Starting point
Reference letter requests run informally in many companies: a short message from the manager, three bullet points, sometimes just a quick word in the hallway. The result is a reference letter HR has to write from thin material — either they follow up, which costs time, or the letter stays generic, which is not fair to the person leaving.
The real bottleneck is rarely bad intent, it is a form without structure: open text fields lead to short, incomplete answers, no matter how good the manager's intentions are.
Approach
The first attempt almost always fails because the form fields are too open. The approach that works turns this around: fixed fields for core tasks, area of responsibility, two or three concrete results, and behaviour within the team, plus a note directly in the form that the reference letter is only as good as the notes the manager enters.
n8n automatically creates a task in the HR filing system from the completed form, with all notes cleanly sorted by section. HR writes the reference letter from this template without having to chase the manager. A language model is explicitly optional here: it can propose a first plain-text draft in standard reference-letter phrasing from the notes, but only if a company has generally approved the use of a language model for personal data — without that approval, it stays at the structured list, and HR writes the text themselves.
The finished draft always goes to HR, never directly to the manager or the person concerned. The automation lacks the legal competence for the principle of goodwill and standard phrasing codes — that remains a task for a human with employment-law judgement.
Step by step
Design fixed fields for tasks, responsibility, results, behaviour together with HR.
Review and organise existing phrasing building blocks for performance and behaviour assessments.
Connect the form trigger, task creation in the HR filing system, and optionally a language-model node.
Run two real but non-critical reference letter requests through the new process as a test.
Establish that every draft is approved by HR with employment-law judgement before it is sent — permanently, not just at the start.
Outcome
Three sentences in the hallway become a structured form HR can process directly without follow-up questions. The time saved is in the first draft, not in the review — that stays deliberately manual.
Managers tend to fill out the form more thoroughly than an open message, because the fixed fields set a concrete expectation instead of leaving room for interpretation.
Prerequisites
- Form toolA form n8n can read structured fields from (e.g. embedded in the HR software or standalone).
- Phrase libraryExisting, legally reviewed phrasing building blocks for common performance levels.
- Clear approval ownershipOne person in HR who takes legal responsibility for every draft before it is sent.
writes this from own n8n projects in HR teams, composited and without client names. Mehr zum Autor