I Felt That Am Behind on AI in Recruitment (Part 1)

I felt like I was behind on AI in recruitment, so I mapped the entire hiring funnel to figure out what tools exist, how they can really work together, and what is legal in Europe.

I suffer from chronic FOMO when it comes to the advancements in my profession. And it has gotten way worse since I am a solopreneur.

Also, I am constantly on LinkedIn, in Slack communities (the most fomo inducing one is PromptMates) or in WhatsApp groups - reading the posts and articles of people who are way smarter than I am. I do know good recruitment inside out, I do build with Replit, Claude (Co-Work / Design / Chat), Lovable, but there is soooo much I have not done yet.

There are hundreds of tools out there. New ones pop up every week. Aggregator websites with logos crammed into category maps. AI features baked into every ATS. MCP servers. n8n workflows. Codex.

And so on… I look at all of it and I feel overwhelmed. And then I thought: if I feel this way, with my background and my network and my access to information, how are TA teams inside companies feeling?

Like, a team with four recruiters, 30 open roles, a Slack workspace and an ATS they are using at maybe 40% of its capacity? So I decided to stop scrolling and start building.

What this series is

I am going to walk through the entire recruitment funnel, from the moment a role gets approved all the way to quality of hire tracking six months after someone joins, and map out what I believe could be automated, with which tools, and under which legal constraints.

The stages I will cover:

• Role approval and the intake/hiring strategy meeting

• Job posting and distribution

• Sourcing (outbound, referrals, internal candidates)

• Application review and screening

• Interview scheduling and candidate preparation Interviews (scorecards, notes, assessments, technical challenges)

• Offer, negotiation, equity explanation

• Contract and handoff to HR Onboarding and quality of hire tracking

• Reporting and analytics across the TA function

For each stage, I will cover:

• What most recruiters still do today (the real version, not the job description or glamorised version)

• What your ATS can probably do already if you turn on the right features

• What are some dedicated tools for that stage (with EU compliance notes where I can find them)

• What you can build yourself with tools like Claude, n8n, Slack, Zapier, Lovable, Replit, Claude Code, and whatever else fits

• The unspoken problems that live at each stage

• And in at least one stage per article, I will include a step-by-step walkthrough of something you can build and test yourself.

What this series is not

I am not an AI engineer. I am not a developer. I am not a legal expert in EU regulation. I am a talent acquisition expert who got tired of feeling confused and decided to learn this properly, by playing around with it.

I will get things wrong and I expect people to tell me when I do. I am also not here to sell you a specific tool. I do not have partnerships or affiliate deals with any of the companies I will mention.

The compliance landscape you need to be aware of

3 pieces of EU regulation intersect with everything in this series.

I will reference them throughout, but here is the short version:

1. GDPR has been in force since 2018 and applies to all candidate data processing.

If you collect CVs, store candidate information, or use AI to evaluate applicants, you need a lawful basis for processing, you need to honour data subject rights, and you cannot make fully automated decisions about people without human oversight.

2. The EU AI Act classifies AI used in recruitment as high-risk. The original deadline for these obligations was 2 August 2026.

That has changed. The EU Council and Parliament reached a provisional agreement in May 2026 to push the deadline for standalone high-risk AI systems (including recruitment tools) to 2 December 2027. Formal adoption is expected in the coming weeks. This gives companies more time to prepare, but it does not mean you should wait. The obligations are coming: risk management, transparency to candidates, human oversight, bias testing, and logging of AI-assisted decisions.

3. The EU Pay Transparency Directive takes effect on 7 June 2026. That is right now.

Employers must provide salary ranges in job postings or before the first interview, and they can no longer ask candidates about their salary history. Some member states are delayed in transposing the directive into national law (the Netherlands, for instance), but the Commission expects compliance by the deadline.

This will change how you write job ads, how you brief hiring managers, and how you handle offer negotiations. I will cover this in the relevant stages of the series.

Who this is for

TA leaders and recruiters working in or hiring into Europe (primarily).

People who know their craft but feel behind on the technology layer. People who want to understand what is possible before they spend money. People who are curious enough to try building something themselves, even if they have never opened n8n or written a prompt in Claude.

If you are already building AI-powered recruitment automations and you find gaps or mistakes in what I share, please reach out. I would rather be corrected than confident and wrong.

Where to start

The first article in the series will cover application review and screening. I chose this one first (even if it is counter-intuitive) because it is the highest-volume, most repetitive task in the funnel and the one where automation makes the most immediate difference for a stretched TA team. I will publish it next week. Follow along if this resonates.