Two job seekers, Erin Kistler and Sruti Bhaumik, filed a federal class-action lawsuit Tuesday in California’s Contra Costa County Superior Court against Eightfold AI. The complaint alleges the company secretly scores applicants and assembled consumer reports without required disclosures.
The platform reportedly pulls social profiles, location data, browsing activity, and tracking cookies. It draws from public sites like LinkedIn, GitHub, and job boards to evaluate candidates.
Clients named include Microsoft, PayPal, Starbucks, and Morgan Stanley. The complaint says the company trains models on more than 1.5 billion global data points.
Those systems output “Match Scores” that rank applicants from 0 to 5. The suit alleges lower-ranked candidates often get filtered out before any human review.
Erin Kistler, a computer science graduate with 19 years of product management experience, applied to senior roles at PayPal in December and received no interview. Sruti Bhaumik says she was automatically rejected from a Microsoft role two days after applying.
The plaintiffs seek statutory and actual damages of $100 to $1,000 per federal violation. They seek up to $10,000 per violation under California law, plus punitive damages and injunctive relief.
The complaint asserts the model also uses data on more than 1 million job titles, 1 million skills, and profiles of over 1 billion people with inferred attributes. “There is no AI exemption to the law—no matter how fancy-sounding the tech or how much venture capital is behind it.” tweeted David Seligman.
