Board Case Study · Consumer (Large Employer)
An AI screening tool cut time-to-hire by 40%. Then a rejected applicant's lawyer alleged it systematically filtered out a protected class, and no human ever saw the file.
The situation
A national consumer-services company with 60,000 employees deployed an AI résumé-screening and video-assessment tool to handle 400,000 applications a year. It cut time-to-hire by 40% and was celebrated as an efficiency win. HR owns the relationship with the vendor; the board has never reviewed the model.
A demand letter alleges the tool produced disparate impact against applicants over 40 and against women in technical roles, in possible violation of Title VII and the ADEA, and that for filtered-out candidates, no human ever reviewed the file. New York City's automated-employment-decision-tool law and similar statutes require bias audits the company never ran.
The vendor calls its model proprietary and won't share training data. Discovery would expose years of automated decisions. The board must weigh remediation, disclosure, and whether "the vendor's algorithm did it" is any defense at all.
“The tool rejected thousands of people no human ever looked at. If the model discriminated, the company did, can we even see inside it?”
Chief Human Resources Officer
The decision on the table
The full case, scenario architecture, board materials, and facilitation notes, is shared with boards and partners on request.