On Monday we published the job seeker's half of this topic — what applicants can ask for when an algorithm stands between them and an interview. This is the employer's half, and it exists because of a specific, expensive misreading we keep encountering: the federal guidance on AI hiring was withdrawn, so this must be deregulated territory now. Half of that sentence is true. The half that matters isn't.
This article explains where the law stands in plain English so you can have a better conversation with your own employment counsel — it is not a substitute for that conversation. Whether a specific tool, practice, or accommodation is required or defensible in your situation is a question for a lawyer who can see your facts. Nothing here asserts that you must adopt any particular tool, audit, or process.
What Actually Happened in January 2025
On January 27, 2025, the EEOC removed its technical-assistance documents on artificial intelligence in employment from its website — including the May 2022 document on AI and the ADA, the May 2023 document on AI under Title VII, and the associated tip sheets for workers. If you looked to those pages for direction, they are gone, and we won't be quoting them here.
Here is the part that decides everything downstream: those documents were non-binding. They created no obligations when they were published, and they extinguished none when they were removed. What they did was explain obligations that live somewhere else entirely — in the text of the Americans with Disabilities Act, a statute passed by Congress that no agency webpage can add to or subtract from. The explanation is gone. The thing it explained is not.
The Statute Your Screening Tool Answers To
The ADA's hiring provisions were written in 1990, decades before anyone screened a résumé with a model — and they were written broadly enough that they reach one anyway, because they regulate selection criteria, whatever form the criteria take. Two clauses of 42 U.S.C. § 12112 do the work, and they are worth reading in their actual words.
Subsection (b)(6) defines discrimination to include:
“using qualification standards, employment tests or other selection criteria that screen out or tend to screen out an individual with a disability or a class of individuals with disabilities unless the standard, test or other selection criteria, as used by the covered entity, is shown to be job-related for the position in question and is consistent with business necessity”
Read that against an AI screener and notice three things. “Or other selection criteria” — the statute does not care whether the criterion is a typing test or a neural network. “Or tend to screen out” — it reaches tools that disadvantage candidates with disabilities in effect, not only tools that mention disability. And “as used by the covered entity” — the covered entity is you, the employer, using the tool. Hold that phrase; it returns in the vendor section.
Subsection (b)(7) speaks even more directly to how a test is administered, requiring that tests be selected and administered so that results:
“accurately reflect the skills, aptitude, or whatever other factor… such test purports to measure, rather than reflecting the impaired sensory, manual, or speaking skills” of the applicant.
That clause is almost eerily on point for modern tools. A video-interview analyzer that scores speech fluidity will mark down a candidate who stutters — not on the job skill it claims to measure, but on exactly the “impaired… speaking skills” the statute says a test result must not reflect. A timed gamified assessment can measure a motor disability instead of the cognitive trait on the label. Whether any particular tool crosses the line is a facts-and-counsel question; the point here is narrower and firmer: the line exists, it is statutory, and it did not move in January 2025.
“Our Vendor Said It's Validated”
This is the sentence employers reach for first, and it is worth being blunt about what it can and cannot do for you. Recall § 12112(b)(6): the criteria are judged “as used by the covered entity.” The covered entity is not your vendor. You chose the tool, you point it at your applicants, and the selection decisions it produces are your selection decisions. A vendor's assurance may tell you something useful about the tool; it does not transfer your obligations to them.
So use the purchase conversation to actually learn things. Reasonable questions for any screening vendor: What exactly does the tool measure, and how? If the answer is a black box, that is itself an answer. What did the validation involve, and were candidates with disabilities part of it? What happens when a candidate can't complete the assessment in its standard format — is there an alternative path, and who operates it? None of these questions requires a law degree, and every one of them is easier to ask before signing than after a demand letter.
The Two Practices That Do the Most Work
Keep a human-operable alternative path, and make it findable. Whatever the tool, some candidates will need a different route — more time, a different format, a human interview instead of a game. An alternative that exists but is buried is an alternative that will be measured by how it worked in practice, not by the fact that it technically existed. Our guide to accessible job applications covers what a findable path looks like.
Treat a request for a different format as what it is: an accommodation request. When a candidate says some version of “I can't do the video assessment — is there another way,” that is not a technical support ticket, and the worst place for it to land is an unmonitored inbox or an outsourced screening flow with no human in it. It belongs in the same process you already use for accommodation requests — the one our ADA basics guide walks through — with the same interactive, documented handling. Employers rarely get in trouble for the conversation they had; the trouble comes from the conversation that never happened because a bot closed the loop first.
About NYC Local Law 144 — Read the Scope Before You Buy an Audit
When AI hiring compliance comes up, New York City's Local Law 144 — with its bias audits, published results, and candidate notices — is usually the first concrete rulebook people have heard of, and it generates confusion in both directions out here. So, precisely: Local Law 144 applies to employers using automated tools for jobs located in New York City — including remote roles tied to an NYC office. A Buffalo employer with no NYC presence hiring for Buffalo jobs is outside it, and does not need to buy a bias audit to satisfy a law that doesn't reach them. But the same rule cuts the other way: if your company does have an NYC office and screens candidates for roles based there — including remote ones — the law's requirements are yours, wherever your HR team happens to sit. Getting this scope wrong is expensive in both directions: audits bought needlessly, or NYC obligations missed from a WNY headquarters. If you're near the line, that's a ten-minute question for counsel, not a guess.
And the reason we bothered with the paragraph above: nothing about being outside Local Law 144 puts you outside the ADA. The federal statute quoted earlier applies to covered employers in Buffalo exactly as it does in Brooklyn. Local Law 144 is an additional rulebook for some employers, not the source of the obligation.
The Quarter's To-Do, Practically
If you use — or are about to buy — an AI screening tool, the reasonable-diligence version of this article fits in four moves: know what the tool measures (ask the vendor the questions above, in writing); know your alternative path and check that a real candidate could actually find it; route format requests into your accommodation process, with a named human owner; and have counsel look at the whole flow once — not because a blog told you to buy anything, but because the cost of one review is a rounding error against the cost of learning your screening flow's weak point from a complaint. For the interview stages after the algorithm says yes, our inclusive interviewing guide picks up where this one stops.
The EEOC's explainers were removed in January 2025; the ADA they explained was not — § 12112 still judges your selection criteria “as used by” you, vendor assurances don't transfer that, and the employers who'll be fine are the ones who know what their tool measures, keep a findable human path around it, and treat “is there another way?” as the accommodation request it is.
Where We Fit
Innovative Placements of WNY sits on both sides of this: we've helped Western New Yorkers with disabilities find and keep meaningful employment since 2001 — over 3,000 placements — and we work with employers who want their hiring to actually reach the talent their tools might be filtering out. We're not lawyers and this article isn't counsel; what we can do is help you build hiring processes where the algorithm is a door and not a wall. Talk to us at (716) 566-0251 or andreatodaro@ipswny.com.