The email came in overnight.
Thank you for your interest. After careful consideration, we’ve decided to move forward with other candidates. You applied eleven hours earlier. Nobody read anything. Nobody considered anything carefully. A system scored you, ranked you below a line, and sent the message.
That was the two hundredth one. You’re over fifty, you’ve done this work for twenty-five years, you’re more qualified than the posting asks for, and you cannot get a human being on the phone.
Here’s what almost nobody applying for jobs in New York City knows. The law already says you’re supposed to be told this is happening, and that the tool is supposed to have been tested. Most employers aren’t telling anyone. And the agency responsible for making them has not, by the state’s own account, been doing much about it.
The Notice You Should Have Gotten
New York City Local Law 144 took effect January 1, 2023, with enforcement beginning that July. It sits in the Administrative Code at sections 20-870 through 20-874, and it covers what the law calls an automated employment decision tool.
An employer or employment agency can’t use one of these to screen you unless two things are true. The tool has been through a bias audit by an independent auditor within the past year. And the employer must post a summary of that audit’s results, plus the date it started using the tool, publicly on its website before using it. That posting has to stay up for six months after the last time the tool was used.
Then there’s the notice. If you live in New York City, the employer must tell you that an automated tool will be used on you and what job qualifications and characteristics it will assess. Both notices are due at least ten business days before the tool runs. The notice also has to include instructions for how to request an alternative selection process or a reasonable accommodation under other laws.
Read that last sentence carefully, because the rules give with one hand and take with the other. The employer has to tell you how to ask for an alternative. Nothing in the rules requires the employer to actually provide one.
You can also ask, in writing, what data the tool collects, where that data comes from, and what the employer’s retention policy is. They have thirty days to answer.
What the State Found
On December 2, 2025, the Office of the New York State Comptroller published an audit of how the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection has been enforcing this. The audit covered July 2023 through June 2025.
In two years, the department received two complaints about automated hiring tools. Two. The Comptroller found the complaint process itself wasn’t reliably routing complaints to the right place, and that despite receiving almost none, the department never checked whether its own intake was working.
Then the number that should stop you. The department reviewed the websites and posted audits of 32 companies and found exactly one instance of noncompliance. The Comptroller’s auditors looked at the same 32 companies and identified at least seventeen.
The audit also found that department officials lack the technical expertise to evaluate these tools and never consulted the city’s Office of Technology and Innovation, despite a formal agreement to get precisely that help. The department agreed to adopt most of the recommendations.
On penalties, the law is more modest than it sounds. A first violation runs up to $500. Subsequent violations run from $500 to $1,500. What gives the numbers teeth is the counting: each day a tool is used in violation is a separate violation, and each failure to give a required notice is a separate violation on top of that.
Why the Paperwork Matters Even Though It Isn’t the Claim
Be clear about what a compliance failure is and isn’t. Failing to post a bias audit is not discrimination, and the penalties go to the city, not to you.
There’s a stranger wrinkle. The law requires the audit. It does not require the employer to do anything about what the audit finds. An employer can publish an impact ratio showing its tool selects one group at a materially lower rate, keep using the tool, and remain in compliance with Local Law 144. The city’s own guidance says so, while reminding employers that discrimination law still applies.
So the posting is not a certificate of fairness. It’s a disclosure. And disclosure cuts both ways, which is the point for anyone who was screened out.
An employer that never audited, never posted, and never gave notice is an employer that never looked at whether its tool skews against people over forty and never gave anyone a chance to ask. An employer that audited and posted numbers showing a skew has, in writing on its website, documented the disparity it kept using. Either way, go look. Check the employer’s careers page for a bias audit summary. Check the posting and your application emails for a notice. Screenshot what’s there, and screenshot what isn’t.
The Claim Lives Somewhere Else, and It Just Got Stronger
Local Law 144 is a disclosure statute. The discrimination claim comes from the human rights laws, and New York just firmed that ground considerably.
Effective December 19, 2025, the State Human Rights Law now states that, in any case alleging employment discrimination, an unlawful discriminatory practice may be established by a practice’s discriminatory effect, even if the practice was not motivated by discriminatory intent. It’s codified at Executive Law section 296(5-b). Most commentary cites 5-a, which is the number the bill carried when introduced; 5-a went to the parallel housing provision, and the employment one landed at 5-b.
The structure is familiar. You prove the practice caused or predictably will cause a discriminatory effect. The employer then has to prove the practice is job-related for the position and consistent with business necessity, supported by evidence rather than speculation. Even then, you can still win by showing the same business need could be served by a practice with a less discriminatory effect.
Two features matter especially for software. The statute reaches practices that actually or predictably produce a disparate impact, so a tool doesn’t have to have already done damage. And a legally sufficient justification is expressly not a defense to intentional discrimination.
This is the right theory for algorithmic screening, because nobody has to prove anyone intended anything. A system that filters out long work histories doesn’t need an opinion about older workers to produce an age skew. Intent was always the hard part. Here you don’t need it.
And the two don’t compete. Local Law 144 says in its own text, at section 20-874, that nothing in it limits any candidate’s or employee’s right to bring a civil action in any court of competent jurisdiction, or the City Commission on Human Rights’ authority to enforce the City Human Rights Law. The disclosure rules sit alongside your claim. They were never meant to replace it.
The Vendor Is Not a Shield
The obvious defense is that the employer didn’t build the thing. It bought it. Go sue the software company.
That defense is not working in the leading case. In Mobley v. Workday, pending in the Northern District of California, a job applicant sued the vendor rather than the employers, alleging that Workday’s algorithmic screening tools rejected him and others on the basis of race, age, and disability. The court allowed the claims to proceed on the theory that a vendor performing a core hiring function for its client employers acts as their agent, and so falls within the definition of employer under Title VII, the ADEA, and the ADA.
The court has also now twice rejected the argument that job applicants can’t bring disparate impact claims under the ADEA at all. In an order dated March 6, 2026, Judge Rita Lin reaffirmed that holding, pointing out that the EEOC has read the statute’s disparate impact provisions to cover applicants since within months of the ADEA’s enactment and confirmed that reading through formal rulemaking.
The case is very much alive. Plaintiffs filed a fourth amended complaint; Workday answered in July 2026, and the docket was still moving in late September. AARP and the AARP Foundation appeared as amici. No court has yet decided whether these tools actually discriminate.
But the agency holding is the one that matters for anyone screened out by software. If the vendor can be the employer’s agent, neither one gets to point at the other.
What to Save
Keep every rejection with its timestamp. The gap between submitting an application and getting turned down is a fact in itself, and an overnight turnaround on a detailed application says something about whether a person was ever involved.
Save the job posting in full, including any notice about automated screening or the conspicuous absence of one, before the listing comes down.
Keep a running list. One rejection is nothing. Forty, where you meet or exceed every stated qualification, is the start of something.
Note the platform you applied through. The name of the applicant tracking system is usually visible in the portal or in the rejection email itself.
And note what marks you out to a model. Graduation years. A long work history. A gap. A degree from a school associated with a particular group. These are the proxies that produce skewed outcomes without anyone typing a protected characteristic into anything.
Does the Law Reach What Happened to You?
Three questions sort most of it out.
Where was the job? The audit and posting duties attach to tools used to screen for positions in the city, including a job based at a New York City office even part of the time and a fully remote job tied to one. The notice duty runs to candidates and employees who live in the city. Remote work does not put you outside this.
How was the score used? This is the question that decides coverage, and it’s one you can often answer from your own experience. The tool is covered if its output was relied on by itself with nothing else considered, or weighted more heavily than any other factor, or used to overrule a conclusion a human had already reached. An instant rejection, a rejection that arrived before anyone could have read your materials, or a recruiter who tells you the system screened you out, all point in the same direction.
Where does the complaint go? These are two different tracks, and the difference matters more than it looks.
A missing bias audit or a missing notice is a Local Law 144 complaint. That goes to the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, through 311 or its website. The city asks for the job posting details, the name and type of the tool if you know it, what notice you received, if any, and what you think went wrong. This is a regulatory complaint, not a discrimination claim, and filing it does not give up anything.
Discrimination is the other track, and here the choice deserves care rather than speed. You can file with the State Division of Human Rights or the City Commission on Human Rights, or you can sue. Under Executive Law section 297(9), filing with the Division or a local commission generally forecloses a later court action on the same grievance, and it runs the other way too: once you’ve gone to court, you can’t then file the same grievance with the agency. The agency route can cost you the courthouse.
Two things in that provision are worth knowing before you panic. A charge filed with the EEOC to satisfy federal requirements does not count as an election under the statute, so going to the EEOC does not by itself forfeit your state court claim. And if you’ve already filed with the Division, you are not necessarily stuck. At any time before a hearing, you can ask the Division to dismiss the complaint and annul your election so the claim can go to court, and the Division may do it.
There are deadlines underneath all of this. A complaint with the Division has to be filed within three years of the practice you’re complaining about. Waiting is the one thing that forecloses every route at once.
These cases ultimately turn on statistics and what discovery reveals about how a tool actually scored people. That’s not a reason to assume you have no case. It’s the reason these cases get built with a lawyer rather than alone.
The Bottom Line
Being rejected by a machine at two in the morning feels like nothing happened. No decision maker, no conversation, nothing to point at. That feeling is the whole problem, and it’s why so few people ever ask a single question about it.
But there’s a law saying you should have been told. There’s a state audit documenting that the telling largely isn’t happening. There’s now a statute saying discrimination can be proven by effect alone. And there’s a federal court holding that the company that built the software can be on the hook next to the company that used it.
If you’re over forty, or disabled, or in any protected group, and the rejections are arriving faster than any human could have read your application, that pattern is worth having someone look at.
Risman & Risman, P.C. represents employees throughout New York and New Jersey. Call 212-233-6400 or contact us online.