What Is Workday, Inc.?

Workday doesn't hire anyone itself. It makes the software that thousands of companies use to manage hiring, payroll, and HR - and that distinction is exactly what this lawsuit is fighting about.

Workday, Inc. is a large, publicly traded software company (its stock trades as WDAY) that sells online business tools to big organizations - things like payroll, HR records, and job-application systems. It was started in March 2005 by David Duffield and Aneel Bhusri, two people who had previously built another business-software company called PeopleSoft. Workday is based in Pleasanton, California, and its stock first became publicly tradeable in October 2012. (source: Workday's own newsroom page; source: Workday press release)

By Workday's own figures, it employs more than 20,800 people worldwide and its software is used by more than 11,500 organizations, including over 65% of the companies on the Fortune 500 list (a well-known ranking of the 500 biggest U.S. companies). (source: Workday's own newsroom page)

The specific part of Workday's software this case is about

This lawsuit isn't about Workday's payroll or finance tools - it's about "Workday Recruiting," the part of its software that companies use to collect job applications and help decide who gets rejected and who moves forward. According to the judge's own summary of the case, Workday has advertised that this software can "reduce time to hire by automatically dispositioning or moving candidates forward in the recruiting process" - in plain terms, automatically rejecting or advancing applicants without a person necessarily reviewing each one. (source: court order, page 3)

Two specific tools are named in the lawsuit:

• Candidate Skills Match - software that compares an applicant's resume to a job posting and gives it a score, like "strong," "good," "fair," or "low."
• Workday Assessment Connector - software the lawsuit says can learn that a particular employer tends to reject people in a protected group (for example, based on race or disability) and then start recommending fewer of those people automatically. Workday says this tool is really just a bridge that connects to other companies' AI tools, rather than making its own decisions.

(source: court order, pages 3-4)

Workday's customers can reportedly turn these AI features on or off. Workday has argued that if an employer chooses to use them and something goes wrong, the employer - not Workday - should be the one held responsible. Whether that argument holds up is really what this whole case is about; see why it's significant. (source: court order, page 4)