Two job hunters have filed a class action lawsuit against an AI-powered recruitment platform, alleging that the company secretly scores applicants without their knowledge or consent, violating consumer protection laws.
The complaint, filed in California’s Contra Costa County Superior Court, accuses Eightfold of violating the Fair Credit Reporting Act and the state’s Investigative Consumer Reporting Agencies Act by ranking job applicants without their knowledge or option to contest.
Plaintiffs Erin Kistler and Sruti Bhowmik allege in their filing that Eightfold collects personal data, including users’ social media posts, location data, internet activity, and website cookie information, in order to evaluate candidates on its platform. decryption I will report it.
The complaint alleges that Eightfold uses that data to create a “match score” that ranks applicants from 0 to 5 based on their “likelihood of success.” It also claims that because of the scoring system, low-ranking applicants are “discarded before a human can review their applications.”
According to Kistler and Bhaumik, users are not informed about the ranking system and have no way to dispute their rank.
“This case is about a dystopian, AI-driven market, where robots operating behind the scenes make decisions about the most important things in our lives: whether we get jobs, housing, and health care,” David Seligman, executive director of Towards Justice and one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, said in a post on X.
The plaintiffs are seeking both actual and statutory damages ranging from $100 to $1,000 per violation under federal law and $10,000 per violation under California law.
Kistler, a computer science graduate with nearly 20 years of experience in product management, never received an interview after using the platform to apply for a senior role at PayPal.
Bhaumik, who is also a project manager, was automatically rejected from a job at Microsoft just two days after applying through the Eightfold platform.
According to the complaint, about two-thirds of large companies use AI technology such as Eightfold to screen candidates, and up to 38% use AI software to rank and match applicants.
In its filing, Eightfold’s LLM claims to draw from “more than 1 million job titles, 1 million skills, and profiles of more than 1 billion people working in every job, profession, and profession.” [and] “Inferences” are then made to create a profile that is supposed to reflect the applicant’s “preferences, characteristics, tendencies, behaviors, attitudes, intelligence, abilities, and aptitudes,” all without the applicant’s knowledge or consent.
independent person Eightfold has been contacted for comment.
