There is a social credit system operating inside the American job market right now and no one told you about it. If you've applied for a job in the last few years and couldn't even get an interview, this might be why. A class action complaint just exposed the company running it.
The company is called Eightfold Al. Over 100 major employers use it, including Microsoft, PayPal, Starbucks, Morgan Stanley, Chevron, and Bayer. When you submit a job application to any of these companies, Eightfold's Al activates in the background without your knowledge.
It scrapes your social media profiles, your Linkedin, your GitHub, your location data, your cookies, your internet and device activity, and cross-references all of it against a proprietary database of 1.5 billion data points on people worldwide. It then scores you from 0 to 5 on your "likelihood of success" and ranks you against every other applicant. If you score low, your application is discarded before a human being ever sees it.
You are never told Eightfold exists. You are never told your data is being scraped. You are never shown your score. You are never given the chance to review or dispute the information used against you. You don't even know there's a report. You just apply, wait, and get an automated rejection two days later, like one of the plaintiffs in this case, a woman with a master's degree and over a decade of experience who applied to Microsoft and never made it past the algorithm.
Source: Kistler et al v. Eightfold Al Inc., Class Action Complaint, filed January 2026, Superior Court of California, County of Contra Costa.
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