She Applied for Thousands of Jobs and Got Zero Interviews. Now She's Suing the AI That Screened Her Out

Key points

• Erin Kistler filed a class-action lawsuit in January 2025 in California court against Eightfold AI, a Silicon Valley hiring software company.
• Kistler applied for thousands of jobs over four years at companies including PayPal, Microsoft and Netflix, and received no interviews.
• The lawsuit argues that Eightfold AI's screening tool acts as an undisclosed consumer report, ranking applicants without their knowledge.
• Eightfold AI's software is used by hundreds of companies, meaning many job-seekers may have been scored without knowing it.
• This is one of the first U.S. cases to directly challenge automated hiring tools as secret credit-style dossiers on job applicants.

Erin Kistler is a product manager with nearly 20 years of experience. Over the last four years, she applied for thousands of roles at companies like PayPal, Microsoft and Netflix. Not one led to an interview.

Kistler doesn't believe that's a coincidence. She believes an algorithm, a piece of software following automatic rules, was rejecting her before a human ever looked at her name.

What is she actually claiming?

Her lawsuit says the AI screening tool made a secret judgment about her and never told her. The case, first reported by The Guardian, was filed in January in California court against Eightfold AI, the Silicon Valley company that makes the hiring software those employers use.

The legal argument is specific: Kistler's team says Eightfold AI's tool functions like a consumer report, which is a scored profile of a person, similar to a credit report, used to make decisions about them. Under U.S. law, companies must tell people when a consumer report is used against them and give them a chance to dispute errors. Kistler says Eightfold AI did none of that.

Instead, the software ranked applicants by their predicted likelihood of success, quietly, and sent those scores to employers. The applicants never saw the scores and had no way to challenge them.

Who does this affect?

The scale matters here. Eightfold AI's software is used by hundreds of companies. That means the number of people who may have been scored without knowing it runs well into the thousands, possibly far more. The case is structured as a class action, meaning Kistler is trying to represent all of them.

For ordinary job-seekers, the concern is practical. You might be fully qualified on paper, but if a hiring algorithm scores you low based on patterns it learned from past hires, your application could be filtered out before it reaches a recruiter's desk. And you would have no idea it happened.

What should job applicants watch for?

This case has not been decided, and Eightfold AI has not been found to have done anything unlawful. But the lawsuit opens a real question about transparency in hiring.

If you are applying for jobs and getting no responses despite strong qualifications, you have the right to ask companies whether they use automated decision-making tools in their hiring process. In some U.S. states and across the European Union, you already have a legal right to that information.

You can also ask whether any consumer report was run on you, which legally requires a straight answer.

Keep records of the roles you apply for, the qualifications required and the dates. If a pattern of unexplained rejections builds up, that documentation could matter later.

The case is early, but it signals a growing push to treat AI hiring tools with the same legal scrutiny applied to credit scores. Researchers studying algorithmic hiring bias have long called for exactly this kind of accountability.