What Must an AEDT Candidate Notice Include?

Your resume-screening tool goes live Monday. Do your candidates know?

Your recruiting team is turning on a resume-screening tool next Monday for two open roles. Forty candidates are already sitting in the pipeline. Someone on your team asks the obvious question in the Monday planning meeting: what exactly do we have to tell these people, and when do we have to tell them?

It's a fair question, and it's not answered by "post something on the careers page." Local Law 144 doesn't require a vague disclosure that AI is somewhere in your process. It requires a specific notice, sent to a specific person, containing specific information, on a specific timeline — and if any candidate asks for a paper trail on why their notice was worded the way it was, you want to be able to hand it over without scrambling.

This is the part of LL144 that trips up the most employers, not because the requirements are complicated, but because nobody wrote down what "compliant" actually means in practice. By the end of this article, you'll know exactly what a candidate notice must contain, how the alternative-process request pathway fits alongside it, and where "notice" and "consent" are two different things that a lot of vendors blur together.

What Must an AEDT Candidate Notice Include, at Minimum

Local Law 144 defines an AEDT broadly: any computational process derived from machine learning, statistical modeling, data analytics, or AI that issues a simplified output — a score, classification, or recommendation — used to substantially assist or replace discretionary decision-making about a candidate or employee (Perkins Coie, 2023). If your resume screener, interview-scoring tool, or ranking algorithm fits that definition and touches a New York City job posting, the notice requirement applies.

The law's core obligations, as summarized by employment counsel who've tracked its rollout since it took effect January 1, 2023 (with enforcement beginning July 5, 2023, after a delay from an originally announced April 15 date), come down to three things: an annual independent bias audit, a public summary of that audit posted with the AEDT's distribution date, and candidate or employee notice sent at least 10 business days before the tool is used — paired with a way to request an alternative process or accommodation (Crowell & Moring LLP, 2023; Epstein Becker Green, 2023).

Strip that down to what belongs in the notice itself, and you get three working parts:

1. Disclosure that an AEDT is in use for the specific job or promotion the candidate is being considered for.
2. What the tool is assessing — the job qualifications or characteristics it's scoring against.
3. How to request an alternative process or accommodation, and who to contact to do it.

That's the skeleton. It is worth being equally clear about what does not exist: Local Law 144 and its rules do not mandate specific notice wording or a required format, and DCWP has not published an official template to copy. What the law asks is that the three elements above are genuinely present, and that the notice reaches the candidate by one of the permitted methods. Confirm your specific notice content — and any job-location coverage questions, such as a fully remote role associated with an NYC office, or a candidate residing outside the city — directly with DCWP or counsel before sending at scale, since the law's location-coverage rules can be fact-specific.

Element One: Disclosure That an AEDT Is in Use

The first requirement is the least ambiguous and the most frequently skipped. The candidate needs to be told, plainly, that an automated tool will be used to evaluate them for this role — not buried in a general privacy policy, not implied by a checkbox on an application portal, but stated as its own disclosure tied to the specific hiring or promotion decision.

This is also the element that shows up worst in independent review. A 2024 academic study of 391 employers subject to LL144 — the "Null Compliance" study — found that only 13 had posted a transparency notice at all (ACM FAccT, Wright & Muenster et al., 2024). That's not a rounding error. It's most of a sample simply not doing the one thing the law asks for first.

If you want the mechanics of exactly how and where this disclosure needs to appear, the candidate notice requirements breakdown walks through the placement and format questions in more depth than this article can.

Element Two: The Job Qualifications and Characteristics It Assesses

The second piece is where employers get vague, usually because the vendor's own documentation is vague. "The tool evaluates candidate fit" is not a characteristic disclosure — it's marketing language. The notice needs to identify, in terms a candidate can actually understand, what the tool is scoring: years of relevant experience, keyword matches to the posting, communication patterns in a video interview, whatever the tool's actual mechanism is.

This is exactly the kind of thing that should be traceable back to the tool's own vendor documentation, not invented on the fly by whoever drafts the notice. If your vendor can't tell you plainly what their tool assesses, that's worth flagging before you rely on their audit summary for anything else, either.

Element Three: The Alternative Selection Process Request Pathway

The third element is the one most closely tied to enforcement risk, because it's the candidate's actual recourse. The notice has to tell the candidate how to ask for an alternative selection process or a reasonable accommodation instead of being evaluated by the AEDT — and it has to give them a real contact point to do it.

DCWP received only two AEDT-related complaints during the entire audit review period covering July 2023 through June 2025, and the agency never investigated whether its own complaint intake process actually worked (Office of the NY State Comptroller, 2025). That low number doesn't mean the pathway is rarely needed — it may mean candidates don't know it exists, which points back to the notice itself. If your notice buries this request pathway or doesn't name a real person to contact, you've built the exact gap the enforcement review flagged.

The guide to the alternative selection process request covers how to structure this request channel and document what happens when someone actually uses it.

Timing: Why the 10-Business-Day Clock Matters

The notice has to go out at least 10 business days before the AEDT is used on that candidate — not 10 business days before the job posting goes live, not 10 business days before the offer stage. The clock runs from disclosure to actual use of the tool.

This matters more than it looks like on paper because hiring pipelines move fast, and a rolling-basis role with candidates entering the funnel continuously means you're not sending one notice — you're sending a notice, correctly timed, for every candidate the tool touches. The 10-business-day notice guide covers how to structure that timing so it doesn't quietly slip on a high-volume req.

Where Consent Fits (and Where It Doesn't)

A common misconception worth clearing up directly: Local Law 144's notice provision is not a consent form. The law's core obligations, as described above, require disclosure and an alternative-process pathway — they don't frame candidate participation as something the candidate opts into or signs off on the way a data-privacy consent form works. Conflating the two leads employers to build the wrong document: a signature block and liability waiver instead of a disclosure with a working request channel.

If your notice looks like a consent form and doesn't clearly name who to contact for an alternative process, it likely isn't doing the job the law actually requires. The piece on candidate consent versus AEDT notice goes deeper into where this distinction has caused real confusion for employers who borrowed language from unrelated privacy notices.

Building the Notice So It Holds Up

None of this is legal advice, and this article isn't a substitute for confirming your specific notice language with DCWP or with outside counsel — particularly given how much of the enforcement picture so far shows employers guessing at requirements rather than confirming them. The Comptroller's own December 2025 audit found DCWP's enforcement "ineffective" over the review period, flagging that the agency's own compliance checks caught only 1 of 32 reviewed companies as non-compliant, while the Comptroller's auditors reviewing the same companies found 17 (Office of the NY State Comptroller, 2025). If the regulator's own review process missed that much, "we sent something that mentioned AI" is not a defensible standard for your own notice.

Penalties for a documented gap are real and they compound: civil penalties run up to $500 for a first violation, $500 to $1,500 for each subsequent violation, and they accrue per violation, per day (Office of the NY State Comptroller, 2025). A missing element in a notice sent to forty candidates isn't one violation — treat it as forty, and the exposure adds up fast.

The gap between "we told candidates something" and "we can show exactly what we told each candidate, and when" is where most LL144 notice failures actually live.

Start by building the notice itself against the three required elements, then track who received it, when, and what they were told — that's the operational record a regulator, or a candidate's attorney, will actually ask to see. The Candidate Notice & Audit-Readiness Compliance Kit gives you the notice template built around these elements plus the tracking log to record delivery dates and alternative-process requests as they come in. It runs the documentation side of this obligation — it doesn't perform your bias audit and it doesn't give legal advice, but it's the first concrete step before your next AEDT-touched requisition opens. For the fuller picture of how notices fit into the rest of your LL144 obligations, the operator's guide to running AEDT compliance lays out the full compliance calendar around the notice, audit, and posting requirements together.

Download the Candidate Notice & Audit-Readiness Compliance Kit