Starting point
The company, around 200 employees, had switched on Gemini for every organisational unit six months earlier. An IT email had announced it, and after that nothing happened in HR. The two people there had too much to do to try a new tool. A rejection started from the last rejection, name and role swapped. The onboarding document for a new hire was assembled on Friday afternoon from four old Docs. The quarterly turnover figures were built by one of the two alone, because only she knew the formulas.
The moment it tipped was a rejection. It sat in the inbox for three weeks because the person meant to write it was ill and the other did not know the case. The candidate eventually asked on LinkedIn, politely but for everyone to read, whether his application was still open. Management saw the post before HR did. The head of HR called me the next day. Not because she wanted a new system. She wanted candidate communication to stop depending on one person.
At the first meeting the head of HR, the works council chair and the data protection officer were all at the table. The works council said the sentence I hear in almost every one of these projects: nobody asked us when it was switched on what the tool does with personnel data. The data protection officer had read Google's documentation and was reassured about training and storage, but not about access to HR folders in Drive. That set the frame of the project before a single routine was built.
Approach
The first week belonged to the stopwatch. Both people in the team noted for a week which task came how often, how long it took and whether it ran in Gmail, Docs or Sheets. Added to that was a look at the Admin console with IT: Gemini was on for the whole company, with no distinction by organisational unit. The list in the end was short: candidate emails, onboarding documents and the analysis for management took the largest share of writing time, and none of the three needed a decision in the first step. Those became the three routines.
The works council was there from the first build session, not as an inspector but as a co-author. We walked through every routine together: what goes in, what comes out, who checks, where the result lands. The first decision concerned the Admin console: IT reset Gemini's activation per organisational unit, and the HR team's Drive has had a dedicated area ever since with the documents Gemini may use as context. Personnel files sit elsewhere. That separation ended up verbatim in the amendment to the IT works agreement, because the works council had phrased it itself.
Candidate communication was the first routine to stand. HR opens the application in Gmail, starts Gemini in the side panel with the company's prompt for acknowledgement, rejection or invitation, and gets a draft in the tone of its own templates. The review step is non-negotiable: salutation, role, date, no reason given in the rejection and nothing that points to a characteristic protected under the German Equal Treatment Act (AGG). Only then does the email go out. Onboarding followed in week three: one checklist per role sits in Docs, Gemini turns it into the document for the specific person, HR checks names, dates and rules.
The skeleton of the prompt from the project. This is the frame of the rejection prompt the team has worked with in Gmail since. It already works like this. What turned it into the company's own prompt during the project is listed below, and that is the part that gets the rejection out the same day.
The finished prompt, ready to copy
All six building blocks in one prompt. Replace the bracketed placeholders with your own details.
You are writing, as an HR officer at [company], a rejection email to [first name last name], who applied for the position of [job title]. The application is in this email. Tone: [tone from the company's own rejections]. Short sentences, formal address, no stock phrases. Content in this order: thanks for the application, naming the position. The decision in the first paragraph. One sentence on something specific from the application. Good wishes to close. Boundary: give no reason for the rejection, no comparison with other applicants, and nothing about age, origin, gender, religion, disability or any other personal characteristic. If a phrase leans in that direction, delete it without replacement. Mark every passage where you are unsure or make an assumption with [check]. Length: 120 words at most.
- The company's three rejection templates by stagewhich sentences follow the screening, the first interview and the second interview, and which never appear.
- The AGG checklistwhich phrases have led to a query in the company before and are therefore banned.
- The rule for follow-up questions from candidateswho answers, within what deadline, and what Gemini must not write in the process.
- The review stephow HR can tell in two minutes whether the draft can be sent.
The snag came in week four, with the analysis in Sheets. Gemini was meant to explain the turnover table and suggest formulas, and on the first attempt it pulled the name column into its explanation because the column was in the table. The sentence it wrote was accurate, and it should never have appeared in a document for management. The data protection officer then set the rule that has applied since: in Sheets Gemini gets only figures per department and month, no names, no employee IDs. The table was rebuilt, the works council added the rule to the agreement, and HR recalculates a sample of every explanation by hand.
In parallel ran the sessions on the wording of the works agreement. That was the slow part, and it should be: the works council meets every two weeks, the data protection officer reviewed the data processing terms with Google and the data transfers herself, and the clause on controlling the prompts was rewritten three times. The routines ran in test mode with anonymised applications during that time. At the end of month three the amendment was signed, and the team ran the three routines alone for a week while I stayed in the background.
Outcome
A rejection now runs like this: HR opens the application, starts Gemini with the company's prompt, checks salutation, role and boundary, sends. If one person is ill, the other does it with the same prompt, and no rejection is left sitting any more. The onboarding document comes from the role's checklist, without the predecessor's name. The analysis for management is built by Gemini in Sheets from figures without personal data, and the one person who knew the formulas is no longer the bottleneck.
The works council signed the amendment to the IT works agreement, with the three use cases, the activation per organisational unit, the review step, the no-personal-data rule in Sheets and a review date after six months. The team has since built a fourth routine on its own, job ads from the requirements profile in Docs, and presented it to the works council at the review, as the agreement provides. It did not need me for that, and that was the point of the project.