The New Regulatory Frontier: Using AI Tools Is About To Become More Difficult

Employers can be forgiven for diverting their attention during the past three years to pressing pandemic-related employment issues—vaccine mandates, return-to-work challenges, managing hybrid workforces, with all the novel and thorny legal issues that emerged from a transformed workplace. But in an ever-changing employment law landscape, a new compliance challenge has emerged: federal, state, and local regulations governing the use of artificial intelligence ("AI") in the hiring process. These new laws and regulations are a perfect storm for liability. They are new and unfamiliar, and they are easy to violate despite employers' best intentions.

The rise of single-click job application programs like "Easy Apply" on LinkedIn or "1 Click Apply" on ZipRecruiter has made it extraordinarily easy for applicants to submit job applications. But as any recruiting manager knows, the task of filtering resumes and job applications for hundreds of applicants per position ranges