By Eric André, CEO & Co-Founder at Kiku
Key takeaways:
- AI tools now let marginally qualified candidates produce polished, keyword-optimized CVs in minutes, making the document an unreliable first-stage filter.
- A noisier applicant queue buries strong candidates and drains recruiter time on calls that shouldn’t have been booked.
- Structured screening conversations, moved earlier and run at scale, are the practical fix because they’re genuinely hard to fake.
“I feel like I’m being pranked.”
A recruiter I spoke to last month put it better than I could. She said she spends her whole morning opening applications that all look fine on paper, schedules the calls, then realises within two minutes that half the candidates don’t actually match the role. “At this point it’s just not funny anymore,” she continued.
It’s not. Candidates are using AI to write and tailor their CVs, and they’re getting good at it. Someone who’s a marginal fit for a logistics coordinator role can now produce an application that reads like they’ve been doing it for years. The right keywords, the right structure, competency examples lifted almost directly from the job description. It takes them maybe five minutes.
I’ve been building hiring technology for frontline roles for a few years now, and I can tell you this shift is real and it happened fast. The CV was never perfect as a screening tool, but it did a job. Recruiters could read through applications, pull out the ones that looked relevant, and build a sensible shortlist before anyone picked up a phone. That logic is basically gone now.
What I see happening at agencies we work with is that the same process is running, just with a lot more noise at the top. Recruiters open their queues, work through applications that all look reasonable, book the calls, and then lose an hour finding out they shouldn’t have. The strong candidates are in there too, somewhere. They’re just waiting longer than they should because the queue is longer than it should be. Some of them have spoken to two other agencies by Tuesday.
The thing that surprises me is how few agencies have actually changed anything in response to this. And I get it, because what do you change? The CV isn’t going away. Candidates aren’t going to stop using tools that make them look better on paper. You can’t solve this by reading applications more carefully.
What you can do is stop relying on the CV to do filtering work it can no longer do. A structured screening conversation is genuinely hard to fake. When recruiters ask a candidate specific questions about the role, check mandatory requirements, and actually listen to how someone describes their experience, they get information that no AI-polished document produces. Recruiters I talk to already know this. The best ones have always known the phone call is where the real sorting happens. What’s changed is that it now needs to happen earlier, and it needs to happen at a scale that one recruiter with a full desk can’t absorb manually.
I started paying close attention to this about 18 months ago when we kept hearing the same thing from recruiters across very different markets. A staffing agency in Stockholm, a logistics firm in Manchester, a hospitality group in Copenhagen, all of them describing the same exhaustion. It’s not just “we have too many applicants.” It’s also “we can’t tell who’s real anymore.”
The truth is that the core goal remains the same. Recruitment teams deserve a list of candidates who are suitable for a job and suitable candidates deserve to speak to a recruiter. We just have to do the hard work of cutting through the noise to get there.
Eric André co-founded Kiku, a Copenhagen-based AI recruitment startup automating high-volume frontline hiring. He previously led Central Operations at Voi Technology and has scaled tech businesses across Europe.
