The HR software giant argues job applicants alleging race, sex, age and disability bias cannot sue as a group because its customers make the hiring calls
Workday wants a federal judge to stop potentially millions of job applicants from suing it together over its AI-powered screening software.
The HR software company’s core argument is simple. It says it does not decide who gets hired. Its customers do.
The filing landed late Tuesday in San Francisco federal court. It targets a bid to certify classes of applicants who allege the company’s tools discriminated against them based on race, sex, age and disability.
What Workday is arguing
The case is Mobley v. Workday Inc., first brought in February 2023. Four named plaintiffs are leading it.
Workday’s position is that those plaintiffs have not shown the company made any hiring decisions on behalf of the businesses that use its platform. Without that, the company argues, there is no common evidence tying the claims together.
Workday has also argued that individual customer configurations make it hard to establish commonality for class treatment. If a judge agrees, the proposed classes could fall apart before reaching the merits.
The plaintiffs are seeking certification for four subclasses. They cover African American applicants, women, applicants age 40 and older, and applicants with disabilities.
The man behind the lawsuit
Lead plaintiff Derek L. Mobley is a Black man over 40. He alleges he was rejected from more than 100 job applications.
He and three co-plaintiffs claim they faced repeated automated rejections. They allege Workday’s AI screening features were behind the discrimination.
The scale behind the allegation is significant. Workday processes hundreds of millions of applications each year, reporting more than 356 million applications in 2024 alone.
A case already partly through the door
This is not the first procedural round. In May 2025, an age-discrimination collective was preliminarily certified in the case.
By October 2026, more than 15,000 individuals had opted in to that collective.
The current filing addresses the broader proposed classes covering race, sex, age and disability. Workday filed its motions on November 10-11, 2026, opposing certification of those nationwide subclasses.
Plaintiffs’ replies to Workday’s opposition are due by December 8, 2026.
A hearing on class certification is scheduled for March 9, 2027.
The case has been described as one of the first significant legal actions aimed directly at an AI hiring vendor, rather than at an employer that used one.
What this means
For the HR tech industry, the stakes come down to a question of responsibility. Is the company that builds the screening tool liable for how it sorts candidates, or only the employer that clicks the final button?
Workday’s defense leans hard on the second answer. If it prevails at the certification stage, vendors gain a powerful argument: customer-specific setups break the chain of common evidence needed for mass claims.
If the plaintiffs win certification, a vendor whose software sits underneath hundreds of employers could face group liability tied to its product design, not just its customers’ choices.
The age collective already shows that large numbers of applicants are willing to sign on. More than 15,000 opt-ins suggests the grievance is not limited to four named plaintiffs.
Disclosure: This article was edited by John Chen. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
