Give HR teams their time back — with smarter search

Take any employee. Give them a simple question — “How much PTO do I have left?” Now watch what happens. They open a portal, click through a handbook, dig through old emails… and still end up pinging HR. Not because the answer doesn’t exist, but because finding it is harder than it should be.

These routine (and often policy-based) inquiries are often easily answered with existing documentation that employees should be able to access on their own. Unfortunately, that's typically right where things break down. 

What usually happens is that employees don't know where to find these resources, can't access them, or uncover multiple versions with conflicting answers. So they turn to HR for help, tying up staff with basic questions.

Enterprise search can help deflect these requests by empowering employees to instantly find accurate answers across policies, benefits portals, handbooks, and intranets. 

Whether they're looking for PTO balances or policy guidelines, teams can get the answers they need instantly, without submitting a ticket, resulting in better employee satisfaction, lower HR overhead, and better operational efficiency.

Why HR teams are drowning in repeat questions 

Distributed teams, complex policies, employees who expect answers now — these all put constant pressure on your team, making HR feel like a never-ending inbox. Every request, whether it comes from email, Slack, ticketing systems, or walk-ups, is one more interruption pulling HR away from higher-value work.

Roughly 79% of employees surveyed need HR help at least once a month, adding up to around 86,500 inquiries annually in a 2,000-person company — and over 2 million in a 50,000-person enterprise. 

Most of these questions don't go through formal channels, making it even harder for HR to keep up. Volume spikes higher after hiring surges, open enrollment, or policy changes stretch HR teams thinner. 

A lot of the load comes from the same sources: PTO and holiday calendars, benefits details, payroll questions, basic policy clarifications. The answers are often scattered around in tools like Notion, wikis, handbooks, and intranets, but employees can't find them quickly or easily on their own. 

The true cost of HR overhead 

Imagine your HR team on a Monday morning. Inbox full, Slack buzzing, and employees lining up with questions about benefits eligibility or PTO availability. 

If you get 1,000 of those questions a month, and each one takes five minutes, that's 83 hours your team won't get back — hours that could go toward coaching managers or preparing performance and salary reviews. 

These costs stack up across four main areas:

• Time: Answering repeat questions rather than doing strategic work
• Money: Lost productivity from constant interruptions
• Employee experience: Frustration from delayed responses and confusing guidance
• Risk/compliance: Errors or oversights from scattered and inconsistent policies across multiple tools 

The impacts go beyond this, causing HR burnout rates to rise and leading to higher employee turnover. 

Every hour spent fielding routine requests is an hour not spent on strategic work, like driving DEI efforts, rolling out training programs, or planning employee engagement campaigns. 

What is enterprise search in the HR context?

Enterprise search uses AI to understand natural language requests and surface answers from various data sources and repositories, such as knowledge bases, ticketing systems, HRIS, handbooks, and intranets. 

Rather than digging through multiple handbooks and HRIS portals, employees can just ask a question in plain language — like "How many vacation days do I have?" or "When does open enrollment start?" — and get an immediate, reliable answer. 

It's designed to respect roles, permissions, and locations, so it understands who you are, where you work, and what you're entitled to access. A benefits question from someone in California pulls up the right state-specific info, while an employee in the U.K. sees the resources relevant to them. 

Enterprise search doesn't force workers to use a new tool either. It lives where they already work (web apps, Slack, Microsoft Teams, HR portals), so they can get the responses they need without changing tools. Whether it's holiday calendars, org charts, policies, or benefits, enterprise search surfaces the relevant information employees need, so HR teams don't have to.

HR requests enterprise search can address

Most HR tickets are simple, repetitive, and ripe for deflection, like confirming health coverage or checking vacation balances. Enterprise search can make those answers accessible right away, so employees aren't waiting on HR. And HR can turn to work that needs human judgment, like handling complex benefits disputes or advising on compliance issues. 

Below, we'll break down the types of questions that often benefit the most from intelligent enterprise search.

Time off and holiday calendars 

Time-off questions are some of the most common tickets HR sees: "How much PTO time do I have left?", "Is Juneteenth a company holiday?" Employees tend to waste time searching through outdated calendars or multiple portals to find answers. 

Enterprise search can integrate directly with company calendars and HR systems to solve this problem. With a quick, conversational query, employees can see upcoming holidays or how many personal days they have left. More robust tools can also tailor results based on role or location, preventing confusion about local policies or regional holidays. 

Benefits, insurance, and reimbursements

Benefits enrollment always raises a lot of questions, from "Which health plan covers dental?" to "When do I need to submit my forms?" Tracking down the right document or digging through emails wastes valuable time. Enterprise search can put the answers front and center. 

Employees can instantly pull up benefit information, plan details, open enrollment deadlines, and reimbursement policies, which AI search personalizes to their role, location, and eligibility. It's a big time-saver during onboarding or major life moments, like adding a dependent or relocating. 

Payroll and compensation 

FAQs like "When's the next payday?" or "How do I update my bank info?" are never-ending. Even small changes, like checking a bonus schedule or pulling a tax form, can trigger a ticket if employees can't find the info fast. 

With enterprise search, employees can look up pay dates, bonus or RSU schedules, and tax documents — tailored to their role and respecting permissions — without waiting for a response from HR. Surfacing this information using enterprise search means fewer sensitive back-and-forths and payroll tickets. 

Company policies and documentation

Work-from-home rules, parental leave, remote stipends, flex hours, sick leave, travel reimbursement — navigating these policies can feel like a scavenger hunt for employees. They might check a wiki, skim through a PDF handbook, or dig through the HR portal, only to come up with outdated or conflicting info. 

Enterprise search can pull information from all connected sources choosing answers from authoritative, up-to-date sources, reducing conflicting HR information. Employees can ask questions like, "Am I eligible for a remote work stipend?" or "Can I work from home on Fridays?" and get accurate, personalized guidance, without having to submit a ticket and wait for a response. 

Training

Ever feel like you're constantly bookmarking training course links, only to forget where you saved them when you actually need them? Deadlines for mandatory courses, optional learning programs, or certifications can also be hard to track down. 

Enterprise search can help employees spend more time focusing on training and less time looking for URLs. All they have to do is ask "When is the DEI training due?" or "Where's the link for the cybersecurity course?" to get immediate and dependable answers. 

How enterprise search reduces HR workload 

HR ends up buried in the same questions week after week — "When can I change my benefits?", "How do I request time off?", "What's the remote work policy?" Employees spend valuable time trying to find answers, and HR keeps repeating the same explanations. 

With AI-powered enterprise search, employees can ask these simple, straightforward questions in an integrated, familiar tool (whether it's an HR portal, Teams, or Slack) and get a response immediately. When an employee asks "How do I change my direct deposit account?" in a chat, the platform can pull the answer from the connected HRIS in seconds and provide a clear, accurate response. 

This approach means HR can spend less time on repetitive work and more on high-impact work, like employee engagement initiatives or training programs. It also gives HR one source of truth to maintain, optimizing knowledge management for human resources professionals and employees alike. 

Additionally, teams can also use enterprise search analytics to track what people are searching for and uncover gaps in content or policies, so HR has a heads up on when to update guidance. If multiple employees ask, "How do I enroll in commuter benefits?" over a short period of time, for example, it may indicate that the current resource is unclear or missing. 

Impact beyond HR — benefits across the org

Enterprise search can help to streamline support for the whole organization, not just make HR's load lighter. 

• IT sees fewer tickets about account access or password resets linked to HR onboarding. 
• Finance gets fewer repeat questions about expense reimbursements or health savings account contributions.
• Legal spends less time answering inquiries about employment contracts or NDAs.
• Managers also benefit. Rather than fielding questions like, "How do I submit an expense for reimbursement?" or "What's the limit for home office equipment?" they can direct employees to self-service answers. This reduces burnout and lets managers focus on strategic initiatives, like team development and project delivery. 

Cross-functional collaboration also improves when everyone is working from the same accurate information instead of their own data silos. Onboarding accelerates, as employees get instant help when they need it, and processes scale more efficiently as your company grows. 

What to look for in an enterprise search solution

Not all enterprise search tools are built for HR. Some work fine for finding documents, but fall apart when real employees ask real questions — especially when answers change by role, region, system, or record. Security is also a factor, as HR and employee records often contain sensitive information. Solutions that don't address security just won't cut it.

Newer enterprise search platforms that use agentic AI can reason across connected HR systems, versus only surface information from a single portal or knowledge base They can also go beyond search functionality and actually initiate the next step on an employee's behalf. Instead of stopping at "here's the policy," they can trigger workflows like submitting a PTO request or updating personal information. 

From access control and language understanding to user experience and long-term maintenance, here's what separates basic or traditional search from enterprise search that holds up in an HR environment. 

Real-time, role-based access

A good enterprise search system knows exactly who's asking and what they're allowed to see. A manager checking PTO balances for their team can view approvals and remaining days, while an individual contributor only sees their own. Employees in different countries or regions get local holiday calendars and region-specific benefits — without HR manually curating documents for each group.

Access-aware search tools help keep sensitive HR and payroll information secure, but they also reduce the confusion that happens when employees see policies that don't apply to them.

Natural language understanding 

Employees don't ask questions using standard "policy language." They ask them conversationally, often with typos, partial details, or multiple requests at once — "Can I carry over unused vacation days to next year, and what's our leave policy in Canada?" A strong enterprise search can parse these queries, returning precise, actionable answers.

It can also understand HR-specific terminology and synonyms. "Maternity leave," "parental leave," or "family leave" all point to the right policy, no matter how the question is phrased. And multilingual support ensures employees in different regions get accurate guidance in their preferred language. 

When a tool is easy to use and actually saves employees time, adoption climbs naturally. Plus, HR doesn't have to teach teams how to ask the "right" way, reducing training time. 

Deep integrations with HR tools 

A search platform is only as useful as the systems it connects to. Look for deep integrations with: 

• HRIS solutions like Workday or Oracle
• Benefits platforms
• Payroll systems
• Ticketing tools like ServiceNow
• Internal knowledge sources like Confluence or intranet wikis 

These connections let the platform surface both general knowledge (think policies and handbooks) and personalized data, like PTO balances or reimbursement status. When an employee asks, "How many sick days do I have available?", search pulls the exact number from the HRIS, rather than pointing to a handbook. The more systems indexed, typically the more complete the answer. 

Multi-channel, employee-first experience 

Employees don't just use one platform, so enterprise search shouldn't either. Whether they ask questions in Slack, the HR portal, on mobile, or via Teams, a multi-channel approach ensures they get the same answer and same search experience.

An employee might check their PTO balance while on a laptop at the office, then later ask a benefits question from their phone at home. The search platform keeps answers consistent across every channel, so HR doesn't have to track where questions came from or worry about discrepancies. 

This approach encourages employee self-service and boosts adoption. Employees trust the tool because it works where and how they work, instead of forcing them into a new system or workflow. 

Ease of implementation and maintenance 

Enterprise search implementation shouldn't feel like another big IT project. Platforms that work out of the box and offer pre-built connectors to existing HR systems save weeks of setup and reduce friction for employees. 

Once it's up and running, it should mostly take care of itself. Policy updates, new benefits, or HRIS changes that automatically flow through means minimal admin for your teams. 

How Moveworks increases efficiency and simplifies HR support 

By the time most HR teams realize how much time they’re losing to repetitive questions, the damage is already baked into the organization — slower onboarding, inconsistent answers, frustrated employees, and support teams stuck in reactive mode. Moveworks is designed to flip that equation.

Moveworks delivers an enterprise search platform built to understand the full context behind every HR question — the role, location, policy, and system behind it — and return the exact answer employees need in seconds. HR teams that once fielded hundreds of routine questions each week now redirect that time toward work that actually moves the company forward.

But the real shift happens when search and action merge. Moveworks doesn’t just surface information. It can guide employees through the next step, whether that means opening the right request form, checking a balance in Workday, or triggering a workflow to update personal information. What used to require an HR rep, a chain of emails, or a walk-up conversation now happens instantly inside Slack, Teams, or the Moveworks web experience.

This turns HR from a help desk into a strategic function. Employees get answers without waiting. HR frees up hours previously spent on clarifications, follow-ups, and manual lookups. Ticket queues shrink. Knowledge stays consistent. And support teams finally get the bandwidth to focus on real priorities — improving programs, strengthening culture, and shaping the employee experience.

Moveworks is where repeat questions end and real HR work begins.

Give your HR teams time back and reduce friction across your organization — book a demo today to see Moveworks Enterprise Search in action.