EU AI Act Article 50: what to tell candidates

Most of what has been written about the EU AI Act concerns obligations that are not yet in force.

In June 2026 the Digital Omnibus deferred the high-risk obligations, which include hiring and selection systems, from August 2026 to December 2027. Sixteen months. A lot of project plans quietly became wrong that week.

One thing did not move. Article 50 applies now, and has since 2 August 2026.

It is a much smaller obligation than the high-risk regime and it is the only one you have to meet today, which makes it worth understanding precisely rather than approximately.

What Article 50 says

That is the whole requirement. Not fairness, not audits, not documentation. The person knowing.

Where it actually bites in a hiring process

Three places.

AI voice screening. A candidate receives a call, or makes one, and talks to a system rather than a recruiter. This is the clearest case and the one Article 50 was most obviously written for.

AI-assisted interviews. A live conversation where a system is listening, structuring or scoring. The candidate is talking to a human, so it is less obvious, which is exactly why the disclosure matters more.

Anything conversational in the application flow. Chat-based pre-screening, conversational forms, automated follow-ups that read as written by a person.

Note what is not on that list. A scored assessment that a candidate knows is an assessment is generally obvious from context. The cases that need the disclosure are the ones that feel like a conversation with a person.

The three mistakes

Burying it in the privacy policy. Informed means informed. A sentence on page four of a document nobody opens does not tell anyone anything. The disclosure belongs where the interaction happens, at the moment it happens.

Writing it in legal language. "This process may involve automated decision-making technologies" tells a candidate nothing. "You will be speaking with an AI interviewer" tells them something. The obligation is to inform, and informing is a test you fail by being unclear, not just by being silent.

Only doing it in one language. If you hire in six languages you need six versions, and someone has to approve each one. This is the step that gets found in an audit rather than in a review, because the English version is always fine.

What to actually do

Why this is worth doing properly even though it is small

Two reasons.

The first is that it is the only part of the EU regime you can be held to today, and it is cheap to meet. There is no reason to be exposed on it.

The second is less obvious. The December 2027 high-risk obligations will require documentation about systems, decisions and oversight. The exercise of listing every AI touchpoint in your hiring process, which Article 50 forces you to do now, is the first half of that work.