She Swears Her Application Status Changed in About 5 Seconds

In a sworn declaration in Mobley v. Workday, a pending lawsuit, FaithLinh Rowe swears that her application status changed to “No longer under consideration” within approximately five seconds. She is a named plaintiff in the case.

FaithLinh Rowe wrote a LinkedIn message on July 15, 2024. Filed as FROWE 000545 in Attachment A to her declaration, it says: “the moment I pressed submit, the status of my application went immediately to ‘No longer under consideration.’” Her declaration was filed Sept. 14, 2026, as ECF 419-9, in support of the plaintiffs’ motion for class certification in Mobley et al. v. Workday, Inc., 3:23-cv-00770-RFL, pending in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California before Judge Rita F. Lin. She swears she applied to an Associate Director-HR Technology position at AT&T on July 15, 2024, and “received a near-instantaneous rejection through the Workday portal.” She swears that upon submitting her application the Workday page refreshed and her status changed to the words “No longer under consideration” within approximately five seconds.

In the same LinkedIn message she writes: “This should not happen without a recruiter/specialist to approve/reject in the business process definition in Workday.” That sentence says what she thinks should happen; it does not say how an employer’s system was set up. Separately, in paragraph 35 of her declaration, she says: “I also understand that employers and vendors may configure systems differently.”

Three labels run through this record: hers, theirs and ours. Hers is her sworn declaration and its exhibits. Theirs is the plaintiffs’, in their class-certification brief (ECF 418); Workday’s, as a June 2025 news article and a May 2025 order report it; and the court’s, in its orders. Ours is this edition’s own reading, marked as ours. Each voice is printed as its speaker’s own, with no verdict among them. The question is narrow: who or what set the status on her AT&T application, and whether any record would show it. Where this edition read a file and found no answer, it names the file, the date and what was left unread.

What the exhibits print

Rowe’s declaration closes with a declaration under penalty of perjury, and at paragraph 53 it attests that Attachment A is a true and correct copy of the documents related to her applications through the Workday platform referenced in the declaration. A LinkedIn listing screenshot in FROWE 000547 reads “41 minutes ago · 1 applicant.” Her declaration says that when she applied, LinkedIn showed the position had been posted for approximately forty-one minutes and identified her as the first applicant. FROWE 000547 also shows a My Applications row for requisition R-30765, with its status cut off mid-word at “No Longer Under C…” and a date submitted of July 15, 2024. The row prints no time of day.

What she says she does not know

Paragraph 24 of her declaration says: “I did not control how the Workday platform processed my applications after I submitted them. I do not know what score, ranking, filter, assessment result, dispositioning rule, or other automated process was applied to any application I submitted.” In the same paragraph she also says that she “never received any meaningful information explaining how any of my applications were evaluated.” Each of those three sentences appears word for word in the declarations of the three other named plaintiffs.

In paragraph 36 she says: “I do not claim to know the internal names of Workday’s software features or exactly how Workday’s algorithms, models, scoring tools, or integrations work.”

In paragraph 35 she says that what she can describe from personal knowledge is “what I experienced as an applicant and HRIS professional: repeated rejection, rapid status changes, and little to no individualized explanation.” In paragraph 9 she says that as Assistant Director, HRIS and Operations for the City of Dallas, Texas, she directed a nine-person HR team overseeing Workday Human Capital Management (HCM), Compensation and Payroll for over 13,000 employees.

What the plaintiffs allege

In paragraph 46 she gives this as the reason she believes her claims are typical: “my claims arise from the same use of Workday’s AI-based applicant recruitment, screening, rejection, scoring, ranking, shortlisting, or recommendation process and candidate-selection tools, including HiredScore Spotlight, Fetch, and Candidate Skills Match.” The plaintiffs’ class-certification memorandum (ECF 418) asserts that Workday built one set of tools, HiredScore Spotlight, Fetch and Candidate Skills Match, trained them on historical hiring data, and deployed them across its customer base to score, rank and sort applicants. It asserts that Rowe, the three other named plaintiffs and every member of the class they seek to represent “were evaluated by those same tools,” and argues that employer-specific configurations do not defeat the common question. Those are the plaintiffs’ allegations, filed Sept. 14, 2026.

What the court and Workday have said

An order filed May 16, 2025 (ECF 128) states that the motion for preliminary certification of the collective is granted, and that after additional discovery Workday “would then have an opportunity to present evidence that the collective is not, in fact, similarly situated.” Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler’s order filed Oct. 7, 2026 (ECF 435) describes the plaintiffs in this conditionally certified collective action as claiming that Workday’s applicant-screening tools discriminate against job applicants who are forty and older, and states that more than 15,000 people have opted into the collective.

A Workday spokesperson told the Pleasanton Weekly, in an article by Jeanita Lyman published June 4, 2025: “We continue to believe this case is without merit.” The spokesperson also said: “Central to the Plaintiff’s allegations is that Workday products make hiring decisions on behalf of our customers, which is not true.” The article was updated June 11, 2025; both dates are before Rowe’s declaration was filed. The order of May 16, 2025 also reports that Workday asserted, in a declaration, that customers with Workday Recruiting subscriptions may “enable, disable, use, or ignore its many features.”

The order of May 16, 2025 describes Workday as appearing to take the position that, because its recommendation system “supposedly cannot auto-reject applicants without some degree of participation by the employer,” Workday does not “recommend.” The order states that, even taking Workday at its word that the system cannot auto-reject an applicant, Workday is incorrect that the proposed collective has no members. Both come from that preliminary-stage order. As of the docket captured Oct. 25, 2026, no order deciding the plaintiffs’ class-certification motion, filed Sept. 14, 2026, appears among the entries filed since that motion.

What the filings read do not name

The plaintiffs’ class-certification memorandum asserts that Rowe was evaluated by the three tools it names. Who or what set her AT&T application to “No longer under consideration” is a separate question. As of Oct. 26, 2026, none of the court filings this edition read names the person, rule or tool that set that status. The filings read were her declaration (ECF 419-9) with its Attachment A, the unredacted parts of the plaintiffs’ class-certification motion, the declarations of the other three named plaintiffs (ECF Nos. 419-6, 419-7 and 419-8), and the court’s orders of July 12, 2024 (ECF 80), May 16, 2025 (ECF 128) and Oct. 7, 2026 (ECF 435). The thirty-eight opt-in declarations (ECF Nos. 419-10 to 419-47), the expert reports and other exhibits filed in support of the plaintiffs’ motion, the notice of errata to ECF 419 (ECF 421), the depositions, Workday’s own filings and all sealed material were not read. That is a statement about our own reading, not about the world.

Where the argument stops

As of Oct. 26, 2026, the court filings this edition read, as listed earlier on this page, contain no business-process definition for requisition R-30765, the AT&T posting in Rowe’s exhibits, and no status history or audit log for her AT&T application; the files left unread are the ones listed there. We do not say who holds such a record or that one exists.

Three dates are set. Under the Oct. 7, 2026 order (ECF 435), Workday may depose fifteen of the thirty-eight opt-in declarants that it selects, for two hours each and remotely, limited to the contents of each declarant’s declaration, between Oct. 15 and 30, 2026. Workday’s opposition to class certification is set for Nov. 10, 2026 (ECF 395). The class-certification hearing is set for March 9, 2027, before Judge Rita F. Lin. The page resolves to neither a configuration nor a tool.

The Agentics read, not a finding about anyone in this case: a status line can tell an applicant where an application stands without telling who or what put it there. Agentics files that pattern under Digital Derangement Syndrome™ (DDS™) as Decision Exclusion, if the fit holds.