Workday has asked a federal judge in San Francisco to stop millions of job applicants from pursuing discrimination claims over its AI screening software as a group, Reuters reported on 11 November. In a separate filing, Workday asked the judge to decertify a collective of more than 15,000 people who opted into the age claims, according to the report.
By our count, Workday’s bid came 543 days after Judge Rita Lin let that collective go forward in a 16 May 2025 order. That order said Workday “could then ask the Court to revisit its preliminary decision by de-certifying the collective and requiring each plaintiff to proceed individually”.
Workday argues there is no common evidence, and that the four named plaintiffs have not shown it made hiring decisions for its customers, Reuters reported. Law360 reported that Workday asked the court on Tuesday to unwind the collective, arguing the plaintiffs cannot show the tools were applied to them in the same way.
Workday says more than 11,500 organizations use its software, that most customers never used one of the challenged features, and that its technology focuses on qualifications and is tested for potential bias, according to Reuters. Workday’s 10 November filings were not yet in the public CourtListener docket when we checked at about 20:10 UTC on 11 November, so we have not read their text.
Key dates in Mobley v. Workday from the court record. Workday’s 10 November filings are as reported by Law360 and Reuters; the 543 days are our arithmetic.
Business Pill · The AI Audit Problem
An evergreen Business Engineer explainer on why auditing AI systems is hard. It teaches the general idea only and does not discuss Workday or this case.
The key insight: As we read it, the fight is now about who carries the liability for an AI screen: the vendor that builds one model for thousands of employers, or each employer that uses it. The plaintiffs’ motion cites Workday’s witness for more than 356 million applications in 2024; Workday argues, Reuters reported, that there is no common evidence across them.
What the Court Said in 2025
The case, Mobley v. Workday, alleges that Workday’s AI-based “applicant recommendation system discriminated against job applicants on the basis of race, age, and disability”, in the court’s summary. In May 2025 Judge Lin found the proposed age collective similarly situated because Mobley “has substantially alleged the existence of a unified policy: the use of Workday’s AI recommendation system to score, sort, rank, or screen applicants”.
Size was argued then too. The order records Workday’s statement that “1.1 billion applications were rejected using Workday” in the period at issue. The judge answered that “Allegedly widespread discrimination is not a basis for denying notice”, and that the rough estimate “ignores the qualifiers in the definition of the collective that will limit its scope”.
What the Plaintiffs Filed in September
The plaintiffs’ class certification motion, filed on 14 September 2026, seeks a class of people subject to Workday’s AI-based screening tools, “including HiredScore/Spotlight, Fetch, and Candidate Skills Match”. It is set for a hearing before Judge Lin on 9 March 2027.
The motion says “the 38 declarants submitted about 1,800 applications through the Workday platform to approximately 133 unique employers”, or about 47 applications each by our arithmetic. It says “Almost seventy percent of the declarants report that every single application they submitted through the Workday platform was unsuccessful”. These are the plaintiffs’ allegations; the court has not ruled on liability.
Why AI Hiring Vendors Are Watching
The scale comes from Workday’s own side. The motion cites Workday’s witness for “more than 356 million applications submitted” through Workday Recruiting in 2024, at “more than 4,775 of Workday’s customers”. The question in front of the judge is whether one vendor’s screening tools can be tested for bias across all of those employers at once, or only employer by employer.
As we read the record, the court has already framed the question once: in May 2025 it found a unified policy alleged in the use of Workday’s AI recommendation system to score, sort, rank, or screen applicants, and said Workday could later ask to decertify. Workday’s 10 November filings are that request, by our reading of the reports.
As we read the plaintiffs’ motion, its case for one class rests on Workday’s own scale and on cross-employer audits, such as a July 2023 audit of 147,077 applications from 10 large customers.
Judge Rita F. Lin, order of 16 May 2025
“Allegedly widespread discrimination is not a basis for denying notice.”
Three Implications
FOR WORKDAY Reuters reported that Workday says most customers never used one of the challenged features and that its technology is tested for potential bias.
FOR EMPLOYERS The plaintiffs’ motion cites more than 4,775 Workday Recruiting customers and more than 356 million applications in 2024.
FOR THE COURT The plaintiffs’ class motion is set for a hearing before Judge Lin on 9 March 2027.
The framework says: “Workday isn’t HR software; it’s the canonical source of organizational truth.”
As we read it, the Mobley case tests the other side of that position: if one vendor’s screen sits under thousands of employers, the plaintiffs argue its effects can be judged across all of them at once. The framework predates the filings and does not discuss the case.
What Is Not Established
We have not read Workday’s 10 November filings, so Workday’s arguments here come from Reuters and Law360 and are not quoted. The more-than-15,000 opt-in figure is Reuters’s; we did not find it in the court documents we read.
The plaintiffs’ claims are allegations. Workday says its technology focuses on qualifications and is tested for potential bias, and the court has not decided whether the software had a disparate impact on anyone.
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Workday’s 10 November filings ask Judge Lin to undo the age collective she allowed 543 days earlier, by our count, and, Reuters reported, to refuse a wider class. The hearing on the plaintiffs’ class motion is set for 9 March 2027.
A note on sourcing. We read Judge Rita Lin’s 16 May 2025 order granting preliminary collective certification in full, the plaintiffs’ 14 September 2026 class certification motion and the case docket, through CourtListener’s public RECAP archive. Workday’s 10 November filings were not yet in that archive when we checked, so Workday’s arguments and the more-than-15,000 figure come from Reuters and Law360 and are paraphrased. The 543 days and the per-declarant average are our arithmetic.
The plaintiffs’ claims are allegations; the court has not ruled on liability. We did not contact Workday or the plaintiffs’ lawyers for this piece.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
