skills for your own processes. Effy AI's free skills cover an onboarding plan for a new hire and building a career framework.
5. Connect your HR tools, starting with read-only use.
6. Run one task for a month, compare time and quality with the old way, then add the next.

Effy AI's free AI for HR course follows this path with Claude, starting from understanding Claude and organising context files. For ready-made prompts, see ChatGPT prompts for HR; they work the same way in Claude.

Employee data in Claude: what to check

Which plan you use decides how your data is treated. On Claude Free, Pro and Max, Anthropic lets each user choose whether their chats can be used to improve Claude; the setting is in Privacy Settings. Team and Enterprise plans fall under Anthropic's commercial terms, which those consumer rules don't cover. For company HR work, that makes Team or Enterprise the safer default.

Whatever the plan:

• Remove names and identifiers when a task doesn't need them.
• Leave out health, disciplinary and pay details of named people unless your policy allows it.
• Check every fact, especially on employment law.
• Keep decisions with people. Claude can draft a review or a shortlist; ratings, hiring, pay and dismissals stay with a person. Several places now regulate AI in hiring and promotion decisions. This is not legal advice; check with employment counsel before using AI in those decisions.

Claude for performance reviews

Reviews are where Claude saves HR and managers the most time: forms, summaries of peer feedback, rewrites of vague comments, bias checks. They're also where it needs the closest checking, because the output affects pay and promotion.

If you run reviews every cycle, a dedicated tool removes most of the prompting and keeps reminders, deadlines and reports in one place. The options are compared in performance appraisal software, and for teams that work in Slack, in performance reviews in Slack. Effy AI is free for up to 5 users and starts at $3 per seat a month. Under 300 employees, see performance management software for small business.

The short version

Claude for HR comes down to three things: Anthropic's HR plugin for the common tasks, your own skills and context for how your company works, and connectors to the HR tools that hold your data. Use a business plan for employee data, start with one repeated task, and keep every decision about a person with a person.