When AI screens your candidates, who's on the hook?
Hiring with AI is no longer unusual. Even Trade Me tells employers that "AI in recruitment is a given." What many employers haven't thought through is who is responsible when the tool gets it wrong.
According to Simpson Grierson's employment and technology lawyers, quoted by HRD New Zealand in April, the answer is you.
"AI does not change an employer's underlying legal obligations."
That's Rachael Judge and Michelle Dunlop. If a screening tool filters out people based on sex, age, family status or race, that can amount to unlawful discrimination, even when nobody meant it. And when a model learns from biased hiring history, they warned, "the model will replicate that at scale."
New Zealand has no AI-specific hiring law yet. The EU already treats recruitment tools as high risk, and that is the benchmark the local lawyers point to. May be it's time to consider some guidelines and transparency.
Four questions to ask any tool before you trust a score
- Does it read the whole CV, or only match keywords?
- Can it explain, in plain language, why a candidate scored the way they did?
- Does it ever reject anyone on its own?
- Who makes the final call?
HOW EMEETE ANSWERS THEM
- Every CV and job description is read in full, not keyword-matched.
- Every score out of 100 comes with a clear and simple summary, so you can check the thinking.
- No candidate is ever auto-rejected or auto-hired. People decide.
- Every employer is validated by a person before they can post, so the jobs and companies candidates see are real.
AI is good at reading a lot of text quickly. It should never be the one making a decision about someone's livelihood. We built EMeetE to do the first really well and leave the second for you to do even better.
Sources: HRD New Zealand, "AI recruitment boom puts NZ employers on legal notice" (9 April 2026); Trade Me Jobs, "How to judge a job application in a ChatGPT world".