Voice to Text for HR Professionals

HR Is a Documentation-Heavy Profession

Human Resources might be the most people-centric function in any organization, but the reality is that a huge portion of an HR professional's day is spent writing. Job descriptions, interview scorecards, offer letters, onboarding materials, performance review templates, policy documents, employee communications, termination notes, benefits explanations, training materials — the list is endless.

The paradox is painful: the more time you spend documenting, the less time you spend on the human interactions that make you effective. Every hour you spend typing a 2,000-word policy document is an hour you could have spent coaching a manager, supporting an employee, or designing a better onboarding experience.

Steno helps you reclaim that time. It's a macOS voice-to-text tool that lets you speak your documents instead of typing them. Hold a hotkey, dictate your content, release — and the text appears wherever your cursor is. Job descriptions, interview notes, policy drafts, and employee emails flow out at 150 words per minute instead of 40. That's not a marginal improvement — it's a fundamental shift in how fast you can produce documentation.

Pain Points Steno Solves for HR

HR Workflows That Get Faster with Voice

Job Descriptions and Postings

A good job description includes the role summary, key responsibilities, required qualifications, preferred skills, team description, benefits overview, and company culture statement. When you dictate this, you naturally flow through each section, explaining the role as you would to a candidate in a screening call. The result reads more naturally than most typed JDs, and it takes a third of the time to produce.

Interview Scorecards and Candidate Evaluations

After a 45-minute interview, you need to document your assessment across multiple dimensions — technical skills, communication, problem-solving, leadership potential, culture fit. Speaking your evaluation immediately after the interview captures specific examples, quotes, and observations that you'd forget by the time you sat down to type. This leads to more detailed, more useful feedback for hiring committees.

Employee Handbook and Policy Documents

Updating or creating handbook sections is a significant writing project. Whether it's a remote work policy, PTO guidelines, or a code of conduct update, dictating the first draft lets you get the substance down quickly. You already know the policy — you just need to get it into written form. Speaking it is the fastest path from knowledge to document.

Performance Review Documentation

Writing performance reviews — or helping managers write them — is one of the most time-consuming seasonal tasks in HR. Dictating review content lets you produce thoughtful, detailed evaluations without spending hours at the keyboard during review season. The conversational tone of dictated text often reads more authentically than stiffly typed reviews.

Internal Communications and Announcements

From benefits enrollment reminders to organizational change announcements, HR teams write a constant stream of company-wide communications. Dictating these messages produces a natural, approachable tone that employees actually read, and it takes a fraction of the time.

Typing vs. Voice: An HR Professional's Comparison

Want to see how fast you type today? Try our free typing speed test and imagine what you could do at 3x that speed.

Why HR Teams Choose Steno

HR professionals handle sensitive information, so privacy matters. Steno processes audio through Groq's enterprise-grade API with encryption in transit, and no audio or text content is stored after transcription. Your employee data stays confidential. Read more about how Steno handles data on our blog.

Steno works with every tool in your HR stack — BambooHR, Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, Google Docs, Notion, Slack, Gmail — because it operates at the macOS level, typing text wherever your cursor is positioned. There's nothing to configure, no plugins to install, and no learning curve. If you can talk, you can use Steno.

Frequently Asked Questions