Wall Street Journal, June 2025
U.S. job hunters submit millions of online applications every year. Often they get an automatic rejection or no response at all, never knowing if they got a fair shake from the algorithms that gatekeep today’s job market. One worker, Derek Mobley, is trying to discover why.
Mobley, an IT professional in North Carolina, applied for more than 100 jobs during a stretch of unemployment from 2017 to 2019 and for a few years after. He was met with rejection or silence each time. Sometimes the rejection emails arrived in the middle of the night or within an hour of submitting his application. Mobley, now 50 years old, noticed that many of the companies he applied to used an online recruiting platform created by software firm Workday. The platforms, called applicant tracking systems, help employers track and screen job candidates.
In 2023 Mobley sued Workday, one of the largest purveyors of recruiting software, for discrimination, claiming its algorithm screened him out, based on his age, race and disabilities. Mobley, a Black graduate of Morehouse College who suffers from anxiety and depression, said the math didn’t add up. He says he applied only for jobs he believed he was qualified for. “There’s a standard bell curve in statistics. It didn’t make sense that my failure rate was 100%,” said Mobley, who has since gotten hired and twice promoted at Allstate.
