What to Ask When AI Is in the Process

Three moments in a hiring process are worth a question: before you apply, before an assessment, and after a rejection. Each table below gives the question, what a workable answer sounds like, and what to do when no answer comes. Send one or two per stage rather than all of them, in writing, to whoever invited you, and keep the replies.

Questions before you apply

Ask once the posting or the invitation is in front of you, before you spend an evening on the application. A recruiter who cannot say which stage runs an automated step has told you something useful either way.

Two places already require notice:

• New York City: A bias audit within the prior year, a public summary of its results, and notice to the candidate 10 business days before the tool is used. NYC Admin. Code 20-870 et seq., effective January 1, 2023. ³
• Illinois: Before an Illinois video interview is analysed by artificial intelligence, notify the applicant, explain what it evaluates, and obtain consent; an applicant who has not consented may not be evaluated. 820 ILCS 42, effective January 1, 2020. ¹

Questions before an assessment

Send these when the assessment invitation arrives, not after a bad attempt at it. If the format itself is a barrier for you, put the request in the same message: name the barrier and name the alternative you want. You do not need to name a condition, and a diagnosis is not part of the request. An employer may come back with questions about the limitation itself.

Two rules already sit on the assessment itself:

• Federal: Select and administer any test so the result reflects the skill it measures, not a candidate's impaired sensory, manual or speaking skills, unless those are what it measures. 29 CFR 1630.11. ^{4 5}
• Maryland: No facial recognition service may create a facial template during an applicant's interview unless the applicant signs a waiver stating four things in plain language. Md. Code Lab. & Empl. 3-717, effective October 1, 2020. ²

Ask what changes along with what gets relaxed. On at least one widely used interview platform, a labelled request option relaxes the time limit, the employer's own team decides whether to grant it, and taking the relaxed limit drops one section of the assessment entirely ⁶. A different assessment is not automatically a longer version of the same one.

Questions after a rejection

Ask once, in one short message, and only where there is a person to receive it. A rejection with a named sender is worth a note. A no-reply address usually is not.

Ask for the explanation rather than a different outcome. In a study of how rejections land, an unexplained automated rejection was rated the worst of every condition tested, and adding an explanation closed most of that gap ⁸.

The formal complaint route is thinner than it looks. A state audit of the New York City tool law found two complaints reached the enforcing agency across the first two years of enforcement, and most of the auditors' own test complaints never arrived at all ⁷. A dated record of what you asked is worth more than a complaint you file and never hear about again.

Your own record

Keep the invitation, the assessment instructions, and every message where you asked a question, with the answer or the silence that followed. Keep them outside the employer's system, in a dated file of your own. That record is the difference between "I never heard back" and a specific gap you can point to.

Limits

This is a list of questions. It is not advice, it applies no law to your situation, and it does not say whether any particular process is lawful where you live. Rules differ by state, by city, and by the kind of tool in use. Asking obliges nobody to answer, and an answer obliges nobody to change the process. Where the answer matters to a decision you are about to make, take it to someone who can advise you on your own facts.