It’s week 2, and I’m currently feeling like a kid in a sweet shop, what with the ideas people have sent me, as well as having a lot of fun solving some problems…

Table of Contents

• This week I’m going to show you:

  • Who Am I?

  • Special Offer

    • For the next 12 days only, I'm offering this at a …

  • 🎯 Deep Dive of the Week

    • Step 1 - Set good parameters

    • Step 2 - Challenges emerged

    • Step 3 - Locations and Documents

    • Step 4 - finishing the process and making it mobil …

    • Step 5 - A final flourish to make your lives easie …

  • TA DA 🎉

  • 🧠 Quick Learn:

  • 📰 News That Matters for People Ops

    • 1. Perplexity Launches "Deep Research" Feature

    • 2. AI's Impact on HR Functions and Employee Experi …

  • 👋 Let's Connect!

This week I’m going to show you:

• How I created a free onboarding scheduling tool in just 2 hours

• How to use Deep Research by Perplexity to create really insightful reports

• A better way to prompt

It’s kind of 🤯 being sat here in a quiet little town in Kent, but engaging with people all over the world and learning how to build solutions to people’s problems in People Ops with AI.

All whilst the sun finally comes out… obligatory back garden beach shot in the preview.

Who Am I?

Welcome to all the new subscribers this week! I'm Matt Bradburn, and I'm here to help HR and People Leaders enhance their skills with the help of AI. I'm also beginning to advise companies on common issues like hiring, onboarding, organisation design, equity, and performance, but with a fresh perspective.

I have been using AI in my work for the last 2 years, starting from nothing and now able to build agents and small apps, or provide deep research to clients to solve their challenges.

Now I want to share my learnings with you all.

My focus this week:

1. Atlas Partners - moving the website to Lovable, speaking to a couple of funds about fractional support for them.
2. People x Robots - built the website in Lovable, was super fun! Going to be adding all content, free tool links and directory for people next week. Also add in a consulting tab.
3. COMING SOON - Scale Advisory - still working out what to name this, but taking my last 15 years of experience and using the lens of AI to work on projects with better quality, a lower price point and better velocity - the dream!

Special Offer

Is your People Ops function keeping up with your growth?

The top 3 challenges I'm seeing at startups and scaleups right now:

• Compensation structures breaking due to geo challenges or lack of clarity

• Performance approach that worked at 20 people failing at 50 or adding no value

• L&D budgets being wasted on un-targeted initiatives

After selling my People Ops consultancy, I've developed an AI-powered audit system and roadmap that combines my expertise with AI.

For the next 12 days only, I'm offering this at a fraction of my traditional consulting costs: 

0-50 employees: £4,000 £2,000 for a full audit and roadmap with me working to solve low hanging fruit using AI over the next month with you.

50-100 employees: £6,000 £3,000 for a full audit and roadmap with me working to solve low hanging fruit using AI over the next month with you.

100+ employees: £8,000 £4000 for a full audit and roadmap with me working to solve low hanging fruit using AI over the next month with you.

👉 How do you get this? Click HERE to book a call

🎯 Deep Dive of the Week

For this week, step up Andrew Shortland who came to me with a challenge about onboarding.

Now, we all know onboarding is vital, but often neglected. Getting those meetings in can be a time consuming bore, but it’s CRITICAL for ensuring people get the insights into the company fast.

Andrew wanted me to do the following:

To sum up the challenge:

We want to create personalised schedules that help people smoothly join the company. Traditional methods often result in inconsistent experiences, missed meetings, and stressed newcomers. There's a strong need for a solution that can turn this time-consuming and mistake-prone task into a more efficient and reliable process.

So this week I was building an app instead of just using tools for HR refinement.

Tools used:

Lovable.dev, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, ChatGPT o3-mini

First Try - I used Claude to mock something up quickly, but it became clear it was not going to be very user friendly, I would have to give you a file to run, to make another file, yadda, yadda, looked dull etc. So back to the drawing board.

I had heard a lot of good things about lovable.dev and fell in love very quickly - you can use for websites, apps, dashboards, anything, and chose this.

Step 1 - Set good parameters

It’s always important to be as clear as possible about what you want any model to do, as well as give it the ‘return format’ in this case building an app for me.

The following prompt keeps on going, but I took Andrew’s initial spec, then simplified using Claude so it was ready for Lovable.

• Started with the essentials: company details and department specifics

• Created clear separation between mandatory and optional onboarding activities

• Enabled HR teams to standardise their onboarding timeline based on department needs

Step 2 - Challenges emerged

So I got my first version of the application, but it had some flaws… The scheduling was all lumped together - no bueno!

So I had to go back and re prompt to ensure:

• Introduced intelligent meeting distribution to prevent overwhelming new hires

• Implemented automatic lunch break consideration and working hours alignment

• Ensured we took into account public holidays and weekends - yes, it decided weekends were totally fine…

• Added flexibility for morning or afternoon preferences, acknowledging that different teams have different peak productivity hours

• Built-in buffer times between meetings to allow for proper preparation and processing

ET VOILA!

I also then…

• Added functionality to create ONE onboarding flow for a new hire, or to book out a regular onboarding schedule for up to an entire YEAR 🥳

• Think how much time that will save…

Step 3 - Locations and Documents

Now it’s all well and good having a schedule, but I needed to make sure this would work for a variety of locations and times, meeting rooms etc. So I then:

• Developed a system for managing both physical and virtual meeting locations

• Created a structured approach to document management, ensuring new hires receive the right materials at the right time - straight from your knowledge banks in drive or Notion etc.

• Enabled resource linking to specific meetings, creating a coherent learning journey, so people get the right things at the right time.

Step 4 - finishing the process and making it mobile

I wanted to make sure the end of the journey was as good as the start. So I got it to double check all of the changes I had made, so that the file it gives you works well.

• I added the ability to review the complete onboarding journey before finalising.

• Then I created clear visual indicators of the onboarding flow, helping HR explain the process to stakeholders if needed.

• I also made it mobile friendly, because why not?

Step 5 - A final flourish to make your lives easier

I wanted to make sure all final refinements were done, so I added a cute lil guide so that once you get your file, it shows you where to upload it in google calendar or in microsoft outlook.

So there we go! You can now all go and use the app to create an onboarding schedule for a new team member, or setup onboarding for the entire year if you like!

• HR teams can now ensure every new hire receives a well-structured onboarding experience, regardless of department or role, location, timezone, holidays etc, while still having the freedom to tailor specific elements to individual needs.

• This balance between standardisation and customisation helps you scale your onboarding processes efficiently.

TA DA 🎉

🧠 Quick Learn:

Want to learn how to prompt better?

The following is a game changer, and is now the format I use for anything major I want to achieve.

Retweeted by one of the founders of OpenAI, so you know it’s good. Apply this to every chat and you get MUCH better outputs:

📰 News That Matters for People Ops

1. Perplexity Launches "Deep Research" Feature

Perplexity AI has introduced a new tool called "Deep Research" that is a game changer for how we People folks professionals do research and analysis.

• This tool is free and is amazing at quickly searching through many sources and creating clear reports in minutes. Just make sure you tell it how long you want it to be!

• HR teams could use it to easily find information on policy best practices and benchmarking globally, with updated legal requirements, and current trends.

• Or it can help with competitive analysis by providing details on other companies' benefits, pay, and hiring strategies.
  
  Pretty much anything!

2. AI's Impact on HR Functions and Employee Experience

Recent reports indicate a significant increase in AI's influence on HR:

• 91% of HR professionals are experiencing some impact from AI on their HR function LINK

• There's a need for "compassionate implementation" of AI in HR processes to ensure it enhances rather than detracts from the employee experience LINK

These developments underscore the rapid integration of AI in HR practices and the need for careful consideration of its implications for both employers and employees!

👋 Let's Connect!

Finding this valuable? There's more where this came from!

✨ Share this newsletter with your HR network 🔗 Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattbradburn/ 

Remember of the special offer:

For the next 12 days only, I'm offering this at a fraction of my traditional consulting costs:

0-50 employees: £4,000 £2,000 for a full audit and roadmap with me working to solve low hanging fruit using AI over the next month with you.

50-100 employees: £6,000 £3,000 for a full audit and roadmap with me working to solve low hanging fruit using AI over the next month with you.

100+ employees: £8,000 £4000 for a full audit and roadmap with me working to solve low hanging fruit using AI over the next month with you.

👉 How do you get this? Click HERE to book a call

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