Can You Show Your Working?

The letter arrives on a Tuesday. A candidate your team rejected four months ago has counsel now, and counsel would like the complete basis for the decision: who interviewed her, what was asked, how her answers were scored, and why someone else got the job.

In most companies, that letter lands in a room with no file.

The recruiter remembers the candidate, roughly. The hiring manager's notes are in a notebook, or in his head. The scorecard in the ATS says "strong culture fit, not enough depth," written by someone who has since left. The actual decision was made in a debrief nobody minuted.

Nothing about this is unusual. That is the problem.

A hiring decision leaves almost no trace

Most consequential decisions inside a company produce records. A budget has an owner and a spreadsheet. A fired employee has a paper trail. A signed contract has drafts.

A hiring decision produces a verdict.

Ask why a specific candidate was rejected and the honest answer, in most organisations, is that nobody can fully reconstruct it. The interview happened in a room or on a call. The impressions were exchanged verbally. The feedback form, if one exists, was filled in to close a workflow step, not to record a judgement. What survives is an outcome with no reasoning attached, and reasoning is the only part anyone ever asks about later.

This has never been a comfortable gap. It is about to become an expensive one.

The law now assumes you can reconstruct it

New York City moved first. Since July 2023, Local Law 144 has required any NYC employer using an automated tool in hiring or promotion decisions to have that tool independently audited for bias every year, and to post the audit summary publicly. It was the first law of its kind in the United States.

Here is what happened next. In the first six months of enforcement, researchers from the Ada Lovelace Institute and Data & Society went looking for the audits. Out of the thousands of employers the law covers, they found 19 posted publicly. Five of those came from tool vendors the law does not even cover (Groves, Metcalf, Kennedy, Vecchione and Strait, "Auditing Work," February 2024).

The regulation assumed a file would exist. Almost nobody had one.

Colorado is next. Its revised AI act, signed as SB 26-189, takes effect on 1 January 2027: employers must give candidates clear notice before a covered tool is used in a hiring decision, disclose when a tool materially influenced an adverse decision, and offer a process to request corrections and human review. Illinois amended its Human Rights Act to cover AI in employment decisions from January 2026. The details differ. The direction does not: a hiring decision is becoming a legal document, and the law assumes it can be shown, justified, and re-examined.

The uncomfortable part

It is reasonable to be uneasy about software sitting between a person and a job. The instinct behind these laws is sound, and anyone building or buying hiring tools should say so plainly.

But notice what the laws actually audit. The tool. Not the process.

The software is the only part of most hiring funnels that keeps receipts: the same questions for every candidate, a fixed rubric, logged scores, a record a third party can inspect. The human first round, the unstructured phone screen, the gut-feel debrief, produces nothing an auditor could hold in their hands. Regulators are auditing the tools because the tools are the only part of the decision that left a file.

The humans left nothing to audit.

That should sit uncomfortably with every hiring team that reads it. The most scrutinised component of the modern funnel is also, by some distance, the most accountable one.

Where that leaves hiring teams

The question a hiring team needs to answer is shifting. It used to be "did we pick the right person." It is becoming "can we show our working."

Those are different disciplines. The first rewards judgement. The second rewards evidence: consistent questions, recorded reasoning, scores tied to something a reviewer can check. A decision that cannot be reconstructed is turning into a liability, legal first and reputational second, and the window for treating documentation as optional is closing in one state after another.

The teams that get ahead of this will not be the ones with the cleverest tools. They will be the ones whose decisions, human or otherwise, arrive with their evidence attached.

Hiring ran on trust for a century. The next decade runs on evidence. The letter keeps arriving either way.

Sources: NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, Local Law 144 guidance (in force July 2023) · Groves, Metcalf, Kennedy, Vecchione and Strait, "Auditing Work: Exploring the New York City algorithmic bias audit regime," arXiv, February 2024 · Colorado SB 24-205 as amended by SB 26-189 (effective 1 January 2027) · Illinois Human Rights Act amendment, HB 3773 (effective January 2026)