Handling AEDT Alternative Selection Process Requests

The Email You Weren't Expecting

Your applicant tracking system sent the required notice ten business days ago. Since then, the requisition has moved forward — resumes screened, a shortlist built, interviews scheduled. Then a reply lands in a shared inbox: a candidate wants to know if there's another way to be considered, because they'd prefer not to go through the automated screening tool. Nobody on the hiring team has seen this before. Nobody's sure who owns the response, what the answer should say, or where it needs to be filed once it's sent.

This is the moment Local Law 144's candidate notice is built for. The notice doesn't just inform — it opens a door. Some candidates will walk through it. When they do, you need a way to receive the request, respond to it consistently, and keep a record that shows you did both. By the end of this article, you'll know exactly what that record needs to contain and how to keep every request from landing in a different inbox with a different answer.

What Triggers an AEDT Alternative Selection Process Request

Local Law 144 requires employers using an automated employment decision tool to give candidates and employees notice at least 10 business days before the tool is used, and that notice must include an avenue for requesting an alternative selection process or accommodation (Crowell & Moring LLP, 2023; Epstein Becker Green, 2023). That avenue is where these requests originate — a link, an email address, or a phone number the candidate uses after reading the notice.

An aedt alternative selection process request can arrive in a few forms: a plain reply to the notice, a note left on an application portal, or a question routed through a recruiter who fielded it verbally. However it arrives, it's the same event under the law — a candidate has invoked the avenue the notice promised them. Treating a verbal mention differently than a written one, or letting a request sit unacknowledged because it came in through an unusual channel, is exactly the kind of gap that turns a routine notice into a documentation problem later.

If your team hasn't nailed down what the notice itself has to say before this point, that's worth fixing first — see our breakdown of what an AEDT candidate notice must include and the 10-business-day notice mechanics before building the request-handling piece on top of it.

What the Law Requires — and What It Doesn't Tell You

Here's where we're direct about the boundary: this is operational guidance, not legal advice. Local Law 144 requires that the notice include an alternative-process or accommodation avenue, but the statute and DCWP's published rules don't spell out a rigid script for what your response has to say, or a fixed clock for how fast you must reply. Where the specific wording or timing question matters to your situation, that's a conversation for outside counsel or a direct check with DCWP — not something a workbook or an article should answer for you.

What the law is clear about is the consequence side. Civil penalties for AEDT violations run up to $500 for a first violation, and $500 to $1,500 for each subsequent violation, with penalties accruing per violation per day (Office of the NY State Comptroller, 2025). A mishandled or undocumented request doesn't need to be a dramatic failure to become a liability — it just needs to be unrecorded when someone asks to see the file.

And someone might ask. A December 2025 Comptroller audit covering July 2023 through June 2025 found the city's LL144 enforcement mechanism largely ineffective, and a separate academic review of 391 employer disclosures found only 18 had posted audit reports and just 13 had posted transparency notices at all (Office of the NY State Comptroller, 2025; ACM FAccT, Wright & Muenster et al., 2024). Enforcement being uneven today isn't a reason to skip the paperwork — it's a reason to be the employer whose paperwork is clean if attention ever turns your way.

Building a Request Log That Holds Up

An aedt alternative selection process request only becomes a documented rationale you can defend if it's captured the same way every time. That means one log, not five inboxes. At minimum, the entry needs:

• Date and channel the request came in (email, portal, verbal-to-recruiter)
• Candidate identifier and the requisition/AEDT tool involved
• Date the response was sent, and what it offered (manual review, alternate evaluation step, or accommodation)
• Who on your team owned the response
• Where the underlying notice to that candidate is filed, so the two records connect

A request with no matching notice on file, or a notice with no record of how a resulting request was handled, is the exact gap an auditor or investigator will spot first.

This is the same discipline that matters for proof-of-notice documentation generally — the alternative-process log is really an extension of that record, not a separate system. If your candidate-notice tracking already lives in one place, the request log belongs right next to it, keyed to the same candidate and requisition.

Responding Without Guessing on the Fly

Consistency matters more than eloquence here. A response drafted fresh each time, by whoever happens to answer the inbox that day, produces exactly the kind of variation that looks bad in hindsight — one candidate offered a clear alternative path, another given a vague non-answer, a third never hearing back at all.

The fix is a small set of pre-approved response templates your team pulls from rather than writes from scratch: one for "yes, here's the alternative process," one for routing an accommodation question to the right internal contact, and one for acknowledging receipt while a decision is worked out. None of these need to be legal documents. They need to be consistent, logged, and reviewed periodically by whoever owns your Local Law 144 program — see our general compliance guide for how this fits into the broader annual cycle alongside the audit and the public summary posting.

Where This Fits Into the Bigger Candidate Notice Picture

None of this works in isolation. The alternative-process request log is downstream of the notice itself, which is downstream of your understanding of what Local Law 144's candidate notice requirements actually cover. Get the notice right, and requests become a manageable, occasional workflow. Get it wrong — vague language, no real avenue, inconsistent delivery — and you'll generate more requests than you can track cleanly, or worse, candidates who had a right to ask and never knew it.

To be direct about what this article and the tools behind it are for: nothing here performs, certifies, or signs your bias audit, and nothing scores any candidate. This is about running the operational side of the notice-and-response cycle so the record exists when someone needs to see it — the independent audit itself is a separate, separately engaged process.

Your First Action Item

Don't wait for the next reply to land in a shared inbox before deciding how to handle it. The Candidate Notice & Audit-Readiness Compliance Kit includes a request-and-response log template built for exactly this workflow — one place to capture the request, the response, and the file it connects to, formatted so it's ready if anyone ever asks to see it. Download it, plug in your current notice process, and route the next alternative-process request through a system instead of an inbox.