LinkedIn Article | Monday Morning
The System Was Not Broken. It Was Built That Way.
What the Workday lawsuit means for every job seeker over 40 who has been wondering why the silence felt so loud.
You did everything right. You updated your resume. You tailored your cover letter. You researched the company. You clicked submit. Then, sometimes within minutes, sometimes in the middle of the night, a rejection email arrived. No interview. No human voice. Just a notification telling you that you were not selected, before anyone with a heartbeat had ever seen your name.
If that has been your experience since 2020, you were not imagining it. You were not failing. You were not irrelevant. You were being filtered out by an automated system that was never designed to see you fairly, and a federal court has now confirmed that this is exactly what was happening to people just like you.
Here is what the courts have found. A lawsuit called Mobley v. Workday, Inc. has been working its way through the federal court system since 2023. The plaintiff, Derek Mobley, applied to more than 100 positions at companies that rely on Workday's AI-powered applicant screening tools. He was rejected every time, despite being qualified. He is African American, over 40, and disabled. The lawsuit alleges that Workday's algorithm discriminated against him and millions of others on the basis of age, race, and disability status. The rejections often came within minutes of submission, sometimes at 1 in the morning, long before any human recruiter could have reviewed a single line of his resume.
Workday fought this case at every turn. The company argued it was just a software vendor, not an employer, and therefore could not be held liable under anti-discrimination law. In January 2026, Workday went further and argued that the Age Discrimination in Employment Act only protects employees, not applicants, meaning the people who never got a chance to become employees had no legal standing to complain about being blocked from the door. On March 6, 2026, Judge Rita Lin rejected that argument directly. The court ruled that disparate impact age discrimination claims by job applicants can and will proceed. The law covers you before you ever get hired, not just after.
The scale of this is difficult to absorb. In its own court filings, Workday acknowledged that 1.1 billion applications were rejected using its software tools during the relevant period. One billion, one hundred million people who submitted applications and received automated rejections. The judge's response to Workday's complaint that the affected class was too large to manage was direct: widespread discrimination is not a reason to deny people notice that a case exists on their behalf.
The algorithm was not neutral. These systems are trained on historical hiring data. When older applicants were historically overlooked, the algorithm learned to treat youth as a positive signal. It also uses proxy indicators, things like graduation years, the span of your career history, employment gaps, and experience levels, that do not directly reference age but effectively filter for it. Every year you have in your background that signals decades of experience may have been the exact thing the system used to move your application out of the queue before a human ever saw it.
Some applicants had an even more alarming experience. They submitted applications through Workday, received confirmation that the application went through, and then later discovered the employer never received it at all. No resume. No record of the submission. If this happened to you, document it. Write down the company name, the date, and the name of anyone who told you they had no record of your application. That documentation matters.
This is not just a lawsuit about one man's experience. This case represents every person over 40 who has spent months or years submitting applications into what felt like a void. It represents the executive who closed a business during the pandemic and has been told a gap in their timeline explains why no one calls back. It represents the operations leader, the finance professional, the HR director, the marketing veteran who knows exactly what they bring to a room but cannot get past a screening system long enough to prove it. The courts are now saying out loud what many of you have known in your gut: the system was not evaluating you. It was eliminating you.
Here is what you can do right now. Start keeping a record of every application you submit through any platform using automated screening. Note the time you submitted and the time any rejection arrived. If a company ever tells you they did not receive your application, write it down with every detail you can remember. Build a parallel strategy that puts your resume directly into human hands, through LinkedIn connections, direct emails to hiring managers, and referrals from people who already know your name. The algorithm cannot filter out a phone call from someone who vouches for you personally.
You are not too old. You are not overqualified in a way that disqualifies you. You are not failing to adapt. You have been running a race where part of the track was quietly closed before you arrived, and no one put up a sign. That is changing. The courts are beginning to hold the right people accountable. None of that erases the months of silence or the weight of wondering what was wrong with you. The answer was never you.
Keep going. Show up as the professional you are. Reach out directly, build your visibility, and do not let an algorithm be the final word on your value. It never had that authority to begin with.
William Rochelle, but you can call me Bill.
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