It’s a cliché as old as working for a living itself: lying on your CV. A 2024 survey by employment screening firm DISA Global Solutions found that, among 1,500 Dutch citizens, one in eight admitted misrepresenting the truth in job applications. The most common lies involved people exaggerating their work experience, skill level, hobbies and length of employment. In full disclosure, I’ve never outright lied on a CV, but I may have suggested that the Buy 3 Get 1 Freebook offer I suggested when I worked in a bookshop one summer, which failed and lasted about a week, was actually a ‘highly successful and comprehensive implementation of a season-wide sales tactic’. So for years employers have been sifting through CVs that contain a fair number of lies, trying to decipher fact from fiction; one person trying to convince another.
However, in recent years, technological developments have meant that this battle is no longer being fought only by humans, but by two different AI systems. It is now becoming increasingly common for both applicants and employers to use AI during the application and evaluation process.
A 2026 Tellent/Panel Inzicht survey found that 48% of Dutch applicants surveyed had used AI tools during the application process, including 27% for motivation letters and 22% for CVs. AI is also beginning to change how people find vacancies: Stand van Werven 2026 found that the share of Dutch people using LLMs such as ChatGPT or Perplexity to find jobs rose from 3.5% at the end of 2024 to 7.6% in 2025. Employer-side figures are harder to compare, but a 2022 SEO study found that 12% of Dutch employers directly used algorithmic tools to select candidates for interview rounds, rising to 27% when external recruitment providers were included.
According to Tim van Leeuwerden, AI expert and lecturer at Fontys University of Applied Sciences, this development is creating a fundamental shift in how jobseekers should approach their applications. ‘In this new way of applying, you often convince a computer first, and only then a human,’ he told UWV, the Dutch public agency responsible for employee insurance benefits, unemployment support and helping people find work.
Humans can recognise the passion and creativity that someone may bring to an application, but, as Van Leeuwerden puts it, ‘at the moment, AI can only recognise text. It does not recognise a beautiful story, passion or empathy’. So when employers use AI systems that can evaluate large numbers of job applications quickly, keywords found in the job description may take on greater significance than the presentation of a strong emotional connection with the specific job or sector.
The EU is trying to regulate the employer side of this shift through the European AI Act. The law does not ban employers from using AI to sort applications, but it does stop them treating recruitment AI as a casual black box. Systems used to target job adverts, filter applications or assess candidates are classed as ‘high-risk’, meaning they must meet stricter rules on testing, transparency, data quality, human oversight and discrimination risk. In practical terms, an employer should not be able to reject someone simply because an unexplained system ranked them badly. The machine can assist the hiring process, but it cannot be allowed to become an unaccountable replacement for it.
Of course, there is no simple silver bullet to these issues. AI systems will continue to become more sophisticated, and as they become increasingly embedded in everyday life, more people will use them to write their CVs, and more employers will use them for recruitment. When people present dystopian visions of how AI will revolutionise human life, I’m not sure many imagined it boiling down to one computer trying to trick another into believing bungee jumping is actually one of their hobbies.
Written by James Turrell