A new Illinois law, which went into effect on Jan.1, requires employers to notify and obtain consent from job applicants for using AI to grade video interviews
Rebecca Heilweil / Vox :
Context & Ripple Effects
Illinois opens 2020 by putting a consent gate in front of automated hiring: employers may no longer run applicants' video interviews through AI grading software without telling them and getting permission first. It is an early move in what becomes a multi-state regulatory arc — two years later, the NY city council goes further than consent and bans AI hiring tools outright unless a yearly bias audit clears them on race and gender.
The throughline matters because it is not one-off: New York City's version takes effect in 2023 with audit disclosures and per-violation fines (annual software audits plus race and gender impact reporting), and Illinois itself returns to AI oversight later with SB 315's annual third-party safety audits of leading AI labs — a bill OpenAI and Anthropic backed. The 2020 consent law is the template the later, heavier regimes build on.
First-order effects
- Employers hiring in Illinois must add notice-and-consent steps before any AI tool grades recorded video interviews, and vendors selling those tools now have compliance obligations tied to how their customers deploy them.
Second-order effects
- Recruiting platforms serving multiple states face pressure to build consent and disclosure flows once rather than per-jurisdiction, since New York City's bias-audit regime shows the requirements only escalate after the first consent law lands.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, state legislatures ratchet from transparency (consent) to verification (bias audits) to systemic oversight (SB 315-style third-party audits), leaving AI hiring vendors to design for the strictest state rather than the loosest.
The trend: State governments are layering AI-in-hiring rules from consent notices up to independent audits, with Illinois repeatedly first among them.