LOS ANGELES – After applying in vain for nearly 100 jobs through the human resources platform Workday, Derek Mobley noticed a suspicious pattern.
“I would get all these rejection emails at 2 or 3 in the morning,” he told Context. “I knew it had to be automated.
Mobley, a 49-year-old Black man with a degree in finance from Morehouse College in Georgia, had previously worked as a commercial loan officer, among other jobs in finance.
He applied for mid-level jobs across a range of sectors, including energy and insurance, but when he used the Workday platform, he said he did not get a single interview or call-back and was often forced to settle for gig work or warehouse shifts to make ends meet.
Mobley believes he was being discriminated against by Workday’s artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms.
