Margaret SpenceFounder, The Inclusion Learning Lab · AI Governance Strategy for CHROs | Author, When AI Breaks the Law | SXSW Speaker: Human+AI CoLab and AI Skills Gap for Women | Substack: AI Governance for HR & The Undisruptable Woman

Mobley: 100 rejections at 1:50 a.m. #substack #shorts

26 Mar 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:52

The video segment outlines the case of Derek Mobley, a 40‑year‑old African‑American software engineer who applied to 100 positions through the Workday hiring platform. Each application was rejected within minutes, including a 100th rejection that arrived at 1:50 a.m., indicating that no human reviewer was involved. Mobley, leveraging his technical background, decided to investigate the Workday software to understand why the automated resume screening system was consistently filtering him out, raising concerns about algorithmic bias and the opacity of AI‑driven hiring tools.

Chapters

The first case is Mobley v. Workday. It basically, Derek Mobley, 40-year-old software engineer, African American, well experienced, applied for 100 jobs using the Workday platform. He received rejections at all hours of the day and night, generally within minutes of applying. When he got his 100th rejection at 1:50 AM, He knew that no human being was reviewing his application. The resume screening process was screening him out for some reason, and being the software engineer that he wa— is, he decided to unpack the software.