Two job hunters have filed a class-action lawsuit against an AI-powered hiring platform, claiming the company is violating consumer protection laws by secretly scoring applicants without their knowledge or consent.
The complaint was filed in the California Contra Costa County Superior Court, and accuses the company, Eightfold, of violating the Fair Credit Reporting Act and the state's Investigative Consumer Reporting Agencies Act by ranking job applicants without their knowledge and without the option for dispute.
Erin Kistler and Sruti Bhaumik, the plaintiffs, argue in the filing that Eightfold collects users' personal data — including their social media posts, location data, internet activity and information from website cookies — to evaluate candidates on the platform, Decrypt reports.
The lawsuit alleges that Eightfold uses the data to compile "Match Scores" that give an applicant a rank from 0 to 5 based on their "likelihood of success." It further claims that — due to the scoring system — applicants who rank lower are "discarded before a human being ever looks at their application."
According to Kistler and Bhaumik, users are not told about this ranking system and have no means of disputing their rank.
"This case is about a dystopian AI-driven marketplace, where robots operating behind the scenes are making decisions about the most important things in our lives: whether we get a job or housing or healthcare," David Seligman, Executive Director at Towards Justice and one of the lawyers representing the plaintiffs, wrote in a post on X.
The plaintiffs are seeking both actual and statutory damages between $100 and $1,000 for each violation under federal law, and $10,000 per violation under California law.
Kistler is a computer science graduate who has nearly 20 years of experience in product management who failed to land a single interview after using the platform to apply for senior roles at PayPal.
Bhaumik is also a project manager, and was automatically rejected from jobs at Microsoft only two days after applying via the Eightfold platform.
According to the lawsuit, approximately two-thirds of large companies use AI technology such as Eightfold to sift through candidates, and up to 38 percent use AI software to rank and match applicants.
The filing claims that Eightfold's LLM pulls from "more than 1 million job titles, 1 million skills, and the profiles of more than 1 billion people working in every job, profession, [and] industry," after which it makes "inferences" to create profiles it thinks reflects the "preferences, characteristics, predispositions, behavior, attitudes, intelligence, abilities and aptitudes" of the applicants, all without the applicants knowledge or consent.
The Independent has requested comment from Eightfold.
