Having AI choose your candidates doesn’t protect you from failure-to-hire lawsuits. A person, claiming to be a general counsel and former Big Law attorney, writing on X as “Will Revieu,” shared a story about an AI disaster. I think this is a fictional tale, but it’s undoubtedly based on a real (albeit exaggerated) situation.
Let’s break it down. He writes:
“I just had a deeply alarming 45 minute sync with our Talent Acquisition team regarding their new AI-driven resume screening tool.
“They reported that the software’s reduced our time-to-hire by 60 percent over the last month.”
Now, this starts out great! Reducing time-to-hire makes a huge difference. But it also suggests the problem isn’t just sourcing; it’s the selection process. Let’s continue:
To keep reading, click here: Why Saying ‘The AI Did It’ Won’t Stop an Age Discrimination Lawsuit
The “60% faster time-to-hire” framing is exactly how these tools get sold, and it is why nobody stops to ask what the model is actually doing. We run a job board for traveling skilled trades workers and we do use AI on resumes, so this is our problem too. The constraints we settled on: it works from information the candidate already made public, we do not train models on user data, and every one of those tools also works fully by hand, so a human path always exists. None of that is a legal opinion – it is just the version we could say out loud to a candidate if we ever had to. We wrote it up at how we use AI on resumes and candidate summaries.