Ask an HR-tech founder about the AI Act and you will hear a date: recruitment AI is Annex III high-risk, obligations start December 2027, plenty of time. Ask the same founder which rules govern their CV-screening model in Türkiye today, and the answer is usually silence. That silence is the risk. For AI in hiring, the binding law is not coming; it is layered, and most of it is already here.
Layer 1. KVKK, today
Every scoring, ranking or filtering of candidates is personal data processing. That triggers the full KVKK stack now: lawful basis, aydınlatma (in Turkish, naming automated analysis explicitly), data minimisation against the reflex of feeding the model everything, and retention limits for rejected candidates’ files. Above all, Article 11: a candidate has the right to object to a result produced exclusively by automated analysis that works against them. If your funnel auto-rejects below a score threshold with no human in the loop, you are running exactly the system Article 11 targets; build the human-review path before a complaint builds it for you.
Layer 2; the biometrics red line
Video-interview analysis, voice profiling, facial expression scoring: after the Authority’s 2026/921 principle decision, the Turkish position on workplace biometrics is clear; special-category data, strict necessity, and consent does not rescue a disproportionate system. A hiring tool that infers traits from a candidate’s face or voice sits on the wrong side of every element of that test. The EU AI Act goes further on the same line: emotion recognition in the workplace falls under the Act’s prohibited practices; the tier that has applied since February 2025, postponed for no one.
Layer 3; discrimination law, the sleeping giant
İş Kanunu Article 5 and the Turkish Human Rights and Equality Institution Law prohibit discrimination in access to work. A model trained on your historical hiring data learns your historical biases, and unlike a biased manager, it documents the pattern at scale, in logs your counterparty can request. In an equal-treatment dispute, “the vendor’s algorithm did it” is not a defence; it is an admission that you deployed a decision system you could not explain.
Layer 4; the EU timeline, for EU-facing hiring
Recruiting for EU entities or screening EU-resident candidates adds the AI Act layers: transparency duties from 2 August 2026 (candidates must know they interact with AI where not obvious), and the full Annex III high-risk regime from 2 December 2027; risk management, data governance, human oversight, logging, and your vendor’s conformity assessment. If you build hiring tech, those December 2027 duties define your product roadmap; if you buy it, they define your procurement questions.
What applies when; one table
| Rule | Applies to | Since / from |
|---|---|---|
| KVKK principles + Art. 11 objection | Any AI touching Turkish candidates | Now |
| 2026/921 biometrics standard | Face/voice/behavioural analysis at work | Now |
| İş K. m.5 equal treatment | All hiring decisions, human or automated | Now |
| AI Act prohibition: workplace emotion recognition | EU-facing systems | Feb 2025 |
| AI Act Art. 50 transparency | EU-facing candidate interaction | Aug 2026 |
| AI Act Annex III high-risk regime | EU-facing recruitment AI | Dec 2027 |
An eight-step program for HR teams and HR-tech builders
- Inventory every automated step between application and offer, including third-party ATS features you never turned on deliberately.
- Insert human review before any adverse automated outcome.
- Rewrite candidate aydınlatma texts to name automated analysis and profiling.
- Kill or quarantine emotion-inference features; run the 2026/921 test on anything biometric.
- Bias-test models on Turkish-market data before deployment, and re-test on retraining; keep the reports.
- Set retention schedules for unsuccessful candidates’ data.
- Push AI Act readiness into vendor contracts now; documentation, logging access, conformity commitments for December 2027.
- Assign ownership: one accountable person for AI-in-hiring compliance, not a diffuse committee.
We advise both sides of this market (HR-tech products and the companies deploying them) at the intersection of Employment, KVKK + GDPR and AI & Algorithm Law.
This article is for general information only and does not constitute legal advice. It reflects the position as of July 2026.
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