AI & Work
A federal lawsuit challenging Workday’s AI-powered hiring tools has reached a new stage. On September 14, the plaintiffs in Mobley v. Workday filed a motion asking U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin in the Northern District of California to certify four subclasses of job applicants: African American applicants, women, people over 40 and applicants with disabilities, according to court records and reporting by Reuters. Class certification would decide how the case proceeds. It would not establish that Workday’s software discriminated against anyone.
What the plaintiffs allege
The named plaintiffs, Mobley and three other applicants, allege that Workday’s screening tools disadvantaged applicants in those groups. They pursue disparate-impact theories, which focus on effects rather than intent, under Title VII, the Americans with Disabilities Act and California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act, and challenge tools including HiredScore Spotlight, Fetch and Candidate Skills Match, according to a September 25 summary by the law firm Duane Morris. In support, the plaintiffs cite Workday testimony that more than 356 million applications passed through Workday Recruiting in 2024.
Workday denies that its technology discriminates and says its AI tools assess job qualifications rather than protected characteristics.
How the case got here
In 2024, Judge Lin ruled that Mobley had plausibly alleged Workday could act as an agent of the employers using its software, allowing claims to proceed, while rejecting claims of intentional discrimination. In May 2025, she granted preliminary certification of a collective action under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act for applicants aged 40 and over. A class-certification hearing on the new motion is scheduled for March 9, 2027. These are procedural rulings and contested claims, not a decision on the merits.
Who explains an automated rejection?
The litigation puts a practical question at the center of recruiting technology: when an outside platform ranks or screens applicants, which organization can explain the result? An employer supplies criteria and makes the final decision; a vendor supplies the model; both generate records a rejected applicant never sees. Understanding what happened requires the job requirements, how the tool was configured, the thresholds used and how the employer acted on its recommendations.
For employers using automated screening, the case is a reminder to keep test results and to document who is responsible for each filter. An audit should separate qualifications that a job genuinely requires from signals that may act as proxies for protected characteristics. That is a general operational lesson, not a judgment that the allegations here are true.
The class definitions and court orders may change before the March hearing; the docket is the authoritative record.
Sources
- Mobley v. Workday, Inc., No. 3:23-cv-00770 (N.D. Cal.), docket via CourtListener. https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/66831340/mobley-v-workday-inc/
- Reuters, “These workers say an AI hiring platform discriminated against them. But who should pay?” September 21, 2026, as summarized by Lawyer Monthly. https://www.lawyer-monthly.com/2026/09/workday-faces-class-bid-over-ai-hiring-bias-claims/
- Duane Morris, Class Action Weekly Wire, Episode 166, September 25, 2026. https://blogs.duanemorris.com/classactiondefense/
Featured photo: Workday headquarters in Pleasanton, California, photographed in 2019. Photo: Coolcaesar, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). Cropped from the original.
