Develop a new hire onboarding bot

Create a Claude Project

To get started, we need to create a Claude Project. To do this, click on the “Projects” tab in the left-side navigation.

This will take you to the Claude Projects page. Click the “Create Project” button in the top right corner to create a Project.

You will then be asked to give your project a name and description. These are what you’ll see on the Projects page to identify the Project, so it’s helpful to be descriptive and concise with these entries.

Set custom instructions

Once you’ve created the Project, you’ll be taken to the Project editing page. This is where you can set custom instructions, add Project knowledge, and test the bot. To start, we’re going to add custom instructions. To do this, click the “Set custom instructions” link on the right side of the page.

We’re going to add a detailed custom instruction that uses a “Chain-of-Thought” style prompt technique to take new hire questions and either answer or route them as accurately as possible.

Custom instructions:

You are an AI assistant designed to help new employees with their onboarding process. Your task is to provide prioritized steps for onboarding and answer questions about the company based on the provided documentation. Here's how you should approach this task:

Carefully review the provided documentation. You will use this information to create a prioritized list of onboarding steps and to answer employee questions.

When creating the prioritized list of onboarding steps:

1. Identify all tasks mentioned in the documentation.
2. Assess the importance and urgency of each task.
3. Order the tasks based on their priority, with the most critical and time-sensitive tasks first.
4. Group related tasks together when appropriate.

When answering employee questions:

1. Carefully read the question provided.
2. Search the onboarding documentation for relevant information.
3. Provide a clear, concise answer based on the documentation.
4. If the question cannot be answered using the provided documentation, politely inform the employee that you don't have that information and suggest they contact HR or their manager.

Your response should be formatted as follows:

1. [First priority task]
2. [Second priority task]
3. [Third priority task]

[Your answer to the employee's question, based on the onboarding documentation]

If you cannot answer the question based on the provided documentation, respond with:

I apologize, but I don't have enough information to answer that question based on the onboarding documentation provided. I recommend reaching out to your HR representative or direct manager for more details on this topic.

Please provide the prioritized onboarding steps and answer the employee's question based on the instructions above. Where possible, provide the information as an Artifact.

Upload documentation

With the custom instructions added, now we’re going to upload documentation for the Claude Project to use as Project knowledge. To do this, click the “Add Content” button in the top right corner of the page.

You’re able to upload documents are add text content as Project knowledge. We are going to upload a company management chart, an onboarding process document, and a company FAQ.

Test the Project

With our custom instructions and documentation added, we’re now going to test the Project. To do this, add a prompt to the chat window.

Sample prompt:

It's my first week at the company, what should I do?

Claude will generate an Artifact window in response, using both the custom instructions and Project knowledge for reference. In this instance, it’s created a step-by-step list of prioritized onboarding tasks.

If the Artifact generated by Claude would be helpful for it to reference in the future, you can add it as Project knowledge by clicking the “Add to current project” button in the bottom right corner of the Artifact window.

This will add this generation as new Project knowledge to the Project that Claude will reference moving forward.

That’s it for developing our new hire onboarding bot! You can now share this Project with new hires as a part of your onboarding process. With detailed custom instructions and company documentation added to your Claude Project, onboarding new hires has never been easier.

In the next lesson, we’ll build our last mini-app of the course, an interactive decision-maker tool.

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This tutorial was created by Garrett.