Upwardly Global and Workday are using responsible AI to reduce “brain waste” and connect qualified talent to real job openings faster.
NEW YORK, 23 January 2026 — U.S. employers posted around 7 million job openings a month throughout 2025. Yet at the same time, nearly 2 million skilled immigrants and refugees who are legally allowed to work remain unemployed or stuck in jobs far below their qualifications, according to Mary Lee, national director of employer engagement at the nonprofit Upwardly Global.
This gap has created a frustrating reality across the country: trained doctors driving ride-share cars, engineers working in kitchens, and experienced professionals unable to restart the careers they once built. The problem isn’t a lack of talent. It’s a lack of visibility.
A problem called “brain waste.”
The situation is often described as “brain waste” when highly educated, highly skilled workers are unable to use their expertise because hiring systems don’t recognize their background or experience.
Upwardly Global, a nonprofit that has supported immigrants, refugees, and asylees for 25 years, says the main challenge is what it calls a “visibility gap.” In simple terms, skilled candidates exist, but many employers never see them in the first place.
And when companies can’t find this talent, it becomes a loss on both sides: professionals remain underemployed, and employers miss out on valuable skills.
Why hiring systems miss qualified candidates
Even when immigrants have strong qualifications, they often face barriers in the hiring process. Some of these barriers come from human bias.
For example, confirmation bias can lead a recruiter to assume foreign degrees aren’t valuable—even when the person has the exact skills needed. Another common issue is anchoring bias, where hiring teams focus too heavily on the first job listed on a resume and ignore the rest of the candidate’s experience.
These unconscious habits can block talented people before they ever get a real chance.
A smarter approach using responsible AI
To solve this, Upwardly Global partnered with HR software company Workday to run a pilot using artificial intelligence that helps match skilled immigrant candidates to job openings more quickly and fairly.
“We were really excited to explore a partnership that would utilize responsible AI to mitigate these challenges,” Lee said.
Instead of asking employers to switch platforms or learn new systems, Upwardly Global connected directly into Workday’s hiring software—tools many U.S. companies already use every day.
Introducing Upwardly Global Fetch
The nonprofit developed a custom integration called Upwardly Global Fetch, built as an API that works with Workday’s HiredScore AI tool.
Fetch pulls candidate profiles from Upwardly Global and places them directly into recruiters’ normal workflows, side by side with other applicants. This is important because it removes a major obstacle: recruiters don’t need to search outside their system or change the way they work to access skilled immigrant talent.
It’s like opening a hidden door inside the same hiring platform recruiters already use.
Why this matters right now
Recruiters today are overwhelmed, not only because of job market competition, but also because job applications are being created and submitted faster than ever.
“One of the companies we work with told us that they’ve had 7 million applications for 150,000 positions,” Lee said, explaining how difficult it has become to screen candidates efficiently.
In this environment, even great resumes can get buried. That’s why faster and more accurate matching tools are becoming essential.
Early results show strong potential.
When the Fetch pilot began, even Upwardly Global wasn’t sure how effective the AI matching would be.
“We didn’t know how the tool would work. We didn’t know if our candidates would be matched at all for open roles,” Lee said.
But the first analysis showed promising results. From a pool of 1,500 immigrant job-seekers, Fetch produced 575 candidate recommendations for open roles, and that number has continued to grow.
For the nonprofit, this signals two important things:
- Companies need the skills immigrant professionals bring.
- The AI can recognize and match those skills more successfully than older systems did.
For one employer role, Upwardly Global was able to manually present 45 candidates in a given time period. Using the AI-powered Fetch tool, that number jumped to 200 candidates for the same role in the same timeframe.
This doesn’t just increase volume. It improves efficiency and makes it easier for qualified professionals to be considered without delay, without being overlooked, and without getting filtered out too early.
A win for talent and business
Upwardly Global’s work highlights a simple truth: the U.S. job market doesn’t only need more applicants, it needs better ways to connect real talent to real opportunities.
By combining human-centered support with responsible AI, the organization hopes to reduce brain waste, improve fairness, and help employers fill jobs faster with candidates who are already ready to work.
In a world where skills matter more than ever, making talent visible could be one of the smartest hiring moves companies can make.
