The NYC Residency AEDT Notice Trigger, Requisition by Requisition

Why the Notice Trigger Has to Be Decided Per Requisition, Not Per Company

Your VP of Talent asks a simple question in a Tuesday standup: "Do we owe a candidate notice on the Brooklyn warehouse supervisor req?" You know the company uses an AEDT for resume screening across most open roles. You know the company is not headquartered in New York. Neither fact answers the question. What answers it is the requisition itself — where the candidates live, where the role sits, and whether the tool is actually screening anyone for that specific opening this week.

That's the trap most mid-sized employers fall into: they answer the Local Law 144 notice question once, at the company level, and then apply that one answer to every requisition forever. The law doesn't work that way. A single applicant tracking system can run reqs that trigger the notice and reqs that don't, sometimes in the same week, sometimes for the same title. Treating the trigger as a company-wide yes/no is how a notice gets missed on the one requisition that actually needed it.

By the end of this piece you'll have a repeatable way to make the trigger call on any single requisition and a dated record you can point to if anyone — DCWP, a candidate, outside counsel — ever asks why.

The NYC Residency AEDT Notice Trigger, Explained

Local Law 144 defines an automated employment decision tool broadly: any computational process derived from machine learning, statistical modeling, data analytics, or AI that issues a simplified output — a score, a classification, a recommendation — used to substantially assist or replace discretionary hiring or promotion decisions (Perkins Coie, 2023). The law has been in force since January 1, 2023, with enforcement beginning July 5, 2023 (Epstein Becker Green / Workforce Bulletin, 2023).

Three obligations sit on top of that definition, and the one this article is about is the third: candidates and employees must receive notice at least 10 business days before the AEDT is used to screen them, along with a way to request an alternative process or accommodation (Crowell & Moring LLP, 2023; Epstein Becker Green, 2023). The other two obligations — the annual independent bias audit and the public results summary — apply at the tool level. The notice obligation applies at the candidate level, requisition by requisition, every time that tool touches a real person applying for a real job.

That's the residency piece people trip over. The notice duty isn't triggered by your company's address. It's triggered by facts about the specific candidate and the specific role — where the person applying is based, and whether the position itself is one the law reaches. DCWP has published guidance on how it reads that scope, and because the exact boundary language matters more than a summary of it, confirm the current DCWP position directly before you lock in a company-wide rule. What you can build without waiting on that confirmation is the process for asking the question on every requisition, consistently, and writing the answer down.

Building the Requisition-by-Requisition Decision Tree

Run each open requisition through three questions, in order, and stop as soon as you get a "no."

1. Is an AEDT actually screening candidates on this requisition? Not "does the company own one" — is it live, switched on, for this specific req. A tool sitting unused for a manual-review role doesn't trigger anything.
2. Does the candidate pool for this requisition include people the law's notice provision reaches — based on residency, role location, or however DCWP's current guidance frames that boundary? This is the fact-specific step; it has to be answered per requisition because a national remote req and a Manhattan in-office req can sit one line apart in your ATS and get opposite answers.
3. Has the notice actually gone out at least 10 business days before the tool is used on that candidate? Yes/no, with a date.

Any "no" at step 1 or step 2 means no notice obligation on that requisition — document the "no" and the reason anyway, because "we checked and it didn't apply" is exactly the kind of record you want on hand later. A "yes" all the way through step 3 closes the loop.

The trigger question is never "does our company have to comply with Local Law 144." It's "does this requisition, this week, owe this candidate a notice." Answer it at that level and the company-wide question mostly takes care of itself.

What Triggers the Notice — and What Doesn't

A few patterns are worth naming explicitly, because they're where teams guess instead of check:

• A remote requisition posted nationally can still land candidates the notice provision reaches, depending on where those specific applicants are based — you don't know until candidates actually apply.
• A role headquartered outside New York doesn't exempt a requisition if the candidate facts point the other way.
• A tool that's configured but not yet live on a requisition doesn't trigger anything yet — but the day it goes live, the clock on the 10-business-day notice starts, not before.
• Promotion decisions, not just hiring, carry the same notice logic if an AEDT is doing the screening.

None of this is a substitute for a legal determination on a specific requisition. This is an operations framework for organizing the decision and the paperwork around it — not legal advice, and not a bias-audit function. If a specific requisition sits in a gray area, that's a question for outside counsel or DCWP directly, not a judgment call to leave undocumented.

Keeping a Dated Register of Trigger Decisions

The decision tree only protects you if the answers get written down. A trigger register needs, at minimum: requisition ID, AEDT in use (yes/no), candidate-facts determination and date, notice-sent date (if applicable), and who made the call. That register is what turns "we think we handled this" into a dated paper trail.

The stakes for skipping this are not hypothetical. Civil penalties for AEDT violations run up to $500 for a first violation and $500 to $1,500 for each subsequent one, and they accrue per violation, per day (Office of the NY State Comptroller, 2025). A missed notice on one requisition, left unnoticed for a few weeks, adds up fast under that structure. It's also worth knowing that enforcement so far has been thin — a December 2025 Comptroller review of the July 2023–June 2025 period found DCWP's own enforcement effort "ineffective," flagging only 1 of 32 sampled companies as non-compliant where the Comptroller's auditors found 17 (DLA Piper, 2026; OSC, 2025). Thin enforcement today is not a reason to skip the register — it's a reason the paper trail matters more, not less, whenever enforcement catches up.

Your First Action Item

Don't try to hold this decision tree in your head across every open requisition. The NYC Candidate-Residency & AEDT-Trigger Determination Worksheet walks each requisition through the same three questions above and gives you the register format to log the answer, the date, and the notice-sent confirmation in one place.

Related reading if you're still scoping which side of the line your reqs fall on: does Local Law 144 apply to candidates outside NYC, how the law treats remote workers and NYC candidates, and whether Local Law 144 applies to your company at all. Once the trigger question is settled, candidate notice requirements covers what the notice itself has to say, and the Local Law 144 compliance guide ties the notice obligation back into the audit and posting duties around it.