Over a number of years, Derek Mobley applied to over 100 jobs. He is over forty, Black, and disabled. He used Workday’s platform to apply to businesses. He was rejected every single time — sometimes within hours of submitting his application, occasionally overnight, at hours when no human recruiter would plausibly be sitting at a desk reviewing resumes. That detail stuck with him. Most likely, anyone would remember it.
This silent observation served as the impetus for what courts are now characterizing as possibly the biggest collective action against employment discrimination in American history.
In February 2023, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California received the formal case, Mobley v. Workday, Inc. At its core, it argues that Workday’s AI-powered screening tools — used by thousands of employers, including a significant portion of the Fortune 500 — systematically filtered out job applicants based on age, race, and disability status before any human reviewer ever saw their application. Plaintiffs claim that the discrimination was not deliberate in a boardroom setting. It was subtly inherited from decades of hiring practices that already gave preference to some candidates over others and was ingrained in the training data.
Workday has insisted that there is no discrimination with its tools. The company claims that rather than making hiring decisions, it is a software vendor. U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin rejected that argument, ruling in July 2024 that Workday could be held accountable as an agent in the hiring process due to the direct influence of its system on who advances and who is removed from the queue.
Even so, it’s important to know precisely which tools are being examined. Two particular features of Workday’s platform are named in the lawsuit: the Assessment Connector, which incorporates third-party personality and skills tests into the screening process, and the Candidate Skills Match system, which automatically compares applicant qualifications against job postings. The claim is not that these tools check a box for race or find out an applicant’s age. It’s subtler than that. The system allegedly learned to associate certain signals — graduation years, software proficiencies, career gap patterns — with being a desirable candidate. Those signals, plaintiffs argue, function as proxies. age-related. Race-correlated. The algorithm didn’t have to inquire.
A national collective was preliminary certified by Judge Lin in May 2025 under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. That means workers aged 40 and older who applied to jobs through Workday’s platform after September 24, 2020, and were denied a recommendation by the system, were eligible to join. The opt-in deadline for that initial phase was March 7, 2026 — a date that has now passed for the original collective window. If you missed it, it’s worth speaking with a labor lawyer directly because the legal environment surrounding the more general racial and disability claims under Title VII and the Americans with Disabilities Act is still evolving.
There’s a feeling, watching this case unfold, that it arrives at exactly the moment the hiring industry least wants to examine itself. The main selling point of AI screening to HR departments is that it is quicker, more reliable, and unaffected by the small-minded prejudices of specific managers. And perhaps some of that is accurate. But consistency applied to a flawed model doesn’t produce fairness. It produces the same unfairness, at scale, at speed, across thousands of employers simultaneously.
This has wider ramifications than just Workday. It concerns what occurs when automation eventually catches up to legal accountability. For years, employers carried the risk of discrimination claims. This case asks whether that risk can and should travel upstream — to the vendors building and selling the filters in the first place. According to Judge Lin’s early decisions, the answer may be yes.
Anyone who applied through Workday during the covered period and believes they were discreetly rejected before a human ever gave them a chance should pay close attention to their case. The legal process is still moving. The issues it poses remain unresolved.
