Local Law 144 Candidate Notice Requirements

The 10-Business-Day Countdown Nobody Put on the Calendar

A recruiter schedules an AEDT-scored video interview for Thursday. Someone on the compliance side asks a simple question: did the candidate get their notice yet? Nobody knows. The applicant applied nine days ago. Count business days, not calendar days, and the window is tighter than it looks — weekends and the occasional holiday eat into it fast. If the notice didn't go out in time, the interview either gets pushed or the company is now out of compliance on a filing nobody flagged until the last minute.

This is the moment Local Law 144 candidate notice requirements stop being a policy paragraph and start being a logistics problem. The law doesn't just ask employers to have a notice — it asks them to send a specific notice, with specific content, inside a specific window, to a specific person, and be able to prove they did it. That last part is where most of the operational risk lives, because a notice nobody can locate six months later is functionally the same as a notice that was never sent.

By the end of this article you'll know what the notice has to say, when the clock starts and stops, what an alternative-process request actually obligates you to do, and how to log proof of notice so an audit — internal or DCWP-initiated — doesn't turn into a scramble.

What Counts as an AEDT in the First Place

Local Law 144 candidate notice requirements only apply if the tool in question meets the statute's definition of an automated employment decision tool: a computational process derived from machine learning, statistical modeling, data analytics, or AI that generates a simplified output — a score, classification, or recommendation — used to substantially assist or replace discretionary decision-making in hiring or promotion (Perkins Coie, 2023). Resume-ranking software, video-interview scoring, and applicant-screening chatbots that generate a recommendation typically qualify. A plain keyword filter that doesn't score or rank candidates usually doesn't, but that's a line worth confirming case by case rather than assuming.

The law took effect January 1, 2023, and enforcement began July 5, 2023, after a delay from an originally announced April 15, 2023 start date (Epstein Becker Green / Workforce Bulletin, 2023). That gap matters operationally: it tells you DCWP itself treated the rollout as something employers needed real runway to operationalize, not something to bolt on overnight. Candidate notice is one leg of a three-part obligation — alongside the annual independent bias audit and the public audit-summary posting — but it's the leg that touches every individual applicant, every time (Crowell & Moring LLP, 2023; Epstein Becker Green, 2023).

Local Law 144 Candidate Notice Requirements: The Three-Part Test

Strip away the legal language and the notice obligation reduces to three questions you have to be able to answer for every candidate or employee an AEDT touches:

1. Did they get notice before the tool was used on them?
2. Did the notice say what it needed to say?
3. Can you prove both of the above, later, on demand?

That third question is the one employers underestimate. Local Law 144 candidate notice requirements don't disappear once the notice goes out — they persist as a documentation obligation for as long as that hiring or promotion record might be reviewed. A notice you can't locate is a notice you can't defend having sent.

Practically, this means the notice function needs an owner, a repeatable process, and a place where "notice sent, date, recipient, method" gets logged the same way every time — not scattered across individual recruiters' inboxes. That's the operational core of what a candidate notice tracker exists to solve.

What the Notice Must Say

At minimum, the notice needs to tell the candidate or employee that an AEDT will be used to assess them, describe in plain terms what the tool is assessing, and point them toward how to request an alternative selection process or a reasonable accommodation instead of being evaluated by the tool (Crowell & Moring LLP, 2023; Epstein Becker Green, 2023). Many employers also route candidates to where the AEDT's most recent bias audit summary is posted, since that summary is a separate public-facing obligation under the law and candidates reasonably expect to find it referenced somewhere near the notice.

What the notice should not do is get vague about the alternative-process instructions or bury them at the bottom of a dense paragraph. If a candidate can't find the sentence that tells them how to opt for a human-reviewed alternative, the notice hasn't functionally done its job even if the required language is technically present somewhere in the text. Exact required wording and formatting are worth confirming against current DCWP guidance before you lock a template — this is operational documentation, not a legal opinion, and the specific phrasing question belongs with DCWP or counsel, not with a downloadable workbook.

Timing: The 10-Business-Day Window

The statute requires that candidates or employees receive notice at least 10 business days before the AEDT is used to assess them (Crowell & Moring LLP, 2023; Epstein Becker Green, 2023). Business days, not calendar days — a notice sent on a Friday doesn't clear its 10-day window the following Monday week; weekends don't count toward the total.

This is where most timing failures actually happen: not because nobody sent a notice, but because someone scheduled the AEDT-scored step of the process before the 10 business days had fully run. A resume-screening tool that scores every applicant at the moment of submission needs the notice to go out before that scoring event, not after — which means, for high-volume roles, the notice often has to be built into the application flow itself rather than sent as a manual follow-up. For lower-volume, more deliberate hiring processes, a scheduled reminder tied to each candidate's application date does the same job with less infrastructure. Either way, the 10-business-day notice requirement is the deadline that should be sitting on a calendar next to the interview schedule, not filed away as a policy statement nobody checks against actual dates.

The Alternative Selection Process Request

Notice isn't just disclosure — it's an offer. The candidate has to have a real path to ask for an alternative to being scored by the AEDT, whether that's a human reviewer, a different assessment method, or a disability accommodation under separate law. When a candidate exercises that option, the employer needs a documented response: what was requested, what was offered instead, and how the substitute process was applied.

This is the part of Local Law 144 candidate notice requirements that most resembles an accommodation request under other employment law, and it deserves the same care: a written record of the request and the resolution, not a verbal agreement that lives only in a recruiter's memory. An alternative-process request that's granted but never logged creates the same exposure as a notice that was never sent — there's no way to show, months later, that the candidate's choice was honored.

Proving You Sent It: Documentation That Holds Up

Here's the enforcement backdrop worth knowing before you decide documentation is optional. A study examining 391 employers subject to Local Law 144 found only 13 had posted a transparency notice at all (ACM FAccT, Wright & Muenster et al., 2024). Whatever the reasons — genuine non-use of a covered AEDT, oversight, or an assumption that internal process was "good enough" — the gap between the law's requirement and visible compliance is wide. Civil penalties for 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 missing notice on a single candidate isn't a one-time fine risk; it's a daily one until it's corrected.

A notice you can't locate later is, for enforcement purposes, indistinguishable from a notice that was never sent.

Proof of notice needs three elements at minimum: who received it, when it went out, and what it said — ideally the actual notice text or template version, not just a confirmation that "a notice" was sent. A proof-of-notice log that captures candidate name or ID, send date, delivery method, and template version turns a defensive scramble into a five-minute pull whenever someone — internal audit, a candidate's attorney, or DCWP — asks the question.

One clarification worth stating plainly: none of this is legal advice, and nothing here certifies or performs the separate independent bias audit LL144 also requires. This is the operations layer — the tracking, the logging, the calendar discipline — that sits around a decision your legal counsel and your independent auditor make. If you want the fuller picture of how the notice obligation fits alongside the audit and posting requirements, the Local Law 144 compliance guide and the bias audit requirements breakdown cover the other two legs of the stool.

Your First Action Item

Local Law 144 candidate notice requirements are unforgiving in one specific way: they're not judged by intent, they're judged by the record. You either have a dated, content-complete notice on file for every candidate an AEDT touched, or you don't. Building that record candidate-by-candidate, in the middle of a hiring surge, is how gaps happen.

The Candidate Notice & Audit-Readiness Compliance Kit gives you the notice template language to start from, the 10-business-day tracking worksheet to keep the clock visible, the alternative-process request log, and the proof-of-notice register — the four pieces that turn "we send notices" into "we can show every notice we sent." Download it, drop it into your applicant workflow, and the next time someone asks whether a candidate got their notice on time, the answer is a lookup, not a guess.