this job market is an episode of Black Mirror

Hey,

You know what’s substantially worse than receiving a job rejection email from a recruiter? Being rejected by AI.

Recruitment is supposed to be the very first step in people management, but the shift towards prioritizing efficiency has made this space far less human.

Employers have been using Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) to filter candidates for years now. These tools are flawed and filled with bias, relying on algorithms to detect specific keywords. If your CV isn't in a standard format, if you have an unexplained gap, or if you don't use the exact keywords it’s looking for, you’ll likely be rejected even if you’re perfectly qualified.

And yet there’s something much worse than an ATS—and you probably haven’t even heard of it.

Eightfold AI is marketed as a talent intelligence platform, and it’s used by a bunch of Fortune 500 companies like Microsoft, PayPal, and Morgan Stanley—many of which also operate in Canada. It’s designed to work alongside a company’s ATS, and decides which applications are worth surfacing to a human, and which get sent to trash.

But a new class action lawsuit has exposed how it really works, and I read all 35 pages so you don’t have to.

Buckle up, because it’s damning.

When a candidate submits a resume, Eightfold allegedly pulls in their web searches, browser activity, location history, social media profiles, and third-party tracking data. This all happens silently and without a candidate’s knowledge or consent.

Using 1.5 billion data points, it generates subjective inferences about your "preferences, characteristics, predispositions, behaviour, attitudes, intelligence, abilities, and aptitudes." Then compiles a report and assigns a match score from 0 to 5. If yours is low, no human recruiter ever sees your application.

The candidate has no visibility into how they were scored or what data was used.

Basically, Eightfold is operating like a shadow credit bureau that provides employers with a candidate’s social credit score.

It’s almost as if someone watched Black Mirror and was simply ✨inspired ✨to build a company. Shivers.

Bryce Dallas Howard in Black Mirror (Nosedive)

The key difference from a traditional credit score is that credit bureaus are required by law to tell you a report was run, let you see it, and give you a chance to dispute errors before it's used against you.

The creepier wrinkle here is that the score isn't just based on your qualifications—it's based on predictions about who and what you are. A credit score at least measures something you did (paid bills, took on debt).

This measures something the AI thinks you are.

The shift in what's actually being evaluated explains a lot about why job searching sucks so much right now.

The old system had real problems—ATS systems, quick resume skims, human bias—but the logic was at least legible. You knew roughly what was being evaluated and you could work with it. You can’t optimize for invisible systems like Eightfold.

What you can do is protect yourself and your data.

Right now we only have information about what’s claimed in the lawsuit. The full picture of what data it actually collects and how hasn't yet been made public.

There are still a few things worth trying to limit what these tools can connect back to you:

• Create a new email address for job applications that isn’t tied to your primary Google account or social logins
  
  
• Connect the new email to your LinkedIn
  
  
• Use a VPN when researching employers or applying to jobs
  
  
• Make other social accounts tied to your name private
  
  
• Remove your phone number and address from your CV. It’s 2026. Employers don’t need that information right away

Most people aren’t aware that in the United States, the FCRA gives you the right to ask whether a consumer report was used in a hiring decision that went against you. If one was, the employer must disclose it. In Canada, PIPEDA gives you similar access rights to data collected about you for employment purposes.

The lawsuit is significant because it means the rules created to protect you are still there, even if they've been ignored. Now it’s up to a court to enforce them.

So no, you’re not imagining things. The rules did change.

And now that there’s a paper trail, there’s some hope that the future job market will suck a little less.

Fingers crossed.

Until next time,

Ines

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