These stories are from the American site, Futurism and show what a dumpster fire AI has become in recruitment. Some job candidates are getting legal. Stories written by Joe Wilkins.
Job seekers sue company scanning their résumés using AI
Thanks to scores of competing AI systems clogging up online application portals, applying for a new job in 2026 can feel more like applying for a bank loan than seeking a job.
At least, that’s what a group of disgruntled job seekers is claiming in a lawsuit against an AI screening company called Eightfold AI. According to the New York Times, the plaintiffs allege that Eightfold’s employment screening software should be subjected to the Fair Credit Reporting Act — the regulations protecting information collected by consumer credit bureaus.
The reason, they say, can be found deep within Eightfold’s AI algorithm, which actively trolls LinkedIn to create a data set of “1 million job titles, 1 millions skills, and the profiles of more than 1 billion people working in every job, profession, industry, and geography.” That data set, in turn, is used in marketing material help sell its services to potential clients.
Using an AI model trained on that data, plaintiffs say, Eightfold scores job applications on a scale of one to five, based on their skills, experience, and the hiring manager’s goals. In sum, their argument is that it’s not at all unlike the opaque rules used to govern consumer credit scores.
In the case of Eightfold, however, applicants have no way of knowing what their final score even is, let alone the steps the system took to come up with it. That creates a “black box”: a situation where the people subjected to an algorithmic decision can only see the system’s outcome, not the process that led to it.
And if Eightfold’s AI starts making things up on the fly — an issue AI models are infamous for — the job seeker has no way of knowing.
There’s also the issue of data retention. With no way to take a peek under the hood, there’s no telling how much data from job applicants’ résumés Eightfold collects, or what the AI company and its clients are doing with it.
“I think I deserve to know what’s being collected about me and shared with employers,” Erin Kistler, one of the plaintiffs told the NYT “And they’re not giving me any feedback, so I can’t address the issues.”
Kistler, who has decades of experience working in computer science, told the publication she’s kept a close score of every application she’s sent over the last year. Out of “thousands of jobs” she’s applied for, only 0.3 percent moved on to a follow-up or interview, she said.
It all underscores the sad state of the job market, which has become the stuff of dystopian nightmares thanks to AI hiring tools. Whether the lawsuit can gain enough momentum to challenge the massive legal grey area of AI hiring remains to be seen. If it does, it could bring relief to throngs of despondent job seekers whose careers quite literally hang in the balance.
Applying to jobs has become an AI-powered wasteland
If you’re one of millions of job seekers struggling to find stable employment, just know it’s probably not you.
With the onslaught of so-called “generative AI” — Silicon Valley’s term for complex prediction algorithms that can be used to create new content based on vast amounts of material that they gathered without the permission of its creators — the job search has become a veritable gauntlet of fake job listings, automated application bots, and computer-generated interviews.
Though it’s only been a little over two years since consumers got their hands on ChatGPT — the first widely available generative AI model — the tech has already caused devastating harm to the digital job market.
The number of applications sent via LinkedIn has surged over 45 percent since 2024, according to the NYT. The rate now stands at a dizzying 11,000 apps per minute on the site.
One HR worker was gobsmacked when her fully-remote job posting received 400 applications in just 12 hours, surging to over 1,200 apps 36 hours later.
Access to AI makes it incredibly easy for legit applicants and scammers alike to spam employers with résumés, often uniquely tailored to the job’s details. That makes standing out as a purely human applicant — which was already difficult before AI — a Sisyphean task.
“It’s an ‘applicant tsunami’ that’s just going to get bigger,” one recruiter told the NYT, often devolving into an “AI versus AI type of situation.”
But the problem didn’t start with job seekers. The trouble can be traced back to the mass adoption of AI HR bots, with 99 percent of Fortune 500 companies admitting to the use of AI to filter applicants, and 40 percent anticipating using AI to conduct interviews.
And as job seekers turn to AI to level the playing field, companies — which hold almost all of the power in the labor market — are cranking the lever to dump more AI on the problem.
Employers are now unleashing AI to verify applicant identities, administer computer-generated skilled assessments, and auto-generate messages to applicants — all deployed with essentially zero recourse for anyone wrongfully rejected or subject to bias by the faceless bot.
Case in point, LinkedIn is unleashed a so-called “AI agent” to help HR managers keep up with the flood of AI-assisted job applications — essentially fighting fire with gasoline.
It’s a labor arms race to the bottom, and until regulations like the EU’s Regulation on Artificial Intelligence become universal, applicants lacking the funding, resources, and techno-savvy of organized companies are bound to lose.