People Like Us
A man in a grey suit sits waiting in a corporate interview room, hands clasped, a clock on the wall behind him and other candidates seated along the walls.

Reject the Rejections — for businesses and HR teams

A People Like Us film

  • Produced by new—landDirected by Amara Abbas
  • In collaboration with Worth Your WhileStarring Ebenezer Gyau
  • Co-written with Yasmin AliMade with Real rejection letters

Drawn from real automated rejection emails, the cold language of corporate hiring is reimagined as a spoken-word performance, giving voice to the invisible barriers ethnic minority professionals face every day.

82% of employers who monitor their automated screening found that outcomes differed by candidates' ethnicity, while 28% don't monitor it at all.

75% of job seekers don't know that they may have a legal right to request a human review of an automated rejection.

Read the research

Nobody should be rejected by a system before they are seen

Automated hiring software now stands between UK jobseekers and work, rejecting candidates in minutes, sometimes before applications have even closed. Candidates deserve to know before they apply. Help us make disclosure of automated screening a legal requirement.

Email your MP
A woman in a dark coat stands holding a yellow paper folder, a coat rack beside her.

Automated hiring software can carry bias. More than a quarter of employers aren't checking.

If you screen with automated tools, you may be filtering out qualified candidates in ways that are hard to detect without human oversight. The Information Commissioner's Office has found that many employers using automated decision-making in recruitment are not applying the safeguards the law requires.

  • 15%

    Only 15% of candidates have ever been told an automated system was used on their application

  • 70%

    70% of ethnically diverse job seekers have altered or hidden something from their CV including their country of origin, faith and even their name out of fear software or AI assistants would reject them.

  • 42%

    42% of job seekers have received identical or near-identical rejection emails from different employers, a sign the same software may be rejecting the same people everywhere they apply.

  • People Like Us & Censuswide, 2026
Research & findings

Reject the rejections

Automated hiring systems are rejecting people before a human ever reads their name. Ask your MP to support better hiring transparency.

A man in a grey suit stands in a corporate room, other people out of focus behind him.

Practical compliance tips for your organisation, from the ICO's guidance and UCL's research into fairness in AI-driven hiring.

Advice for businesses
A man in a turban stands in profile against a pale wall, another candidate seated out of focus behind him.

About the campaign

People Like Us champions ethnic minority talent until workplaces reflect the world they serve, holding organisations and governments accountable along the way. This campaign asks for two simple things: tell people in the job advert when automation or AI will be screening them, and check those systems for bias.