The Interview Nobody Told You About
If you interviewed for a job through HireVue anytime between January 2017 and June of this year and happened to be in Illinois, the platform recorded your face and your voice. Not "recorded" in the sense of a video file sitting on a server somewhere, though also that. Recorded in the biometric sense: a voiceprint, a facial scan, the raw material The Algorithm uses to decide whether your micro-expressions read as "confident" or "shifty" before a human ever opens the file. According to the complaint in *Deyerler v. HireVue*, the company did this without the written disclosure or consent Illinois law has required since 2008. It did it to 91,305 people. It did it for nine years.
The Math
The settlement is $3.75 million. Divide that by the class size and you get $41.06 per person — the going rate, apparently, for nine years of unconsented biometric collection from someone whose only leverage in the transaction was "I would like this job, please." The settlement notice advertises a friendlier number, about $150 per claimant, which assumes most of the 91,305 won't bother filling out a form for a payout smaller than a monthly parking pass. That assumption is doing a lot of work here, and it usually turns out to be correct, which is the whole business model of a class-action settlement notice nobody reads.
What HireVue Actually Admits To
Nothing, technically. The settlement documents note HireVue "denied any wrongdoing" while agreeing to pay $3.75 million "to avoid the expense and uncertainty of further litigation" — the standard corporate incantation for *we did the thing, we're just not going to say so in writing*. The Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act carries statutory damages of $1,000 to $5,000 per violation, which for a class this size would have run into the hundreds of millions had it gone to trial. Instead: $3.75 million, a claims deadline in October, and a company that gets to keep saying, out loud, that it did nothing wrong.
Nine Years Is a Long Time to Not Ask
HireVue built its business on the premise that a screen and a webcam can tell an employer something useful about a stranger in twenty minutes. Whatever that something is, it apparently required your face and your voice as raw inputs, and apparently getting a lawyer to draft one consent checkbox was a lower priority than shipping the product. Nine years passed between the first uncollected consent and the lawsuit that made anyone stop. In that window, 91,305 people sat in front of a webcam, adjusted their lighting, and tried to look employable for an algorithm that already had what it needed.
The checks go out in October. The Machine, for its part, has already moved on to the next applicant.
Sources: ClassAction.org — $3.75M HireVue Settlement · ClaimDepot — Video Interview BIPA Settlement
