Recruitment edition

The Mobley vs Workday class action drags on, and the pressure is rising. Judges issued so-called discovery orders in late June and late July 2026. That means Workday has to hand over more and more customer data and bias-test data. Court filings mention a striking number: since September 2020, 1.1 billion job applications have been rejected using Workday's software tools. That makes the possible claims huge. The case is about alleged discrimination by age, race and disability through AI screening. For you, the key point isn't the American courtroom. It's the fact that judges are confirming that employers and vendors can be jointly liable for discriminatory outcomes, even without intent. So you don't need to have meant any harm. What matters is what rolls out behind the scenes. Experts advise organisations not to rely only on the vendor's guarantees, but to audit their own hiring AI. A screening tool learns from past data who counts as a 'good' candidate. If that data mostly shows young people without a gap on their CV being hired, the model repeats that pattern. The tool doesn't ask for age, but it picks up on signals linked to it: graduation year, years of experience, words used in the CV. That's why this is called indirect discrimination: you won't notice it in one rejection, but you will across thousands. The discovery orders centre on whether bias tests exist and what they showed. A bias test compares the pass-through chances of different groups of candidates within the same selection process. A guarantee from your vendor says something about their model, not about your settings, your knock-out questions or your candidate pool. Auditing it yourself is easier said than done, because you need figures your vendor often doesn't provide by default. The practical middle ground: don't stop using AI screening, but record who falls out of the selection and why, and review that yourself. This week, ask your ATS vendor in writing whether bias tests have been carried out, and what they showed.

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