She Applied for Thousands of Jobs and Got Zero Interviews. Now She's Suing the AI That Screened Her Out
A California lawsuit targets Eightfold AI, a hiring software company used by PayPal and Microsoft, arguing that its automated screening tools secretly rank job applicants without telling them or giving them a chance to challenge the results.
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 and Microsoft, 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 four years she applied for thousands of roles at companies including PayPal and Microsoft. Not one led to an interview.
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. Filed in January in California court against Eightfold AI, the Silicon Valley company behind the hiring software those employers use, it is one of the first cases to argue that automated screening functions as an undisclosed consumer report. A consumer report is a scored profile of a person, similar to a credit report, used to make decisions about them. Under U.S. Law, companies must disclose when such a report is used against someone and give them a chance to dispute errors. Kistler says Eightfold AI did neither.
The software ranked applicants by predicted likelihood of success and sent those scores to employers. Applicants never saw the scores and had no way to challenge them.
Who does this affect?
The scale matters. Eightfold AI's software is used by hundreds of companies, so the number of people who may have been scored without knowing it runs well into the thousands. The case is structured as a class action, meaning Kistler is trying to represent all of them.
The concern is practical for ordinary job-seekers. A hiring algorithm could filter out a fully qualified applicant based on patterns learned from past hires, before the résumé ever reaches a recruiter. Our earlier report on 26 former Meta workers who sued over similar AI ranking shows this is becoming a pattern worth watching.
Should you worry?
This case has not been decided, and Eightfold AI has not been found to have done anything unlawful. But it 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 some U.S. States and across the European Union, you already have a legal right to that answer. 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 and the dates. A pattern of unexplained rejections, documented, could matter later.
What this case really signals is that AI hiring tools are being tested against the same legal framework built for credit bureaus. That framing, if it holds in court, would hand applicants real use they don't currently have.
