What must an Illinois AI hiring notice tell a candidate?

HB 3773 requires the notice. It does not tell you what to write. That leaves Illinois employers with a live obligation, no agency form, and no safe-harbor wording to fall back on.

What the statute actually says

What the statute leaves to you

Three things it leaves open, and each one is a decision you have to make and then be able to defend:

• No prescribed wording. There is no official Illinois AI notice text. The language is the employer's, and the employer answers for it.
• No prescribed channel. The statute does not name email, post, or a portal. Whatever is chosen has to be one the organization can evidence afterwards.
• No prescribed timing formula. Unlike New York City's ten-business-day rule, Illinois ties the duty to the use of AI in connection with a covered employment decision rather than to a counted interval.

That does not make the requirement softer. It makes the answer yours to settle with your counsel, and then to run the same way every time.

Why "we told them" is not the same as a record

The question that arrives later is never "does your policy say you send notices". It is "show me this candidate's". Between those two sits everything nobody captured at the time: which version of the language went out, on what date, to which address, and whether it arrived.

An approved template that lives in a shared document and gets pasted into individual emails will answer the first question and fail the second. Not because anyone did anything wrong, but because the evidence was never created.

What teams preserve in practice

The record that answers a candidate-specific question tends to need all of the following, captured at the moment of the send rather than reconstructed:

• The candidate reference and the role or workflow it relates to
• Which automated tool was involved
• The approved template version that was actually used — not the current one
• The send timestamp
• The provider-returned delivery outcome, including bounces, failures and suppressions
• An append-only history of who changed what, so a later edit cannot quietly rewrite the record

Where Illinois and California differ for the same team

An agency operating in both is running two different notice rules through one set of recruiters. Illinois is in force now with no prescribed form. California's CCPA ADMT pre-use notice has a January 1, 2027 deadline and does name what the notice must state — the specific purpose, and how to exercise the applicable rights.

Treating them as one process usually means writing to the stricter of the two and applying it everywhere. That is a decision for counsel, not a default, but it is worth making deliberately rather than discovering later that one state's workflow was quietly used for the other.

Common questions

This page is general information about published government requirements, last reviewed August 26, 2026. Requirements change; confirm the current text with the agency and your own counsel before relying on it.