Workday Rejected You But Its AI May Have Influenced That

Let’s be honest. When AI first showed up in the HR space, a lot of us were skeptical. New technology, unknown outcomes, and a whole lot of “we’ll see.” But it proved itself. The efficiency, the scale, the ability to process thousands of applications in seconds it delivered. And now? Everybody’s using it. Recruiting, screening, scoring candidates..AI is embedded in how we hire.

But here’s where it gets interesting.

Now that it’s proven and widely adopted, I’m noticing that we’ve stopped watching it as closely as we should. We trust the output. We move on. And that’s exactly what I explored in my first article on The Pulse — [Are You Actually Reading What AI Is Telling You?] The Workday lawsuit brings that question to life in a very real way.

What’s Actually Happening in This Case

Mobley v. Workday, Inc. is a federal lawsuit filed in California alleging that Workday’s AI-powered hiring tools discriminated against job applicants based on race, age, and disability. The lead plaintiff, Derek Mobley, a Black man over 40 who also lives with a disability applied to more than 100 positions through companies using Workday’s platform and was rejected every single time.

What made the court take notice wasn’t just the volume of rejections. It was the timing. Rejection emails were coming back outside of business hours, within minutes or an hour of applications being submitted. Nobody is sitting at a desk at that hour making thoughtful hiring decisions. That was automated. That was the machine.

The plaintiff in the case is a cancer survivor with an asthma diagnosis. The court noted that employment gaps, the kind that often show up when someone has dealt with a serious health issue that may have been used as proxy indicators by the algorithm. Not intentional discrimination. But discriminatory outcomes nonetheless.

The judge refused to dismiss the case. That matters.

AI Didn’t Make the Hiring Decision But It May Have Influenced It.

That’s the distinction that keeps coming up for me professionally, and it’s the one that makes this case so significant. Workday’s position is that their AI didn’t make the final hiring decisions and technically, that may be true. The employer still clicked the button. But when an AI system is screening, scoring, and narrowing the candidate pool before a human ever looks at a résumé, the decision has already been shaped. The slate has already been filtered. And if bias exists somewhere inside that system whether it was built in intentionally or not, a human approving the shortlist doesn’t undo it.

This isn’t about pointing fingers at Workday specifically. I don’t know what those contracts and backend systems look like, and it’s not my place to say who’s right or wrong. But what this case is surfacing is a conversation that the HR profession needed to have a long time ago.

The Real Question for Employers

Are you actually paying attention to what your AI tools are doing inside your hiring process? Not what the sales deck said. Not what the implementation team told you during onboarding. What is it actually doing, how was it built, what was it trained on, and what patterns is it looking for when it scores your candidates?

Because here’s what a lot of employers don’t fully realize: third-party tools don’t absorb your liability. They extend it. Workday is being sued. But the companies using those tools are next in line. Courts are beginning to establish that employers are responsible for understanding and overseeing the technology they deploy in their hiring process regardless of whether a vendor built it.

What You Can Do Right Now

This isn’t about abandoning AI. I use it. I believe in it as a tool when it’s used with intention and oversight. But “intention” means knowing what you signed up for.

Here are a few places to start:

Ask your vendors harder questions. How was this system trained? Has it been tested for disparate impact? What does the audit trail look like when a candidate is flagged or ejected?

Review your outputs. Pull your data. Are certain demographics consistently being screened out at the top of your funnel? If you can’t answer that question, that’s a gap worth closing.

Don’t outsource your accountability. AI can handle volume. But HR still has to own the process. Build in human checkpoints, especially at the screening stage.

Read your contracts. Understand what your vendor is and isn’t responsible for when things go sideways.

The Bottom Line

The Workday case is still unfolding. But the conversation it’s forcing is one every HR leader and employer needs to be in right now. AI has proven its value. That’s not the debate. The debate is whether we’re being intentional enough about how we use it and whether we’re actually watching what it’s doing on our behalf.

If you don’t have those answers yet, that’s exactly where the work starts.

Want to talk through what this means for your organization? Let’s connect.

And if you missed the first article that started this conversation Are You Actually Reading What AI Is Telling You?— start there.