Workday Is Now Using AI to Rank You — And It's Being Sued for Discrimination

Workday handles hiring at over 39% of Fortune 500 companies — more than any other applicant tracking system. If you are applying to a large enterprise in finance, healthcare, technology, or higher education, there is a strong chance your application is going through Workday.

That system changed significantly in 2024. And the change has produced one of the most consequential lawsuits in the history of AI-powered hiring.

The HiredScore Acquisition

In February 2024, Workday announced the acquisition of HiredScore, an AI-powered candidate ranking platform. The acquisition was completed mid-2024. Workday integrated HiredScore as "HiredScore AI for Recruiting," an AI layer that stack-ranks candidates for recruiters across Workday's customer base.

What this means in practice: when you apply to a company using Workday, your application is no longer just parsed and keyword-scored. It is processed by an AI model that ranks you relative to other candidates and determines how prominently your profile is presented to recruiters.

Workday has not disclosed what factors the HiredScore model uses to rank candidates. They have not published accuracy data, bias audits, or technical documentation about how the model weighs skills, experience, or other inputs. From a job seeker's perspective, the ranking system is a black box.

The Lawsuit

In November 2023 — before the HiredScore acquisition completed — Derek Mobley filed a class-action lawsuit against Workday in the Northern District of California. Mobley, a Black man in his forties with a diagnosed anxiety disorder and depression, alleged that Workday's AI-powered screening tools had discriminated against him across more than 100 job applications by race, age, and disability.

The case survived Workday's motion to dismiss and, in May 2025, was certified as a class action. The class expanded to include the HiredScore features, covering an estimated one billion or more job applicants whose applications were processed by Workday's AI systems.

In 2025, a court ordered Workday to provide a list of all customers who had enabled HiredScore AI features — a disclosure Workday contested. The case is ongoing.

The lawsuit is significant for several reasons. It is the first class-action to reach certification targeting AI-powered hiring at this scale. And because Workday's customer list includes most of the Fortune 500, a ruling or settlement could reshape how AI is used in hiring more broadly.

What This Means for Your Resume

None of this means you should stop applying to companies that use Workday. It means understanding where you have leverage and where you don't.

What you can still control:

Keywords and clean formatting still matter. HiredScore's AI reads the parsed output of your resume — it works from the text that Workday's parser extracts. A resume with formatting problems (multi-column layout, tables, contact details in headers) will still be parsed poorly before the AI ever sees it. A resume that misses the key terms in the job description will still score poorly on keyword alignment.

See Workday ATS: Why Your Resume Gets Scrambled (And How to Fix It) for the specific formatting rules that matter for Workday's parser.

What you cannot control:

The ranking itself. How HiredScore weights different factors — experience recency, education, job title similarity, or anything else — is not public. You cannot optimise for a score that is not disclosed. The strategy of obsessing over a single number and trying to hit a threshold does not apply here.

What to focus on instead:

Getting clearly into the right pipeline. A resume that accurately mirrors the language of the job description — not keyword-stuffed, but genuinely reflecting the skills and experience the role requires — is the most defensible position. If the role requires five years of product management experience and you have it, say so clearly in those words. Don't assume the AI will figure out that "led product strategy" means "product management."

A Note on ATS Tools and Workday

Third-party ATS checkers — Jobscan, Resume Worded, PassATS — do not have access to Workday's or HiredScore's internal ranking system. They score their own keyword-matching models. These models are useful for identifying keyword gaps and formatting issues, which are real inputs into how Workday parses and presents your resume. But they do not simulate or predict what HiredScore will do with your application.

For more on what ATS tools actually measure versus what they claim to measure, see No ATS Resume Tool Simulates a Real ATS — Including Ours.

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Paste your resume and a job description into PassATS — get your keyword gap against the specific role, see formatting issues that affect parsing, and receive a fully rewritten resume. The ranking is out of your hands. The keyword match and the clean parse are not.