Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images
Thanks to numerous competing AI systems cluttering online application portals, applying for a new job in 2026 may feel more like applying for a bank loan than searching for a job.
At least that’s what a group of disgruntled job seekers claim in a lawsuit against an AI screening company called Eightfold AI. According to At New York TimesThe plaintiffs allege that Eightfold’s job selection software should be subject to Fair Credit Reporting Act — regulations protecting information collected by consumer credit agencies.
The reason, they say, can be found deep within Eightfold’s AI algorithm, which actively trolls LinkedIn to create a dataset of “1 million job titles, 1 million skills, and the profiles of over a billion people working across every job, profession, industry, and geography.” This dataset is in turn used in marketing materials to help sell its services to potential clients.
According to the plaintiffs, using an AI model trained on this data, Eightfold rates applicants on a scale of one to five, based on their skills, experience and the hiring manager’s goals. In short, their argument is that it’s not at all different from the opaque rules used to govern consumer credit scores.
In the case of Eightfold, however, test-takers have no way of knowing what their final score is, much less the steps the system took to get it. This creates a “black box”: a situation where people subject to an algorithmic decision can only see the system resultnot the process that led to it. And if Eightfold’s AI starts inventing things on the fly — a problem that AI models are infamous for — the job seeker has no way of knowing.
There is also the question of data retention. Without any way to peek under the hood, it’s unclear how much data job candidate CVs Eightfold collects, or what the AI company and its clients do with it.
“I think I deserve to know what is being collected about me and shared with employers,” said Erin Kistler, one of the plaintiffs. New York Times. “And they don’t give me any feedback, so I can’t fix the problems.”
Kistler, who has decades of experience in the IT field, told the publication that she carefully noted every application she sent over the last year. Of “thousands of jobs” she applied for, only 0.3% got a follow-up or interview, she said.
All of this underscores the sad state of the job market, which has become the subject of dystopian nightmares thanks to AI recruiting tools. The question of whether the lawsuit can grow large enough to challenge a huge legal gray area recruitment in AI remains to be seen. If so, it could bring relief to droves of discouraged job seekers whose careers literally hang in the balance.
The eight-fold AI did not respond to New York Timesrequest for comment.
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