74% of Job Seekers Use AI to Apply, but Most Companies Have No Policy

Three in four job candidates now use generative artificial intelligence to prepare their CVs, cover letters, and answers to recruitment questions. That's according to Michael Page's Talent Trends 2026 report, published on July 7, 2026. The trend is growing so fast that companies are struggling to determine where acceptable support ends and cheating begins.

How Fast It's Growing

The increase has been sharp. As recently as 2024, only 27 percent of candidates used generative AI while job hunting. A year later that share reached 47 percent, and in 2026 it topped 73 percent. The report draws on Michael Page data and a May 2026 survey by Pracuj.pl, covering both job candidates and the people responsible for recruitment on the employer side.

On the employer side, AI has also become an everyday tool. 62 percent of hiring managers use it to write job descriptions, prepare interview questions, or handle communication with candidates. The report's authors stress that despite how widespread the tool has become, full automation of recruitment processes is progressing more slowly than one might expect.

In practice, AI supports the day-to-day workflow, it doesn't replace entire processes - Bartosz Maligłówka, head of IT contracting, Michael Page

The Fake CV Problem

The most troubling effect described in the report involves CVs generated entirely by AI and perfectly tailored to a specific job posting, as well as cases where bots or avatars take part in the recruitment process instead of real candidates. As many as 32 percent of hiring managers openly admit they cannot say for certain whether a given application was written by a human or a language model.

The lack of clear rules makes the problem worse. Just 7 percent of companies have implemented and openly communicated a policy on the acceptable use of AI in recruitment to candidates. In practice, this means most candidates use AI tools routinely without knowing whether that kind of support is accepted, tolerated to a limited degree, or outright banned by the employer.

Worker Concerns

The report also reveals a clear difference in how various professional groups perceive the risk of losing their job to AI. As many as 80 percent of temporary workers worry about the impact of artificial intelligence on their employment, compared to just 14 percent among freelancers. The authors attribute this gap to the greater sense of control over their own career path that self-employed workers tend to have.

The report also cites global labor market forecasts. Goldman Sachs estimates that AI will affect around 300 million jobs worldwide, while the World Economic Forum projects the creation of 170 million new jobs by 2030, partly thanks to new applications of artificial intelligence.

What It Means for Poland

For Polish HR departments, the report is a signal to urgently regulate issues that today operate in a gray area. Companies that fail to clearly define rules for candidates' use of AI risk situations where they cannot distinguish real competence from skill at operating a text generator. At the same time, candidates left without guidance may unknowingly cross a line that, in the employer's eyes, disqualifies them from the process.

Michael Page experts recommend that companies communicate their rules clearly as early as the job posting stage, so candidates know whether AI support in writing a CV is accepted and, if so, to what extent. Without such guidelines, recruitment will increasingly resemble an arms race between candidates using ever more capable generators and recruiters trying to detect them.

Sources: HRstandard.pl (hrstandard.pl), ManagerPlus (managerplus.pl)