HR Didn't Reject You. HR Wasn't in the Room.
- thehrblackbox
- Jul 8
- 5 min read
What the Workday lawsuit reveals about who's actually deciding your career — and what to do about it.
You refreshed your inbox for three weeks.
You told yourself the hiring manager was swamped. That the role was competitive. That maybe your resume needed one more pass, one more keyword, one more bullet rewritten in whatever format some guru swore by on your feed at midnight.
Then the rejection came. At 1:50 in the morning.
Fifty-two minutes after you hit submit.
Sweetheart, you didn't get rejected. You got filtered.
And the person you've been blaming this whole time — HR, that faceless department everybody loves to drag — was asleep.
The Case Everyone in HR Is Quietly Watching
Derek Mobley. Morehouse graduate. Finance, IT, customer service. Black, disabled, over 40.
More than 100 applications through employers running Workday. Rejected every single time. Often within minutes. Never once interviewed.
He sued in 2023, alleging Workday's algorithmic screening tools discriminated on the basis of race, age, and disability.
Workday's defense was the one every vendor keeps in its back pocket: we just make software, employers make the decisions.
The court didn't buy it.
Judge Rita Lin let the claims proceed on an agent theory — the vendor itself can be on the hook, not just the employer who swiped the credit card. In May 2025 she granted preliminary certification for a nationwide collective action under the ADEA.
Meaning: potentially millions of applicants over 40, screened by these tools since 2020, may be eligible to join. And the court ordered Workday to produce a list of customers using the screening features, so those applicants can be notified.
Now — nothing has been decided on the merits. Every claim is still an allegation, and Workday maintains its tools don't make hiring decisions and are built with human oversight at the center.
But a federal judge looked at a rejection timestamped 1:50 a.m., under an hour after submission, and found that plausible enough to keep the case alive.
That timestamp is the entire story.
Let Me Say the Quiet Part, as Someone Who Sits Inside This
I've built my career in HR. I've sat in the calibration meetings. I've watched the vendor demos. I know what happens in the room because I was in the room.
So let me tell you what my colleagues won't say at the conference:
We bought the black box, too.
HR did not build these algorithms. HR does not write the ranking logic. Most HR practitioners could not tell you how a candidate score is calculated, because that information sits behind a vendor's intellectual property wall. We were sold speed. We were sold objectivity. We were told the machine would strip out the bias that human reviewers carry.
We trusted the system. And the system was a product.
Here's the detail that should chill you. When plaintiffs moved to compel Workday to produce its bias-testing data, the court denied the motion — finding the data protected by attorney-client privilege, because Workday's attorneys curated it and the testing's stated purpose was to provide legal advice rather than serve a business function.
Meanwhile, Workday's public-facing AI Fact Sheet states that the company performs bias testing.
Read those two sentences together.
The bias testing exists. It is publicly cited as reassurance. And it was structured, from the beginning, in a way that makes it very difficult for anyone to look at it.
That's not an algorithm problem. That's an architecture problem. Somebody drew that org chart on purpose.
So What Do You Actually Do?
Here's where every other article about AI hiring bias taps out. With a sigh. With a link to a petition. With "the system needs to change."
Baby. The system will take a decade to change.
Your rent is due in three weeks.
So let's talk about what you can control by Friday.
Sit down. I need to tell you something.
Every hour you've spent stuffing keywords into a resume — reformatting, re-bulleting, running it through some free ATS scanner that told you you scored a 68 — you were negotiating with a machine that has no authority to hire you.
None. Zero. It cannot say yes.
The very best thing that machine can do for you is not delete you.
Read that again, because I need it to land: you have been playing a game whose highest possible score is zero.
That's not a you problem. Nobody told you the rules. They're not written down anywhere, and the one person who could've explained them — HR — was busy getting sold the same software.
And it's worse than you think
The bias doesn't walk in through a box marked race or age. It comes in sideways. Through proxies.
Years of experience? That's your age. Employment gaps? Could read as disability, could read as the year you spent raising your baby. Where you went to school, what organizations you list, the ZIP code in your header — all of it correlates with things that are illegal to ask about and trivially easy to infer.
And you will never see the weights. Nobody does. Per that ruling — sometimes not even the lawyers suing them.
So let's stop trying to outsmart a box we're not allowed to open.
Here's the whole thing. Ready?
The application portal is a filter. LinkedIn is a door.
Sit with that for a second.
A filter exists to remove people. That is its entire job description. It wakes up in the morning and eliminates. You are not "applying" — you are volunteering to be sorted, and the best-case outcome is survival.
A door has a person standing on the other side of it.
A recruiter with a req to fill and a deadline. A hiring manager who saw your name in a comment thread and remembered it three weeks later. A director running a Boolean search at 9 a.m. with a coffee and a mandate.
Nobody's LinkedIn profile gets deleted at 1:50 in the morning by a bot.
Profiles get found.
By humans. On purpose. Who are looking for you.
That is a completely different game — different odds, different physics — and here's the part that should get you out of your chair:
Almost nobody plays it. Because everybody's too busy feeding the filter.
The Move
Referred and sourced candidates skip the screen entirely. Not because they're smarter. Not because they're more qualified. Because they walked through a door while everyone else stood in line at a machine.
So flip your whole strategy upside down:
20% of your energy on applications. Fast. Clean. Zero emotional investment. Submit and forget it, because that portal was never going to love you back.
80% of your energy on being findable — visible, specific, and searchable enough that the human who needs exactly what you do can actually locate you.
Most people run that backwards. Then they sit up at 2 a.m. wondering what's wrong with them.
Nothing's wrong with you. You were at the wrong entrance.
Now Let's Build Your Door
I wrote The LinkedIn Guide for this exact moment.
Not to "build your personal brand." Not to chase engagement or post inspirational carousels into the void. To make you findable by the people who are actually authorized to say yes — the ones running searches while an algorithm quietly discards your application in another tab.
Inside: how recruiters really search. What your headline is actually doing (it's not what you think). Why your About section is working against you right now. And how to position yourself so you surface in the searches that pay.
Written by somebody who's sat on both sides of the desk — including the side that bought the software.
You've been knocking on a wall, love.
So the next time a rejection lands at 1:50 a.m., you'll know exactly who was in the room.
Nobody.
Now go build a door.
Your Career Bestie has spoken. 🤎
- J. Michelle, Founder | The HR Black Box
“Inside the hiring process. Outside the guesswork.”
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