Most of what is written about AI and job applications is advice. This page is the other half: what employers hiring at £100,000 and above have actually put in writing, read from their adverts and application forms.
Cover letters: rarely in the advert, usually on the form
Across 7,556 adverts on the careers boards of 99 employers whose boards we follow, read on 13 November 2026, the words “cover letter” appear in 45, from just 4 employers. 43 of those come from Graphcore and Rockstar Games, which repeat the same paragraph in every advert, and one of the others mentions a cover letter only to say a set of written questions replaces it.
The advert is the wrong place to look, though. The form behind the Apply button is where a cover letter is asked for, and for one platform we can read it: Greenhouse publishes every form’s questions and whether each is required. On 15 November 2026 we read the forms for all 348 roles on this board that use Greenhouse, from 34 employers.
| The form’s cover-letter field | Forms |
|---|---|
| Required | 12 (3%) |
| Optional | 266 (76%) |
| No field at all | 70 (20%) |
So most forms leave room for a cover letter and very few insist on one: the 12 that do come from 3 employers (Airbnb, SumUp and Teneo). What a form cannot tell you is how an optional letter is read, or whether it is read at all.
What this covers, and what it does not
The form figures cover Greenhouse only. Ashby and Lever, which carry the rest of this board’s private-sector roles, do not publish their forms’ questions, and NHS Jobs publishes no application form at all. The advert figures cover every role on those employers’ boards, at any level and in any country — not just the senior UK roles listed here.
What employers say about you using AI
Most say nothing. Those that do range from a ban you must agree to before applying, to an expectation that you will use it well. In their own words, from adverts read on 13 November 2026 and forms read on 15 November 2026:
A ban, agreed to on the form
23 of the 348 Greenhouse forms, from Airbnb and Isomorphic Labs, include a required box to tick. Airbnb’s is headed “Candidate AI Usage Attestation”:
“the use of generative artificial intelligence (‘AI’) tools, for example, ChatGPT, Gemini, and GitHub Copilot (‘AI Tools’) is strictly prohibited during the interview process, unless Airbnb explicitly permits their use … failure to comply with this Candidate AI Usage Attestation may result in disqualification from the hiring process or withdrawal of an offer.”
Isomorphic Labs asks candidates to confirm they “will not use any AI tools or assistants during the interview and assessment process”, while noting it is “an AI-first company” and that adjustments can be arranged with its talent team.
Fine for preparation, not for answers
“we’re happy for you to use it for research and interview prep, but please don’t use it to generate answers during live interviews.” — Faculty
“Behavioural and competency-based interviews: please don’t use AI. These conversations are designed to understand you — your experiences, your judgment, and how you’ve approached real situations. An AI-generated answer can’t tell us that.” — Zopa, which adds that some of its technical stages “actively welcome AI use”, and that there “we’ll be interested not just in the outcome, but in how you used it”.
On AI-written CVs
“we receive a lot of CVs, and many of them are AI-generated. We love seeing people leverage AI … but without human intervention, these CVs can sometimes become generic and fail to show a candidate in the best light. What we’re really looking for is the specific details of real impact that only you know from your previous experience.” — Pleo, listing it among the reasons previous candidates did not pass its application screen
Monzo’s adverts link to its own published guidance on using AI during an application and interview, which is the place to read its position rather than here.
When the employer uses AI on you
It also runs the other way. A few adverts describe AI in the employer’s own process:
- · Deliveroo describes a second stage in which successful applicants complete “a short phone screening and online assessment with our AI assistant, Maki People”.
- · Faculty uses “an AI note-taker (Metaview) in interviews”, which candidates can opt out of, and states that “every application is reviewed by a human, never decided by AI”.
- · Tide says it “leverages AI to enhance our hiring experience”, and links to a published AI policy describing how.
The law on a decision no person made
The UK GDPR’s rules on automated decisions were rewritten by the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025. The new Articles 22A to 22D replaced the old Article 22 and have been fully in force since 5 February 2026.
Article 22A defines the two terms everything turns on. A decision is based solely on automated processing “if there is no meaningful human involvement in the taking of the decision”, and it is a significant decision if it produces a legal effect for the person or “a similarly significant effect”.
Where a significant decision about a person is taken solely by automated processing, Article 22C requires the organisation to have safeguards in place, including measures which:
“(a) provide the data subject with information about decisions … (b) enable the data subject to make representations about such decisions; (c) enable the data subject to obtain human intervention on the part of the controller in relation to such decisions; (d) enable the data subject to contest such decisions.”
Whether a given rejection counts as “significant” is not defined further in the article. The regulation’s recital 71, written for the earlier version of the rule and still part of the text, gives “e-recruiting practices without any human intervention” as an example of a decision with a similarly significant effect.
Separately, the Equality Act 2010 applies to “the arrangements A makes for deciding to whom to offer employment” (section 39(1)(a)), and makes no distinction between arrangements carried out by a person and by software. What a job advert may not say covers that section in full.
Using your own AI to search this board
Every listing here is available as free, open data, with a ready-made prompt you can give an AI assistant so it searches the board for you. The prompt tells it the two things assistants most often get wrong with job data: that a role marked “Pay not stated” has no salary to quote, and that our labels are ours, not the employer’s. The API and the prompt.
Sources
The law on this page was last read against the primary sources on 15 November 2026. Legislation changes; if you are reading this much later, check the source. Advert text was read on 13 November 2026 and application forms on 15 November 2026; employers change both, so a quotation here is what the employer said then, not necessarily now. Quotations are short extracts, attributed, and each employer’s adverts are the authority on its current position.
- · UK GDPR, Article 22A — automated processing and significant decisions
- · UK GDPR, Article 22C — safeguards for automated decision-making
- · UK GDPR, recitals — recital 71
- · Equality Act 2010, section 39
- · Cover-letter and attestation figures: Greenhouse’s public job-board API, read for every Greenhouse role on this board
The guide · Reaching recruiters · Search the board with your own AI