Is this actually free, or do I hit a paywall at the end?

Free. The policy is complete on this page, you can copy or download it right now, and there is no email step. The paid kit is a separate thing you can ignore.

Is this legal advice?

No. It is practical business guidance written to be usable, not a legal document. Employment and privacy law differ by country, so have your final version checked against your local law before you rely on it.

Can we use AI to write job advertisements?

Yes, and it is one of the better uses. An advertisement contains no candidate data, and a tool is genuinely good at flagging wording that would narrow your applicant pool without you meaning to. Check the output before it publishes, as with anything else that leaves the business.

What if our applicant tracking system has AI built into it?

Then it goes through the approval step in section 5 like any other tool, and the question to answer is specifically whether it ranks or filters candidates. Features arriving inside software you already use are the most common way a screening restriction gets bypassed, because nobody experiences it as adopting a new tool.

Free generator

An AI usage policy built for a recruitment agency.

Recruitment is the one sector where the obvious AI use case and the biggest AI risk are the same activity. This writes the policy that separates them, filled in for your agency.

No email required. No signup. Copy it, download it, use it.

Your business

Business name

Who staff ask when unsure

Who approves new AI tools

Approved tools

Tool 1

Tool 2 (optional)

Tool 3 (optional)

Settings

A breach is treated as

Reviewed every

Policy owner

Require staff to note AI use on customer-facing written work Include the bias and fairness section

AI Usage Policy

AI Usage Policy for [Business name]

A plain-language policy covering what staff may and may not do with AI tools at work. Read it, adapt anything that does not fit, then circulate it.

1. Why we have this policy

[Business name] uses AI tools because they save time and improve our work. They also carry real risks: leaking confidential or customer data, producing wrong or biased output, and creating work that nobody has checked. This policy sets out how we use AI so we get the benefit without the harm.

It applies to everyone: employees, contractors, and anyone acting on behalf of [Business name].

2. The one rule that matters most

Never put information into an AI tool that you would not email to a stranger.

If you are unsure whether something is safe to enter, it is not. Ask your manager before you proceed. Asking is always the right call and nobody will think less of you for it.

3. What you must never enter into a public AI tool

Unless the specific tool has been approved for it in writing, never enter:

CVs, resumes, and cover letters in whole or in part
Candidate names, contact details, addresses, and dates of birth
Interview notes, reference checks, and assessment results
Salary expectations, current remuneration, and offer details
Anything revealing a candidate's age, nationality, health, family situation, or other protected characteristic
Client vacancy briefs marked confidential, and client hiring plans
Placement fees, margins, and terms of business

4. Approved tools

Only use AI tools on this list for work. Using an unapproved tool for work is a breach of this policy.

Tool	Approved for	Not approved for
[Tool name]	Drafting a job advertisement, improving the wording of a rejection email, or summarising a public job description	Any candidate document or identifier, and any screening, ranking, scoring or shortlisting task

Free consumer versions of AI tools often train on what you enter and keep it. Paid business tiers usually let you turn that off. Only approve a tool once someone has checked how it handles your data.

5. Getting a new tool approved

Want to use an AI tool that is not on the list? Do not just start using it. Send a request to the operations manager with three things: what the tool is, what you want to use it for, and what data it would touch. The operations manager will check its data handling and security before approving or declining, and approved tools are added to the table above.

6. You are accountable for what AI produces

AI makes mistakes. It invents facts, gets numbers wrong, and is often confidently incorrect.

Check everything before it leaves the business. You are responsible for any AI-assisted work you send to a customer, publish, or rely on for a decision, exactly as if you had written it yourself.
Never send AI output to a customer or an external party without a person reading it first.
Do not use AI to make final decisions about people, including hiring, firing, discipline and pay, or about anything with legal, safety, or financial consequences. AI can assist your thinking. A person decides.

7. Be honest about AI use

If a customer or a colleague asks whether something was AI-assisted, tell the truth.
Do not present AI-generated work as if it involved professional judgement that it did not.
Customer-facing written work must note where AI was used in preparing it.

8. AI must not decide who gets rejected

AI may assist a person's thinking about candidates. It must never rank, score, filter or reject them.

Specifically: no AI tool is to be used to sift an applicant pool, order a shortlist, or generate a hire or reject recommendation. A person reads and a person decides, and that person is accountable for the decision in the same way they would be without the tool.

Where AI is used at any point in a selection process, record what it was used for. If a decision is ever challenged, the difference between a defensible process and an indefensible one is usually whether anyone wrote down what the tool actually did.

9. Bias and fairness

AI reflects the data it was trained on and can produce biased or unfair output. Be especially careful using AI for anything involving people, and never let it be the sole basis for a decision that affects someone.

10. If something goes wrong

If you accidentally enter sensitive information into an AI tool, or you spot AI output that has caused a problem, tell your manager straight away. The point is to fix it fast, not to assign blame. Reporting something early is always treated better than a hidden problem that surfaces later.

11. Breaches

Not following this policy may be treated as a disciplinary matter under our normal procedures, because it can put the business, our customers, and our people at real risk.

Policy owner: [name and role]

Applies to: [Business name]

Version date: [date]

Review: every six months, because AI tools change fast

The risk that dominates in recruitment

Everywhere else, the AI risk is a data risk. Here there are two, and the second one is the one people underestimate.

The data risk is ordinary and large: a CV is a dense package of personal information about someone who gave it to you for one specific purpose, and agencies handle them in volume. Pasting a CV into a consumer tool sends a named individual's employment history, contact details and often their age and nationality to a third party they have never heard of.

The second risk is that AI-assisted screening can produce a discriminatory outcome without anyone intending one. A model ranking candidates reproduces the patterns in what it was trained on, and it will do so consistently, at scale, and with an appearance of neutrality that makes it harder to challenge than a human decision. A person who quietly favours certain candidates affects their own shortlist. A screening process that does it affects every shortlist, and it leaves a record.

This is why the fairness section in this policy is stronger than the general version. It is not a values statement here. It is the operational control.

What this looks like in practice

A consultant has 180 applicants for one role and a client expecting a shortlist tomorrow. The obvious move is to paste the CVs in and ask for the best ten.

That is a breach twice over under this policy. It sends 180 people's personal information to a third party, and it hands the selection decision itself to a tool whose reasoning cannot be reconstructed or defended.

The permitted version is narrower and still useful: write out the role's actual requirements, use AI to pressure-test whether those requirements are the right ones and whether any is unnecessarily excluding people, then screen the applicants yourself against the improved criteria. The tool improves the standard. It never applies it.

What makes this workable is that the consultant is not being asked to give up the time saving entirely. They are being asked to take it at the step where a wrong answer is visible, rather than the step where it is not.

Why this is free

An AI policy is the first thing a business needs and the easiest thing to put off. Charging for it would just mean fewer businesses have one. Handing it over, with no email wall in front of it, is also the honest way to show you what our work is like before you spend anything.

Use it, change it, put your own letterhead on it. There is no attribution requirement and nothing to sign.

If the policy was useful

The policy is document one of nine.

A policy tells people where the line is. It does not tell you which tools to trust, where AI is actually worth using in your business, or whether any of it paid off. That is the rest of the kit.

Data governance checklist, so you know what a tool does with your data before it touches it
Tool evaluation scorecard, with two real tools compared and the better product losing
Use-case grid, seven candidates scored including the high-value one worth refusing
90-day adoption plan, with the staff announcement script and the five failure modes
ROI tracker, a worked quarter and the three challenges a sceptic always makes
Prompt libraries for finance, operations, marketing, HR and customer service

Get the full kit$149 one time, nine documents

Other versions of this policy

The same document rebuilt around a different set of risks. If none of these is you, the general version is the place to start.

Questions

Is this actually free, or do I hit a paywall at the end?: Free. The policy is complete on this page, you can copy or download it right now, and there is no email step. The paid kit is a separate thing you can ignore.
Is this legal advice?: No. It is practical business guidance written to be usable, not a legal document. Employment and privacy law differ by country, so have your final version checked against your local law before you rely on it, particularly the breaches section.
Can I edit it and put my own branding on it?: Yes. Change anything, remove sections that do not apply, add your logo. There is no attribution requirement.
Does it work outside New Zealand?: The policy is deliberately written without country-specific law in it, so the substance travels. The one part to check locally is how breaches are handled under your employment rules.
How long should an AI policy be?: Short enough that people read it. A one-page policy that staff follow beats a twenty-page document nobody opens. This one is deliberately about one page once you delete what does not apply.
How often should we update it?: Every six months is a sensible default while AI tools are changing this fast, and immediately if you approve a new tool or something goes wrong.
Can we use AI to write job advertisements?: Yes, and it is one of the better uses. An advertisement contains no candidate data, and a tool is genuinely good at flagging wording that would narrow your applicant pool without you meaning to. Check the output before it publishes, as with anything else that leaves the business.
What if our applicant tracking system has AI built into it?: Then it goes through the approval step in section 5 like any other tool, and the question to answer is specifically whether it ranks or filters candidates. Features arriving inside software you already use are the most common way a screening restriction gets bypassed, because nobody experiences it as adopting a new tool.
Who wrote this?: Plainstart, a brand of Sypher Limited. We publish plain-language operational material for small and medium businesses adopting AI.