Software can do a lot more than organize job applications. It can decide which applications anybody bothers looking at, and that’s the part of Mobley v. Workday I find more interesting than the AI label.

Derek Mobley and other applicants allege that Workday’s hiring technology scored, sorted, ranked or screened applicants in ways that discriminated against older workers. On May 16, 2025, U.S. District Judge Rita Lin granted preliminary collective certification under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act for applicants age 40 and older.

That isn’t a finding that Workday discriminated. The applicants still have to prove their claims. But the court was willing to treat the alleged use of a common system across a lot of applicants as a shared policy instead of looking at each rejection as an isolated hiring decision.

We’ve gotten used to talking about automated hiring as if the software is just helping recruiters manage a pile of resumes. That description gets harder to defend when the software is deciding who in the pile gets seen.

If 500 people apply and a system decides which 30 deserve further consideration, a human may still make the eventual hiring decision. The software already made a pretty consequential one. It decided which 470 people never got that far.

That’s where responsibility starts getting spread around. The employer chooses the technology. The vendor builds it. Somebody decides how it’s configured and used. Recruiters work with whatever reaches them, and the hiring manager may never see the people who were screened out.

Everybody can look at their own piece and still miss the decision as a whole.

The applicant doesn’t experience a vendor, a configuration choice, a recruiter workflow and a hiring manager as four separate things. They applied for a job and didn’t get through the first gate.

Employers don’t get to avoid discrimination law because software helped make that decision. The EEOC’s guidance on automated selection tools makes clear that Title VII still applies when employers use software or algorithms in selection, and earlier EEOC and Justice Department guidance addresses the same problem when automated tools screen out applicants with disabilities.

The Workday case adds the vendor to the question. If a company builds a system that is doing enough of the scoring, ranking or screening to control who gets considered, can it separate itself from what that system does simply because somebody else makes the final hiring decision?

That’s what I think is worth watching. Automation doesn’t need the final word to have authority over a decision. Sometimes deciding who gets through the door is enough.