Resume Screening Software and Local Law 144: What You Owe

When Your Applicant Tracking System Starts Ranking Candidates

Your recruiting coordinator mentions, almost in passing, that the ATS update from last quarter now scores incoming resumes and surfaces a "top match" list before anyone on the team opens a single application. Nobody remembers approving a new AEDT. Nobody updated the careers page. Nobody scheduled a bias audit. The tool was sold as a "smart filter," not an automated employment decision tool — but the feature that shipped quietly in a software update might be exactly what Local Law 144 is built to catch.

This is the ordinary way employers end up out of compliance: not through a dramatic AI rollout, but through a resume screener that picked up ranking or scoring functionality somewhere along its product roadmap. If you run a resume screener, an applicant-ranking module, or any tool that narrows or orders candidates before a human reviews them, you need a straight answer on whether Local Law 144 applies — and what to do next if it does.

By the end of this article you'll be able to tell whether your resume screening software falls under Local Law 144 and know the three obligations that follow if it does.

What Makes a Resume Screener an AEDT

Local Law 144 doesn't regulate "AI" as a category — it regulates a function. The statutory definition of an automated employment decision tool covers any computational process derived from machine learning, statistical modeling, data analytics, or artificial intelligence that issues a simplified output — a score, classification, or recommendation — used to substantially assist or replace discretionary decision-making in employment (Perkins Coie, 2023).

Read that definition against a resume screener and the trigger becomes clear. A tool that simply digitizes applications or lets a recruiter filter by keyword is not doing the regulated work. A tool that ranks candidates, assigns a fit score, flags "top matches," or auto-advances applicants past a human reviewer is producing exactly the simplified output the law targets. The test isn't the marketing name on the product — it's whether the output substantially assists the hiring decision. If your recruiters routinely act on the tool's ranking without independently re-evaluating every candidate it deprioritized, that's substantial assistance.

This is also the most common gray area recruiting teams run into, because most resume screeners bundle regulated ranking features alongside unregulated administrative ones in the same dashboard. Working through that distinction feature by feature is the whole job of a classification exercise — see Is My Hiring Tool an AEDT? and the broader primer on what an automated employment decision tool is for the full mechanics.

Resume Screening Software and Local Law 144: The Three Things You Owe

Once a resume screener is in scope, Local Law 144 attaches three concrete obligations, each with its own clock (Crowell & Moring LLP, 2023; Epstein Becker Green, 2023):

1. An annual independent bias audit. Someone with no financial or employment relationship to your company or your AEDT vendor has to evaluate the tool's selection rates across sex, race/ethnicity, and intersectional categories.
2. A public summary posted on your own website, including the audit results and the date the AEDT was first used, plus the date it will be used going forward.
3. Candidate and employee notice at least 10 business days before the tool is used on them, along with a way to request an alternative process or accommodation.

Every one of those obligations sits with the employer, not the vendor. A vendor can hand you an audit report it commissioned for its whole customer base, but it can't post your notice, and it can't establish that the audit's applicant pool actually reflects who applies to your jobs. That's an operational responsibility your recruiting team carries whether or not the vendor mentions it.

None of this is legal advice, and this article isn't a substitute for it — it's an operational map of what a resume screening software Local Law 144 filing actually requires so the people running the tool day-to-day know what to track. Confirm current filing specifics and any edge-case interpretation directly with DCWP or with outside counsel before you finalize your posture.

The Bias Audit: What It Covers and What It Doesn't

An independent bias audit under Local Law 144 measures the AEDT's selection rates by group and compares them using the four-fifths (80%) rule from the EEOC's Uniform Guidelines: if any group's selection rate falls below 80% of the highest-selected group's rate, that's a signal of possible adverse impact worth investigating (via Assessment Systems, 2024).

As a worked example only — not a claim about any real tool — imagine your resume screener advances 40% of male applicants to interview and 28% of female applicants. Divide 28 by 40 and you get 70%, below the 80% threshold, which is the kind of result an audit is designed to surface and that would warrant a documented follow-up.

A bias audit tells you whether the numbers cross a line. It does not tell you why, and it does not fix your job description, your sourcing pool, or your interview rubric.

That's the boundary worth being precise about: an independent auditor performs and signs the audit. A downloadable workbook — including the kind built for tracking this exact process — never performs, certifies, or scores anything. It documents which tool is in scope, when the audit is due, what the auditor found, and what your team did about it. That paperwork trail is what regulators and plaintiffs' counsel actually ask to see, and it's the piece most recruiting teams have never built a system for.

Ten Business Days: The Candidate Notice Clock

The notice obligation runs on its own calendar, independent of the audit. Candidates and employees have to be told at least 10 business days before the AEDT is used to evaluate them, and they need a real path to request an alternative process (Crowell & Moring LLP, 2023). For a high-volume resume screener processing applications continuously, that means the notice has to be a standing feature of your application flow — not a one-time posting you set up in January and forget.

Getting candidate consent language and notice timing right for an AI resume screener is detailed enough to deserve its own walkthrough — see candidate consent for AI resume screening for how to sequence it against your applicant flow, and applicant-ranking algorithm AEDT compliance if your screener also ranks rather than just filters.

What Happened When New York Actually Checked

It's worth knowing how thin enforcement has actually been so far, because it shapes how much you can rely on "nobody's checking" as a strategy. The New York State Comptroller's December 2025 audit, covering July 2023 through June 2025, found DCWP's enforcement effectively ineffective: DCWP's own review turned up minimal noncompliance across the companies it examined — far fewer than the 17 out of the same 32 companies the Comptroller's auditors found had violated at least one obligation (Office of the NY State Comptroller, 2025). DCWP received only two AEDT-related complaints during that window and didn't investigate whether its own complaint intake process actually worked — and separately, 75% of test calls placed to check that intake never reached DCWP at all (DLA Piper, 2026).

A separate academic review of 391 employers found only 18 had posted an audit report and only 13 had posted a transparency notice — a compliance rate low enough that researchers labeled it "null compliance" (ACM FAccT, Wright & Muenster et al., 2024). Civil penalties can still run up to $500 for a first violation and $500–$1,500 for each subsequent one, accruing per violation per day (Office of the NY State Comptroller, 2025) — the exposure exists on the books even where enforcement has lagged. Weak enforcement today isn't the same as no exposure, and a Comptroller's audit that publicly calls out the enforcing agency tends to invite tighter follow-through, not less.

Your First Move: Confirm the Tool Is In Scope

Before you can schedule an audit, post a notice, or brief your recruiting team, you need a clean answer to one question: does this specific resume screener, with its specific features turned on, meet the AEDT definition for your company? That's a classification decision, not a guess, and it's the one step most teams skip because there's no obvious place to document it.

The "Is This Tool an AEDT?" Classification Decision Workbook walks your recruiting and compliance leads through that decision feature by feature, so the outcome is written down and defensible instead of assumed. Pair it with the fuller walkthrough at NYC Local Law 144 Compliance Guide once you know where your resume screener lands, and download the workbook as the first concrete step toward getting your audit, notice, and recordkeeping obligations onto an actual calendar.