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Two job seekers have submitted applications class action lawsuit be opposed to AI-driven recruitment platform, claiming the company violated regulations consumer protection law Score secretly without the applicant’s knowledge or consent.
The complaint, filed in Contra Costa County Superior Court in California, accuses Eightfold of violating the Fair Credit Reporting Act and the state’s Consumer Investigative Reporting Agencies Act by ranking job applicants without their knowledge and without contesting their selections.
Plaintiffs Erin Kistler and Sruti Bhaumik argue in the filing that Eightfold Collect users’ personal data — including information from their social media posts, location data, internet activity and website cookies — to evaluate candidates on the platform, Decrypt Report.
Eightfold uses the data to compile a “match score,” which ranks applicants from 0 to 5 based on their “likelihood of success,” the lawsuit alleges. It also claimed that because of the scoring system, lower-ranked applicants were “dropped out before anyone could even view their applications.”
According to Kistler and Bhaumik, users will not be informed of the ranking system and will not be able to challenge their rankings.
“This case is about a dystopian AI-driven market in which robots operating behind the scenes are making decisions about the most important things in our lives: whether we have a job, housing, or health care,” David Seligman, executive director of Towards Justice and one of the attorneys representing the plaintiffs, wrote in a post on X.
The plaintiffs seek actual and statutory damages in the range of $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 product management experience, failed every interview after using the platform to apply for a senior position at PayPal.
Bhaumik, also a project manager, was automatically rejected by Microsoft just two days after applying through the Eightfold platform.
According to the lawsuit, about two-thirds of large companies use artificial intelligence technology such as Eightfold to screen candidates, and a whopping 38% use artificial intelligence software to rank and match applicants.
The document states that Eightfold’s LLMs are drawn from “more than 1 million jobs, 1 million skills and more than 1 billion in a variety of jobs, professions, [and] industry” and then makes “inferences” to create a profile that it believes reflects the applicant’s “preferences, characteristics, tendencies, behaviour, attitudes, intelligence, abilities and qualifications”, all without the applicant’s knowledge or consent.
independent Yae has been asked to comment.