This page is about your own staff, and the admin that fills the week when HR is one person, or an office manager with HR as the second half of the job: the agreement needed by Friday, the pay review letters, the new starter's paperwork, the trial period that ends next Tuesday. Airclerk's NZ People & HR Pack is eleven Claude skills that prepare that work alongside the HRIS and payroll you already run, or the spreadsheet and shared folder if that is what you have. It starts by handing you the finished draft with a source beside every figure, for your team to check and send. As you get comfortable with what it produces, you can let particular kinds of routine message go out on their own, one kind at a time.
Advise employers rather than employ people? See our work with law firms →
Most of what lands in a people mailbox has already been answered somewhere: the agreement, the handbook, employment.govt.nz. The time goes on finding it and saying it kindly. The policy helpdesk is one skill of the eleven, and the easiest to picture.
Illustrative example · NZ People & HR Pack, an accelerator (v1, November 2026)
The pack does the looking up. It answers from the person's own agreement first, then the organisation's policy with the clause cited, then the statutory minimum read from employment.govt.nz in that session, and it says which layer the answer came from so nobody mistakes a policy benefit for a legal right. The legal minimum overrides anything below it, and where the agreement gives the employee more, a less generous policy does not take it away. Every figure in the reply carries its source and the date it was read on the same line. The sick leave question is pointed at payroll rather than worked out, because a balance calculated in a chat window is the one the employee remembers later. The Friday request gets the rule and how to apply, and a short brief goes to whoever decides it. All of it lands as drafts for the people team to send.
The fourth row reads like a policy question. It is a complaint about a manager, possibly the start of a personal grievance, and an answer drafted by a helpdesk becomes the employer's position in that dispute. So that row stops. No answer is drafted. The people team gets a short, warm holding reply to review and send, saying who will be in touch and by when, and an escalation note addressed to the contact the people profile names for it, shared with nobody else.
The third row came from a manager, and a manager's question is handled the same way. What the pack does for managers is set out below.
The other skills cover the rest of the HR week, from the job ad to the exit interview →
An in-house HR team uses Anthropic's Claude models for the dated, template-driven work around its own staff: answering policy questions from the agreement, the policy and the law, drafting employment agreements and routine letters, running the administration of a vacancy and its interviews, onboarding and offboarding, chasing review cycles, watching fixed-term ends, trial periods and visa expiries, and producing the people numbers for leadership. For that to be safe with employee records, Claude has to be connected to the HRIS, payroll, mailbox and document store with everything starting as a draft and only the routine messages the team chooses going out on their own, every rate and entitlement checked against the official source on the day, and every employment decision left with a named person.
HR platforms now do a fair amount: agreements from a template with e-signature, onboarding checklists, review reminders, and on some an assistant that answers questions from the policies you have uploaded. What is left tends to be the work that crosses systems, and the work that has to be checked against the person's own agreement and the law as it stands. Platforms differ, and so does the way each one was set up, so the first thing we do is check what yours already covers.
Holds the salary, and may well produce the letter from a template and collect the signature.
It starts from the review outcome rather than a blank template. Current pay and hours come from the record with the date they were read, the letter is drafted with the employee's acceptance block, and it is set up for the approver your profile names for pay decisions. The payroll change and the HRIS update are prepared as notes for whoever keys them after signature, and any review date goes onto the compliance register.
Sends the new starter a login, collects their tax and KiwiSaver details, and works through the onboarding checklist you have set up.
When the signed agreement is back, someone on your team starts the onboarding workflow with it, and one run produces the whole pack. It checks the trial period first. A 90-day trial only holds if the agreement was signed before the person started work, so a paid induction day or a shift covered to help out before signing means the clause will not hold, and the workflow stops and says so. Then it assembles one onboarding pack for your team to work through: the welcome email, the day-one pack, the health and safety induction record, the payroll and HRIS set-up ready to key, the access request held until the agreement and the work-rights check are both on file, the first-week plan, and a checklist for confirming the first pay ran and the induction record was signed. The identity and work-rights checks are still done and recorded by a named person. The trial and probation dates go to the compliance register.
Stores the dates. What it reminds you about, and how far ahead, depends on your platform and how it was set up.
One register of every dated obligation, built from the HRIS export and the signed agreements, which win where the two disagree: the last day of each trial counted properly, fixed-term ends, visa and accreditation expiries from the visa records on file, parental leave dates and certificate renewals. Each has a lead time and an owner, and a reminder to whoever has to decide is drafted while there is still time to act. Once they have decided, the letters workflow prepares the extension. Run it every Monday and it updates the one register rather than starting another.
On some platforms, an assistant answers from the handbook and policies you have uploaded.
The answer starts from the employee's own agreement, then the policy, then the legal minimum read from employment.govt.nz that day, and it says which layer it came from. That matters when the handbook was last updated years ago and the minimums under it have moved since. A question that is really a complaint stops instead of being answered.
Runs the cycle and sends scheduled reminders.
It shows which managers are actually holding things up and drafts the chasers up your own ladder. Reviews that a pay letter, a probation outcome or a fixed-term decision is waiting on are flagged first.
Records the end date and runs the leaver tasks you have set up.
The last day is set from the notice clause in their agreement, and the exit checklist schedules access removal for the end of that day. Final pay gets a checklist that payroll's figures are tested against, including the public holidays that would have fallen on a working day had their unused annual holiday entitlement been taken after the last day. The exit interview pack and the statement of service follow.
Every message starts as a draft for your team to send, the chasers included. Once a routine kind of message has proved itself, such as a nudge to finish a form or an interview confirmation, you can choose to let it go out on its own. Offers, letters that change someone's terms and anything that tells a person about a decision always go through a person. You decide each step, and you can take any of them back.
Plenty of New Zealand businesses run HR from a staff spreadsheet and a folder of Word templates, with payroll in a payroll system and no need for an HR platform. The pack reads from what is there, so the work comes out the same way.
What has to exist is a staff list someone keeps current, and the documents behind the workflow you start with: the signed agreements, the handbook, your templates. Anything missing is flagged as a gap rather than filled in. Where the staff list lives in five inboxes, pulling it into one spreadsheet is the first piece of work.
Most HR questions start with a manager, and most HR deadlines depend on one. The pack prepares their part of the work as well as the people team's.
A manager is told only what the profile says a manager may see about their own team. To begin with, their answers come through the people team. Letting managers ask the helpdesk themselves is a setting in the people profile, off until you turn it on.
These are all eleven skills, the helpdesk included, with the connector work that sits underneath. The list came from a working HR professional's own account of what fills a one-person HR team's week. Each is a candidate first workflow, and all are illustrative until they are set up against your templates and systems. We suggest starting with the helpdesk or the compliance register, because the reviewer can check the output against a source that is already open beside it.
Reads what the HRIS, payroll, document store and policy library can show, then interviews for what they cannot: who signs and approves, the employment adviser, the escalation table, the chaser ladder and the house tone. Every value records where it came from. Run once, revisited when the organisation changes.
NZ People & HR PackEveryday questions answered from the agreement, then the policy, then the statutory minimum fetched that session, with the layer named and the clause or page cited. Decisions go to the decision-maker, complaints stop and escalate, and no individual balance is ever worked out in the reply.
NZ People & HR PackOne vacancy from approved requisition to accepted offer: job description and ad from your template with criteria tied to the work, the candidate privacy statement, one applicant tracker, shortlisting scored only against the advertised criteria, consented reference checks and the offer summary for approval.
NZ People & HR PackPanel availability, one schedule on the New Zealand calendar with a debrief slot, candidate confirmations, panel packs with the question set screened for prohibited grounds, reschedules and feedback prompts afterwards. Invites stay drafts unless your profile permits calendar holds.
NZ People & HR PackAn individual employment agreement from your approved template and the approved offer. The Employment Relations Act's mandatory terms are checked, a trial period is kept distinct from a probationary period, a fixed term records its genuine reason, and the cover note on the right to seek advice travels with it.
NZ People & HR PackThe routine letters from a catalogue: statement of service, agreed variation, pay review, fixed-term extension, end of trial or probation, flexible working response, parental leave acknowledgement, secondment. Where dismissal is in contemplation the letter becomes a brief for your employment adviser.
NZ People & HR PackSigned agreement to the end of the trial or probation: the pre-start gate, identity and work-rights checks recorded by a named person, tax code and KiwiSaver paperwork, the payroll and HRIS set-up prepared for someone to key, the health and safety induction and the first-week plan.
NZ People & HR PackNotice to records retention: the acknowledgement with the last day set from the agreement's notice clause, a dated exit checklist with access timed to the last day, a final pay checklist that payroll's figures are tested against, and the exit interview pack. Employer-initiated exits go to the adviser.
NZ People & HR PackA status register from the HRIS export, completion by manager, chasers up your own ladder, flags on reviews that gate a pay decision, a probation outcome or a fixed-term decision, and a calibration pack with small groups suppressed. Ratings stay with the managers who gave them.
NZ People & HR PackEvery dated obligation in one register: fixed-term ends, the last day of a 90-day trial counted properly, probation reviews, visa and accreditation expiries, parental leave dates, certificates and vetting re-checks, any minimum wage change from 1 April. Turned into a dated action list with owners and notice drafts.
NZ People & HR PackHeadcount reconciled between the HRIS and payroll, turnover, tenure, absence, leave liability taken as payroll's figure, the recruitment funnel and review completion. Diversity figures only from data collected voluntarily for that purpose, pay-gap figures on a named methodology, small groups suppressed, in your own report format.
NZ People & HR PackThe plumbing underneath: read access to the HRIS and payroll, by connector where one exists and by export where it does not, the shared people mailbox and calendar, and the folders where agreements and policies live. Scoped so a run sees only the records it needs. Connector work rather than a skill.
ConnectorsWhere AI could make the biggest difference, how that work runs today, the systems it touches and who owns it. We also work out together whether Airclerk is the right partner for it. If we are, the conversation gives us enough to quote.
One document: the outcome we are aiming for, what we deliver, what your team contributes, the fixed fee and timeline, and what acceptance looks like. Nothing starts until it is agreed on both sides.
The engagement opens with the detailed design, agreed with you before anything is built. Then we configure and connect the workflow to your documents and systems, build in the agreed review controls and audit trail, test it on real work, and prepare the people who will run it.
Handover, and the support that follows go-live, are written into the scope so you know what is covered before you sign. Ongoing operations and further workflows are a separate agreement, made when you want them rather than switched on by default.
Read how an engagement runs in detail →
The pack is built as Claude skills and is deployed to your own Claude instance, under your own agreement with Anthropic. We also implement Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT; if your organisation runs one of those, the workflow is scoped for it in the first conversation. Airclerk is not affiliated with or endorsed by Anthropic, Employment New Zealand or any HRIS or payroll vendor.
Ten of the eleven do people work. The eleventh, people-profile-setup, reads what your systems can show and interviews for what they cannot, then writes the people profile every other skill reads. Without it a skill has to ask who signs an employment agreement. With it the skill already knows, and it knows that anything touching a dismissal goes to your employment lawyer before a word is drafted.
The employing entities, who signs and who approves, the employment adviser, the agreement templates and their versions, trial and probation practice, leave above the statutory floor, the KiwiSaver approach, the policy library, the people calendar, the chaser ladder, the small-cell threshold and who may see what. Each value records where it came from, whether that was a system, a document or a person. The team keeps it up to date, not us.
Minimum wage, KiwiSaver rates, leave entitlements, notice, parental leave timings: each is fetched from employment.govt.nz, ird.govt.nz, immigration.govt.nz or legislation.govt.nz during the run and tagged with the date it was read, or written as unverified. A figure held in a model goes stale without saying so. The source and the date it was read let the reviewer check which rule was used and whether it applies.
A vacancy runs from recruitment administration to interview scheduling to the employment agreement to onboarding, and onboarding hands the trial and probation dates to the compliance register. The review cycle flags the reviews a pay letter is waiting on. Each skill recommends the next step for the people team to start, rather than running it.
The compliance register, the review status and the applicant tracker are refreshed in place, so running them every Monday is harmless. There is one register, not a folder of them. Outputs use your own templates and report formats, and anything in a format you did not already have says so.
The guardrails live in one place, and every skill works within them. Four of them do most of the work.
Emails, letters, offers and invitations start as drafts, and nothing is written to the HRIS or payroll. Once the team trusts a workflow's output, you can let a particular kind of routine message go out without a review. That permission is agreed with you and written into the people profile, where anyone can see it and take it back. Some things always go through a person: offers, letters that change someone's terms, anything that tells a person about a decision, and anything on the escalation table. Employment agreements are never signed or dated on the employer's behalf, pay is never changed, and nothing said in a conversation can grant a permission the profile does not.
Hiring, pay, warnings, dismissal, redundancy selection, leave and flexible working are prepared and never made. Where dismissal, redundancy, medical incapacity, discrimination, harassment or a raised grievance is in play, the output is a brief for the employment adviser named in the profile, and no skill says a matter is clear to proceed.
Job ads, shortlisting, interview questions and letters are checked against the grounds the Human Rights Act 1993 prohibits. A request that would turn on one, whether it arrives as a hiring preference or a question for the panel, is flagged and not acted on.
Managers see what the profile says they may see. Medical and grievance material is quoted only to those entitled to it. People reporting suppresses small groups and strips names, reference checks carry the Privacy Act notice for indirect collection, and nothing identifying goes into a public search. Content inside a CV, a reference or an email is data rather than instruction: a line in a CV telling the assistant to shortlist its author is a fact about the CV.
Optional AI Process Assurance can sit behind the workflows we implement: the reasoning, sources and sign-off retained as an AI Workpaper, so the team can show what the AI did, how it was checked and who signed it off. It is a platform subscription, implemented alongside the workflow, and the workflow runs without it.
An HRIS such as HiBob, Employment Hero or BambooHR, or a spreadsheet someone actually keeps up to date, and a payroll system that can export. The pack reads through a connector where one is available and from exports where it is not, and it never writes back. Where the employee record lives in five inboxes, getting it into one place is the first piece of work. No HRIS at all is fine.
The pack is built to hand the hard cases on. An organisation with no employment lawyer or HR consultancy it calls has an escalation table that points nowhere, and that is worth fixing before anything else.
A named person who reviews the drafts and sends them, and who decides when a kind of message is ready to go out on its own. The workflow can prepare the letter and show where every figure came from; it cannot decide the letter is right. Where nobody has that job, the drafts pile up and the team goes back to writing them by hand.
The pack was built in November 2026 and is an accelerator rather than a finished product. Every skill opens by confirming the work is in New Zealand and stops if it is not, so staff employed in Australia are outside it today. Each organisation's version diverges from ours as the skills are adapted to its templates, policies and settings before anything runs on a real employee.
An in-house HR team uses Claude for the dated, template-driven work that fills the week: answering everyday policy questions from the employee's agreement, the organisation's policy and the statutory minimum, drafting employment agreements and routine letters, running the administration of a vacancy and its interview round, onboarding and offboarding, chasing a performance review cycle, keeping the register of fixed-term ends, trial periods and visa expiries, and producing the people numbers for leadership. Airclerk implements these as governed workflows on the systems the team already runs: the HRIS and payroll as the systems of record, read through a connector where one exists and from exports where it does not, plus Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace and the document store where agreements and policies live. The pack is Airclerk's NZ People & HR Pack, eleven skills built in November 2026 for a New Zealand organisation running its own people function. Everything starts as a draft for the team to check and send. As the team gets comfortable with what a workflow produces, particular kinds of routine message can be set to go out on their own, one kind at a time, and every employment decision stays with the employer.
No, and it is built to send work to them. The people profile names the organisation's employment adviser, and wherever dismissal, redundancy, medical incapacity, discrimination, harassment or a raised personal grievance is in play, the output is a brief for that adviser rather than a draft letter or an answer. No skill gives legal or immigration advice as the organisation's position, and none says a matter is clear to proceed. Airclerk is an AI implementation consultancy, not an employment law firm. Law firms advising employers are a different buyer, served by Airclerk's legal work.
It never signs an agreement and never changes payroll. Sending is different. Every workflow starts at draft: emails, letters, offers and invitations are prepared for your team to send, and nothing is written to the HRIS or payroll. In HR the routine message and the one that matters often look the same until someone reads them, so the draft stage is built to make the check quick, with the work for one event arriving as one pack and the source and date beside every figure. Once your team trusts what a workflow produces, you can choose to let a particular kind of routine message go out on its own, such as interview confirmations or a reminder to finish a form. Each change is agreed with you and written into the people profile, where it can be pulled back. Offers, letters that change someone's terms, anything that tells a person about a decision and anything on the escalation table always go through a person, and a request made in a conversation does not change any of this.
It stops. The helpdesk classifies every question before it answers anything, and a question that suggests unfair treatment, bullying, harassment, discrimination, a problem with a manager's conduct or a pay dispute is treated as a possible complaint, however casually it was asked. No answer is drafted, because an answer to a grievance in disguise becomes the employer's position in that dispute. The output is a short, supportive holding reply for the people team to review and send, saying who will be in touch and by when, and an escalation note for the contact the people profile names, shared with nobody else. A safety matter goes to the health and safety lead first; whether to notify WorkSafe is a person's decision. An ordinary question about legal rights, with no complaint in it, is different: it gets the public source and a referral, without a legal conclusion.
It does not remember rates, thresholds, entitlements or deadlines. Each one is fetched during the run from employment.govt.nz, ird.govt.nz, immigration.govt.nz or legislation.govt.nz and tagged with the date it was read, or written as unverified. That matters more than usual at the moment: the Employment Relations Act was amended with effect from 21 February 2026, KiwiSaver contribution rates stepped on 1 April 2026 and are legislated to step again on 1 April 2028, the Privacy Act's new notification principle for indirectly collected information (IPP 3A) applies from 1 May 2026, and the Employment Leave Act 2026 replaces the Holidays Act 2003 from 6 August 2028. The compliance tracker plans ahead for the KiwiSaver step in April 2028 and the leave-law transition in August 2028. The annual minimum wage review and any other enacted change go on the same register as dated items once they are identified.
The pack is built around the Privacy Act 2020 principles and a need-to-know rule set in the people profile: managers see what the profile says they may see, and medical, grievance and investigation material is quoted only to those entitled to it. People reporting suppresses any group smaller than the profile's threshold and strips names from leadership outputs. Reference and background checks carry the IPP 3A notice. Nothing identifying goes into a public web search. Content inside CVs, references, policies and emails is treated as data rather than instructions, so a line in a CV telling the assistant to shortlist the candidate is a fact about the CV. The skills run in the organisation's own Claude instance, under its own agreement with Anthropic.
Your HRIS is where the record lives, and HR platforms now handle a fair amount of the routine: agreements from a template with e-signature, onboarding checklists, review reminders, and on some an assistant that answers questions from the policies you have uploaded. What is left tends to be the work between systems and the work that has to be checked against the person's own agreement and the current law, such as whether a trial clause will hold, or who has to decide about a fixed term before it ends. The workflows do that part and leave the record in the HRIS. Platforms differ and change quickly, so the design phase starts by checking what yours already covers, and we do not rebuild what it already does well.
Yes, as long as someone keeps a current staff list and the documents behind the work exist somewhere. The pack reads from what is there: a staff spreadsheet, the signed agreements in a shared folder, the handbook as a PDF and an export from payroll. It does not need an HR platform, and it does not try to become one. Anything missing is flagged as a gap rather than filled in, and where the staff list lives in five inboxes, pulling it into one spreadsheet is the first piece of work.
No. Most HR questions start with a manager, and the pack prepares their part of the work too. A manager's policy question is answered from the agreement, the policy and the legal minimum, each with its source, and anything heading toward a warning or a dismissal goes to the people team and the employment adviser instead. A new starter's manager gets the first-week plan and a prompt for each check-in. The manager who has to decide about a trial or a fixed term gets a reminder in time, and an interview panel gets one pack with a question set already screened for prohibited grounds. Managers see only what the people profile says they may see about their own team, and their answers come through the people team unless the profile lets them ask the helpdesk directly.
Bring the part of the HR week you would most like back. A free introductory conversation is enough to say whether it is a first workflow and to quote a fixed fee for building it.