Who owns the rejection
Derek Mobley applied to more than 100 jobs over six years.
Every one went through Workday. Every one came back no.
One rejection arrived at 1:50 in the morning, under an hour after he applied. Nobody was awake to read it. Something was.
So in 2023 he sued the software.
Not the companies. The software.
I’ve been turning that choice over since 60 Minutes Australia ran the story this week. Mobley wasn’t their main subject. He was a cutaway. But he’s the whole story.
For 20 years every hiring tool has lived on one assumption. The employer decides. The vendor assists. If the decision is discriminatory, that’s the employer’s problem and the vendor’s terms of service say so.
On July 12, 2024, Judge Rita Lin in the Northern District of California said no. A vendor that performs the screening is the employer’s agent, and agents can be liable. In May 2025 she certified a collective of every applicant aged 40 and over rejected through Workday since September 2020. The court papers reference roughly 1.1 billion rejected applications in that window. Workday itself warned the class could reach hundreds of millions of people.
The opt-in window closed in March. In June the judge let the disability claim through on a theory I haven’t stopped thinking about. The software might be screening on proxies. Employment gaps from medical leave. Patterns that track treatment and recovery. Nobody had to set a filter called “disabled.” The outcome is enough.
Nothing has been decided on the merits. Discovery will run for years. Workday will appeal everything.
You can argue Workday is a scapegoat for decisions its customers made. Fine.
It doesn’t matter. The shape of the law is already set. If you build the screen, you own the screen.
What I think this means
I spent years on the investing side before I started building. When I read a case like this I’m not reading it as a lawyer. I’m reading it as a repricing.
Every AI screening vendor just acquired a liability it didn’t have before. Their customers did too. The old pitch was “we reject faster so your team never has to look.” That pitch is now a confession.
Three things I believe follow. I could be wrong on timing. I don’t think I’m wrong on direction.
The resume stops being the gate. The resume is where the proxies live. Dates. Gaps. Tenure. School names. Every one of them correlates with age, health, or something else you cannot legally screen on. A system that filters resumes at scale is a system that filters proxies at scale. You can audit it or you can stop using it as the first cut. Auditing it is harder than people think.
Explainability becomes a procurement line item. Not “is it fair.” Can you show me why this person got a no. “Model output 0.31” will not survive a deposition. “Candidate said X when asked Y” will. Buyers will start asking for the second kind before they sign, the same way they ask about SOC 2 now.
Discovery is the real penalty. Workday has already been ordered to name every customer that switched on its HiredScore screening. Forget the damages. Every vendor in this category should assume a plaintiff’s lawyer will one day read its scoring logic out loud in a courtroom. Build as if that day is on the calendar.
What I don’t know
Who insures this. There’s no actuarial table for algorithmic disparate impact and the first carriers to write it will price it badly.
Whether a court can actually audit a model. Judge Lin can order Workday to turn over the logic. I’m not sure anyone in that room can read it.
What happens to the 50-person company that posts a role and gets 800 applicants. Interviewing everyone with humans was never possible for them. The filter was the only tool they had. Tell them to stop using it and you’ve told them nothing.
Whether this gets settled by courts or by statute. New York has had an audit law for automated hiring tools since 2023. A state audit last December found the city had received 2 complaints and found 1 violation in two years. The auditors checked the same 32 companies and found 17. Litigation moves slower but it has teeth. My guess is the lawsuit sets the standard and the regulators catch up to it, not the other way around. That’s a guess.
Where I sit
We built RightMatch so every applicant gets an interview before a resume gets ranked. Not because of Mobley. Because the filter was throwing away good people and I could see it from the other side of the table.
The lawsuit didn’t change what we build. It changed who else has to care.
Mobley got 100 rejections and never once talked to a person. The question the court is deciding is who’s responsible for that.
The question I’d ask is simpler. Why was that ever the design?
