The Workday Lawsuit: What It Is, Why It Matters, and What It Means for Your Job Search
- Jul 29
- 4 min read
If you've been applying to jobs and wondering why rejections come back so fast, sometimes in the middle of the night and sometimes within minutes of submitting, a landmark lawsuit working its way through the federal courts might explain more than you'd expect.
Here's what's happening, in plain English.
The story starts with one man and over 100 rejections.
Derek Mobley is a Black man over 40 who lives with anxiety and depression. Starting in 2017, he spent years applying to more than 100 jobs through companies that all used the same HR software platform: Workday. He was rejected every time, often within minutes, sometimes with automated emails arriving at 1:30 in the morning. The speed and consistency of the rejections made him suspect something wasn't right. No person, he reasoned, could be reviewing and rejecting applications that fast. He was right. In 2023, rather than suing the companies that rejected him, he sued the software company behind each rejection: Workday. That case, formally known as Mobley v. Workday Inc., has become the most closely watched AI hiring lawsuit in the United States.
What is Workday, and why does this matter to you?
Workday is one of the most widely used HR software platforms in the world. More than 80% of U.S. employers, and nearly every company in the Fortune 500, now use hiring tools like these. That means there's a very real chance that jobs you've applied for recently were screened, at least in part, by an algorithm before a human ever saw your name. Workday's platform includes resume screening, candidate ranking, and skills-matching software. The lawsuit argues these tools function as gatekeepers, making consequential decisions about who gets considered and who gets quietly filtered out.
What exactly is Workday being accused of?
The core of the lawsuit is what lawyers call "disparate impact", meaning the algorithm produced discriminatory outcomes against protected groups, even without anyone explicitly programming it to do so. Workday's software was specifically accused of screening candidates using proxies like employment gaps and patterns that read like recurring medical leave; so while not a single company's HR manual says "reject cancer survivors," these proxy measures have been used to screen out applicants that organizations see as burdens based on predictions about patterns. AI has now put these patterns to work, silently, at scale. The plaintiffs argue the algorithm disproportionately screened out Black applicants, people over 40, and people with disabilities — not through intentional bias, but because it was trained on decades of hiring data that reflected those biases to begin with.
What did the court decide?
Workday tried to argue that it just makes the software and that employers make the actual hiring decisions, so Workday shouldn't be liable. Judge Rita Lin rejected these claims outright, letting the discrimination claims move forward, partly because Workday builds, trains, and runs these tools out of its California headquarters. On June 22, 2026, the court confirmed the core discrimination claims can proceed. This is significant and signals that courts are increasingly willing to hold technology vendors accountable for the outcomes their tools produce, not just the employers using them.
What does this mean for you as a job seeker?
A few things worth understanding. First, if you've applied to jobs through companies using Workday's platform since September 2020 and you're over 40, you may be eligible to join the collective action. That's worth looking into independently if it applies to you.
But beyond the legal specifics, the broader implication is this: the discrimination in automated hiring got trackable. A decade ago, a qualified candidate could have been turned away by a hundred employers: slowly, by a hundred different people in a hundred different offices, each rejection its own small story, none of them obviously connected. These rejections were spread thin across years and HR departments, and slow enough that no one had to notice the pattern. One system applying one logic to everyone, instantly, is what brings that pattern into focus.
What the Workday case confirms is something we talk about constantly at Top of the Stack: the hiring process has evolved in ways most candidates don't fully understand, and the rules have changed. Algorithms are making consequential decisions before humans are involved. Employment gaps, inconsistent formatting, the wrong keywords, the wrong proxies are the things getting candidates filtered out silently, at scale, with no feedback and no explanation.
Understanding that is the first step. The second step is making sure your candidacy is built to get through – not just past a screening tool, but in front of the right people, in a way that makes them want to pick up the phone. That's the work we do. Learn more about our Full Candidate Rebrand and suite of services that navigate these shifts for you and sharpen your candidacy to get you to the Top of the Stack.
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