Every "AI for HR" piece this year talked about throughput: faster screening, faster onboarding, faster ticket resolution. None of them explained how a People team defends an automated rejection in front of the EEOC, or produces an offer-letter audit trail when the system says the recruiter sent it but the recruiter was asleep. HR is the vertical where every automated action is one subpoena away from a deposition.
Dock is built around the question the capability conversation skipped.
Three HR workflows where Dock fits
Recruiting pipeline. A typed table per role, one row per candidate, columns for stage, source, screening notes, decision rationale. A triage agent reads inbound applications, scores them against the rubric, writes attributed rows, routes the top of the funnel to the recruiter. Because every agent is a first-class principal, the screening note carries the agent id AND the owning recruiter's id. A candidate who later files an adverse-impact claim gets a coherent record of who looked at the application, not a reconstruction from chat logs.
Onboarding sequence. A doc surface holds the new-hire runbook. A table surface holds the per-hire checklist: laptop shipped, payroll set up, benefits enrolled, manager 1:1 scheduled. A sequence agent walks each hire through the checklist, marking rows complete as systems confirm, escalating stuck items. The runbook and the checklist live in the same workspace, so the agent's shared surface is also the new hire's, the manager's, and the auditor's.
Employee Q&A. A doc surface holds the knowledge base: policy, benefits, leave, accommodations. A knowledge-base agent answers questions by reading the doc and replying with citations to specific sections. When the answer needs human judgement (a leave request, an ADA accommodation, a comp question), the agent escalates instead of guessing. Its writes are scoped: it cannot edit the legal sections without a human review pass.
Why the principal model matters for HR specifically
SHRM's 2025 Benchmarking Report puts the average cost per non-executive hire at $5,475, with executive hires at $35,879 (SHRM, 2025 Recruiting Benchmarking). Every one of those hires is also a potential ATS audit, EEOC investigation, or state labour records request. When an agent screens a candidate today, the ATS records the recruiter as the actor. The recruiter has no defence when the audit asks who actually read the application.
Dock's dual-keyed audit log records the agent principal id AND the owning user id on every privileged write. The discrimination-claim question "which agent screened this candidate, what rubric did it apply, and who is accountable" is a query, not a forensic project. The agent identity layer is the substrate that makes HR records defensible at all.
Why dangerous-ops gates matter here
Gartner's May 2025 HR survey found 82% of HR leaders plan to deploy agentic AI within twelve months (Gartner, Future of AI in HR). A meaningful share will give the agent authority to send offer letters, post terminations, and change comp. None of those are recoverable. An offer letter sent in error is a binding contract. A termination revokes access, ends payroll, and ends benefits inside the hour.
Dock's dangerous-ops contract gates those operations the same way it gates plan upgrades. The agent proposes, receives a confirm token, surfaces the proposal to the owning recruiter or People partner, and only executes after the human confirms. Single-use, time-bound, bound to the specific candidate and action. The HR partner is the principal of record. The agent did the legwork. The audit log says both.
The People team's worst day, bounded
The chat-assistant pattern asks an HR team to trust that the agent will do the right thing every time. Dock asks the substrate to make the worst-case agent bounded: scoped credentials, dual-keyed attribution, dangerous-ops gates on the actions that cannot be undone. The same patterns Dock applies to finance, legal, and sales, applied to the workflows that hire and let people go.