"I've also sent hundreds of applications and had no interviews from Workday"
As financial services employees struggle to find jobs in what remains a very challenging market, a new bête noire has emerged: Workday, the US-based application tracking system which many banks use to process applications.
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"I've applied for hundreds of jobs through Workday and had no interviews," one experienced risk candidate tells us. "Sometimes the rejections come through months after I applied - at 11.30pm or 6am in the morning."
Another applicant with decades of experience in trading roles says Workday is "horrific". - "It asks you for loads and loads of information that it doesn't really need and then suddenly rejects you," he says. "It's all done by AI."
The complaints come after the Wall Street Journal highlighted the case of Derek Mobley a 40-something IT professional with a finance degree, who says the Workday algorithm screened him out based on his age race and disabilities. Mobley said he applied for 100 jobs, each of which he believed his was qualified for, but that he got 100 rejections, sometimes in the middle of the night or within hours of applying. “There’s a standard bell curve in statistics. It didn’t make sense that my failure rate was 100%,” Mobley told the WSJ.
Workday told the WSJ that Mobley's claim has no merit. The company said its software matches résumé keywords with words in job advertisements and ranks applicants as 'strong, good, fair or low match.' It also allows for companies to set "knockout questions" leading to automatic rejection so that employers can make final decisions on hires.
Law firm Holland Knight says Mobley's main allegation is that Workday discriminates against candidates aged over 40. Mobley's filing last year claims that tools like Pymetrics, which are popular with banks and integrated into Workday reflect employer biases. Workday strenuously denies this. “There’s no evidence that the technology results in harm to protected groups,” the company told the WSJ.
Mobley's claims seem to have hit a nerve, however. Writing in response to our article earlier this week, people claimed to have been arbitrarily rejected by the Workday system. One candidate said they'd been unable to find a job since Workday became prevalent. - "I have applied for more than 100 compliance jobs and not had one reply. My CV is almost a mirror reflection of what the job advert requirements require." Another said they'd applied for 500 roles and received no response despite them being a close match.
Like Mobley, some candidates complain that Workday rejects people with too much experience and anyone with gaps on their CV.
Last week, the judge in Mobley's case certified it as a class action lawsuit in a federal court in California, inviting other affected individuals to come forward. Despite their complaints, though, some in finance are sceptical that this will succeed. "The problem is that Workday is effectively a white label site used by companies like banks," says one. - It's the companies, not the system that are doing the rejecting.
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