The AI Screening Notice Belongs in the Job Posting, Not the Careers Footer

Which rules actually reach a job posting?

Two create a notice duty an applicant might see, and they are shaped differently. New York City's Local Law 144, in force since January 1, 2023, bars using an automated employment decision tool on a city candidate unless a bias audit was done within the prior year, a summary is posted publicly, and the candidate got notice at least ten business days beforehand ¹. Illinois makes the failure to give notice a civil rights violation in its own right ².

Local Law 144 has a scope clause that decides most cases before the notice question arrives. It applies where the tool substantially assists or replaces discretionary decision-making, and an employer that concludes its tool merely informs a human reviewer takes itself out of scope, with no up-front review of that call ¹. The duty sits on the employer, not the vendor, and nothing in the law approves a tool for use. Whether your ATS ranking feature lands inside it is the first question to settle, and it is the whole subject of what counts as an automated employment decision tool.

Illinois Public Act 103-0804 took effect January 1, 2026, amending the Human Rights Act to make it a violation to use AI that has the effect of discriminating in recruitment, hiring, promotion or discharge, to use zip codes as a proxy for a protected class, or to fail to give notice that AI is being used for those purposes ². The statute requires no bias audit, does not say the notice must be published, and does not fix a deadline: timing, circumstances and means all sit with Department of Human Rights rulemaking. So an employer choosing a surface today is choosing under uncertainty, and the listing is the surface most likely to reach an applicant before anything runs.

California is a third shape worth knowing and a fourth answer to the question. Its Civil Rights Council amended the employment regulations to cover automated-decision systems, filed June 27, 2025 and effective October 1, 2025, naming resume screening for particular terms or patterns and analysis of facial expression, word choice or voice in online interviews, and treating a vendor acting for an employer as an employer itself ³⁶. Nothing in it requires telling a candidate anything. It expands who can be sued without adding anything a candidate must be told, which is a useful reminder that the map of which AI hiring rules apply is not one duty repeated in five places.

Why the careers-page footer is the wrong home

Because it reaches the wrong reader. New York City does let an employer put the notice on the employment section of its website, and the ten business days then run from when that page went up, regardless of when a specific job was posted ¹. Nothing routes a job-board applicant through that page on the way to applying. The duty is discharged and the person it exists for learns nothing.

The measured version of that gap is unflattering. A Cornell study sent 155 student investigators to record what 391 employers publicly posted under Local Law 144 across seventeen days in late 2023: 18 had posted a bias audit report and 13 a transparency notice, and among the 267 employers actively listing New York City jobs, 14 had an audit posted and 12 a notice ⁴. The authors are emphatic that these are compliance rates rather than non-compliance rates, since the law lets an employer decide for itself whether its tools are in scope, and notices shown after somebody applies were invisible to the study. Read as a measure of what a job seeker can actually see, though, it is close to nothing.

A listing solves three problems the footer cannot. It travels with syndication, so the notice reaches whichever site the candidate used. It is one of the routes the city names for the notice, alongside mail or email ¹. And it is versioned with the posting, so the record of what a candidate was told is the record of the posting they answered.

Timing is the part a listing does not fix. The ten business days run from the notice to the moment the tool is used ¹, so a requisition posted Monday and screened Tuesday is short no matter where the paragraph sits.

Nothing here argues for taking the careers page down. Keep both. The one to delete is the version that exists only in an internal policy document nobody outside the company has read.

Write the paragraph once and keep it in the template

Write four things and stop: the category of tool, what it assesses, that a person reviews the outcome, and who to contact for an alternative or an accommodation. Keep the paragraph in the posting template rather than a policy page, so every requisition carries it and no recruiter has to remember. Have counsel approve the wording once, then reuse it unchanged.

New York City requires three of those four: that an automated tool is being used, the job qualifications or characteristics it will assess, and instructions for requesting a reasonable accommodation ¹. Human review is the one you add only if it is true.

A version that fits in a posting: this role uses an automated screening tool that reviews applications against the qualifications listed above. A recruiter reviews the result before any candidate is declined. To request an alternative process or an accommodation, write to the address below.

Three things to leave out. The vendor's product name and version, because it dates the template and commits you to a specific tool. Any claim about what the tool does not do, unless somebody has confirmed the settings. And the phrase that AI is used to improve the candidate experience, which describes nothing, answers no duty, and reads to a regulator exactly as vague as it is.

Keep a copy of which template version was live for each requisition. The notice is an artifact somebody may ask you to produce months later, alongside the audit summary and the vendor documentation, and that is the same filing problem as retaining the records behind an AI hiring decision. This paragraph is also separate from any statement about what candidates may use themselves, and separate again from how an AI-skills requirement gets worded, which turns on job-relatedness.

What a posted notice does not buy you

Not much protection, and no defence of the tool itself. New York City runs a disclosure-and-audit regime and approves no tool: a tool that performs badly in its own bias audit stays lawful to use as long as the summary is posted, and the notice says nothing about whether the tool is job related. The exposure that matters sits in discrimination law, which a notice does not touch.

The enforcement picture is thinner than the penalty numbers suggest. Civil penalties run from $500 to $1,500 per day as a statutory maximum rather than an amount anyone has been made to pay ¹. A New York State Comptroller audit of the first two years of enforcement, which began July 5, 2023, found the department received only two complaints in the entire period, and that nine of the auditors' twelve test calls to 311 attempting to file one were never connected ⁵. That measures the complaint pipeline rather than employer behaviour, and the department offered a competing explanation the auditors did not rule out.

The same audit is a warning about audit quality. In the department's one proactive sweep of 32 company websites it identified a single instance of potential non-compliance, while state auditors re-reviewing the same 22 employers from public information alone counted at least 17 ⁵. Those employers were pre-selected by outside researchers precisely because they raised questions, none of it has been adjudicated, and one employer can contribute several instances. It still means a posted audit frequently fails the rule's own technical requirements.

So write the notice for the day somebody asks you to produce it. It is also the sentence a rejected applicant quotes back when they ask what happened, which is the harder conversation and the one worth preparing for: what you owe a candidate the AI screened out.

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