Three in Five Managers Use AI to Decide Who Gets Laid Off
The News
A ResumeTemplates.com survey of 1,000 US managers with direct reports found that 59% use AI to help decide who gets laid off, and 58% use it for firing decisions. One in four managers said they use AI for layoff decisions 'often or all the time.' The factors managers ask AI to weigh are legally troubling: 80% use performance and productivity scores, but 57% factor in attendance, 42% look at salary or cost, and 31% direct AI to consider 'frequent sick days or medical leave.' Tenure (32%), paid time off (23%), and age (14%) also feature. As Julia Toothacre, chief career strategist at ResumeTemplates.com, noted: 'A decision that weighs someone's health or age sits on very different legal ground than one based on their work.' Meanwhile, 58% of managers couldn't confirm their company's AI tools had been tested for bias, and only 38% had received any training on ethical AI use for HR decisions. The survey also found that 43% of managers occasionally let AI make layoff decisions with no human supervision, and 13% of all managers surveyed said they have already replaced a worker's job with AI.
Why It Matters
This is the compliance story hiding inside a survey about layoffs. When managers feed sick leave, age, and medical history into an AI model and act on its recommendations, they are not just making poor personnel decisions — they are generating evidence for discrimination claims. The EEOC has been clear that 'the algorithm did it' is not a defence under Title VII. And in states with new AI employment laws — Illinois, California, Colorado, New Jersey — algorithmic discrimination provisions extend beyond hiring into promotion, discipline, and termination. The survey also surfaces a governance vacuum: if 58% of managers can't confirm bias testing and 62% have never been trained, then frontline decision-makers are deploying AI in legally sensitive contexts with no guardrails. For TA leaders, this matters because the line between 'hiring AI' and 'workforce AI' is increasingly thin — the same vendors are pitching tools across the entire employee lifecycle.
Taking Action
All action is situated in your corporate context. These are starting points, not prescriptions — choose what fits.
Connect
Who to talk with in your enterprise
Your General Counsel or employment law lead: Ask whether the organisation has a policy governing AI use in termination and layoff decisions. If not, draft one this quarter — before someone feeds a RIF list into ChatGPT and creates a discoverable paper trail.
Your head of HR operations: Survey your own manager population. Do they have access to AI tools that could be used for workforce decisions? Do they know what constitutes appropriate versus inappropriate use? The ResumeTemplates data suggests passive assumptions about manager judgment are insufficient.
Inspect
What to take a closer look at
Check your last reduction in force (if applicable): was any AI or algorithmic tool used — formally or informally — in the selection process? If you can't answer that question definitively, you have a discovery risk. For current AI tools deployed in performance management or workforce planning, verify that they exclude protected characteristics (age, disability status, medical leave history) from their weighting models. Document the verification.
Reflect
What to think about more deeply
A manager who wouldn't consciously discriminate based on age or health will happily ask an AI to factor those variables into a layoff decision. Does the technology enable discrimination, or does it simply reveal what managers wanted to do all along?