Class action lawsuit claims AI platform sabotages job seekers

Eightfold is the company being sued. The AI platform filters applicants for Fortune 500 companies like Microsoft, Netflix and PayPal.

Plaintiff, Erin Kistler, applied to these companies through Eightfold’s online platform.

“She’s a highly qualified tech professional who realized she was being filtered out by AI tools before a human ever saw her resume,” said Jenny Yang J.D. who’s representing Kistler. “Out of the thousands of jobs she applied to in the past year, only 0.3% of her applications have progressed to a follow up.”

Yang also represents another woman named Sruti Bhaumik with a similar experience. Their shared lawsuit said since 2023, Bhaumik has applied for various positions with Microsoft and other employers Eightfold contracts with. It said during the online application process, she did not consent to waive her privacy and consumer protection rights under state and federal law.

Despite this, the lawsuit accuses Eightfold of collecting applicant’s personal data like social media profiles, their location, internet and device activity, cookies and other tracking, to create a profile about them with info they never included in their job application.

They claim the platform then uses that data to rank their likeliness of success on the job from 0-5 and sells that info to employers.

“When things are hidden behind a black box and information is shared, many mistakes can get made,” Yang said.

Eightfold responded to the lawsuit with a statement:

This characterization about our products is factually incorrect. Eightfold offers technology that enterprises use to manage their talent processes and engage with candidates. Eightfold does not “lurk” or scrape personal web history, social media or the like to build ‘”secret dossiers.” Eightfold’s platform operates only on data 1) submitted by candidates to our customers or 2) provided by our customers.  

We use information such as skills, experience and education that applicants choose to submit to our customers and data authorized by our customers under contract. Candidates have the ability to view and, if necessary, correct the data Eightfold has gathered.This is one of many differentiators of our platform. Eightfold supports a dedicated experience where candidates can view the resume information used by our system, correct inaccuracies, and represent their skills accurately.

To learn more about our specific data practices, including our policies on data sourcing and candidate agency, please read our detailed blueprint: AI you can trust: Our blueprint for Responsible AI.

Plaintiff counsel Towards Justice and Outten & Golden responded back:

The allegations in Plaintiff’s complaint are drawn from Eightfold’s own marketing materials, which advertise that the company’s proprietary AI software uses the world’s “largest, self-refreshing source of talent data”–over one billion people–in order to score and rank job applicants. The complaint includes images of Eightfold’s own patents, which set forth how the company’s software evaluates specific applicants using data gathered not only from the candidate’s application and Eightfold’s customers (the prospective employers), but also using a vast pool of third-party data. As alleged, opaque process results in precisely the type of black-box decisionmaking that the FCRA and ICRAA were enacted to prevent.

This lawsuit follows another class action suit against an AI hiring platform called “workday” that is still in court.