Workday is asking a federal judge to prevent potentially millions of job applicants from bringing a joint lawsuit over its AI-powered screening software.
The HR software company’s main argument is straightforward: it says its customers, not Workday, decide who gets hired.
The filing was submitted late Tuesday in federal court in San Francisco. It opposes a bid to certify classes of applicants who say the company’s tools discriminated against them on the basis of race, sex, age and disability.
What Workday is arguing
The case, Mobley v. Workday Inc., was first filed in February 2023. Four named plaintiffs are leading the lawsuit.
Workday argues that the plaintiffs have not shown it made hiring decisions for businesses using its platform. Without such evidence, the company says, there is no common evidence linking the claims.
Workday has also argued that differences in how individual customers configure the software make it difficult to establish commonality for class treatment. If the judge agrees, the proposed classes could be dismissed before the claims reach their merits.
The plaintiffs are seeking certification of four subclasses: African American applicants, women, applicants aged 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 that he was rejected from more than 100 job applications.
Mobley and three co-plaintiffs say they experienced repeated automated rejections, which they allege resulted from discrimination by Workday’s AI screening features.
The scale of the allegations is significant. Workday processes hundreds of millions of applications annually and reported more than 356 million applications in 2024 alone.
A case already partly through the door
This is not the first procedural stage in the case. In May 2025, an age-discrimination collective was preliminarily certified.
By October 2026, more than 15,000 people had opted in to the collective.
The latest filing concerns the broader proposed classes covering race, sex, age and disability. On November 10-11, 2026, Workday filed motions opposing certification of those nationwide subclasses.
The plaintiffs must submit their replies to Workday’s opposition by December 8, 2026.
A class-certification hearing is scheduled for March 9, 2027.
The case has been described as one of the first significant legal actions to target an AI hiring vendor directly, rather than an employer that used such a vendor.
What this means
For the HR tech industry, the stakes hinge on responsibility: Is the company that builds the screening tool liable for how it sorts candidates, or is liability limited to the employer that clicks the final button?
Workday’s defense strongly favors the latter position. If it succeeds at the certification stage, vendors would have a powerful argument: customer-specific configurations break the chain of common evidence needed for mass claims.
If the plaintiffs win certification, a vendor whose software is used by hundreds of employers could face group liability tied to its product design, rather than only to its customers’ decisions.
The age collective already shows that many applicants are willing to join the case. More than 15,000 people opting in suggests the grievance extends beyond the four named plaintiffs.
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