Workday Faces Expanded Lawsuit Over AI-Driven Job Screening Discrimination

Is the AI screening your resume biased? A lawsuit makes the case

Pages about historic figures were taken down from the Pentagon's website amid a push to purge DEI. Officials say artificial intelligence is to blame. A lawsuit against Workday alleges the company's screening technology discriminates against job applicants on the basis of race, age and disability in a case that raises new legal issues about how employers use artificial intelligence in hiring decisions. Derek Mobley brought the discrimination lawsuit against the human resources software company in 2023, alleging he applied for hundreds of positions over seven years only to be repeatedly rejected. Four other plaintiffs over the age of 40 have since joined the suit, blaming the AI recommendation technology that screens and ranks job applicants for "disproportionately" preventing older workers from "securing gainful employment." California federal judge Rita Lin ruled Friday the case can proceed as a collective action - similar to a class action - so Mobley can notify "similarly situated individuals of the lawsuit and provide them an opportunity to opt in to having their claims heard on a collective basis." "We continue to believe this case is without merit," Workday said in a statement. "This is a preliminary, procedural ruling at an early stage of this case that relies on allegations, not evidence. The court has not made any substantive findings against Workday and has not ruled this case can go forward as a class action. We're confident that once Workday is permitted to defend itself with the facts, the plaintiff's claims will be dismissed." The Workday lawsuit raises new issues about the use of AI and shows the possible legal exposure for AI vendors and for employers that increasingly relying on it. Human resources professionals lean heavily on AI technology to screen and rank applications and resumes. While the technology saves manpower and time, civil rights experts say the technology may have hidden biases that discriminate against job applicants based on protected characteristics such as gender and race. "AI tools are trained with a large amount of data and make predictions about future outcomes based on correlations and patterns in that data - many tools that employers are using are trained on data about the employer's own workforce and prior hiring processes. But that data is itself reflective of existing institutional and systemic biases," warned the American Civil Liberties Union. In 2014, a team of engineers at Amazon began building an algorithm to review resumes and determine which applicants the tech giant should hire. The system was scrapped a year later because it discriminated against women applying for technical jobs. Mobley said he received automated rejections again and again despite a finance degree from Morehouse College and experience since 2010 working in various financial, IT help desk and customer-service positions, sometimes in less than an hour. These systems are not "race neutral, disability neutral or age neutral," Mobley said in his complaint. Another plaintiff, Jill Hughes, said she also received automated rejections for hundreds of roles, often within a few hours of applying.

Discrimination Lawsuit Against Workday's Job Screening AI Gets Bigger

This week, Judge Rita Lin ruled in San Francisco Federal Court that a 2023 case filed by a single plaintiff claiming Workday's tech caused over 100 of his job applications to be rejected due to his age, race and disabilities may now be transformed into collective action litigation. Like a class action suit, those cases can be joined by other people claiming to have been similarly wronged by the same company. In this instance, that involves four individuals who -- like the initial petitioner -- argue the Workday algorithm almost immediately rejected their candidacies for vacancies because they were 40 years old or older. Worse still for Workday, Lin said the expanded case could also be joined by even more "similarly situated individuals of the lawsuit and provide them an opportunity to opt in to having their claims heard on a collective basis." The reason, Lin ruled, was to allow anyone "allegedly required to compete on unequal footing due to Workday's discriminatory AI recommendations" to be heard by the same court at the same time. Workday rejects the claims as unfounded. It also refutes the central allegation that its app actively filters out applications from people based on professional or personal characteristics designated as unwanted. The Pleasanton, Calif.-based firm says its tech isn't configured to weed out, much less discriminate against applicants. Instead, it says its automated AI evaluates applications based on client criteria for jobs available, and either retains or rejects candidates based on their merits. That initial phase of finding the best matches to specific positions saves hiring managers countless hours they'd have otherwise spent vetting CVs, Workday says.