Arena Analytics
Arena scores job applicants, mainly for healthcare and senior-living employers, on how likely they are to show up and stay in a specific role at a specific location, reroutes and sources candidates it rates likely to be retained, and applies the same outcome models to employee flight risk and internal mobility.
HireAIScore rates Arena Analytics 32 out of 100 (grade F, Substantial gaps) under rubric v1.0, last reviewed September 25, 2026. Arena Analytics ranks 154 of 160 vendors rated in Screening AI, against a category average of 46. That score is drawn from 30 evidence items across 7 rubric criteria for Arena Analytics — 23 with a cited source, 7 recording that nothing was located.
§ 01 - Company facts
- Legal name
- Arena Analytics Inc.
- Founded
- 2015
- Headquarters
- United States · US
- Pricing tier
- Enterprise
- Market side
- Employer-side (AEDT)
- Categories
- ScreeningAssessmentSourcing
- Website
- arena.io
These are company details, not findings. They are editable by a verified representative and carry no weight in the score, which is built only from the cited evidence below.
§ 02 - Score breakdown
§ Score breakdown
Category scoring
Weighted contribution shown to the right of each bar.
- 01
Article 11 Technical Documentation
Weight 20%30
+6.0 · category avg 49
- 02
Bias Audit Transparency
Weight 18%25
+4.5 · category avg 41
- 03
FRIA Support
Weight 15%25
+3.8 · category avg 31
- 04
Data Governance Disclosure
Weight 15%42
+6.3 · category avg 53
- 05
Human Oversight Design
Weight 12%38
+4.6 · category avg 56
- 06
Post-Market Monitoring
Weight 12%28
+3.4 · category avg 40
- 07
Customer Documentation
Weight 8%38
+3.0 · category avg 58
Category avg is the mean raw score on that criterion across the 160 Screening AI vendors in scope of this rubric, this one included.
§ 03 - Strongest · weakest
Strongest category
Data Governance Disclosure
Raw score 42 · contributes 6.3 to total.
42 against a 53 category average
Weakest category
FRIA Support
Raw score 25 · contributes 3.8 to total.
25 against a 31 category average
§ 04 - Cited evidence
Download diligence record→§ Evidence
Cited per category
Every score is backed by at least one cited piece of evidence.
Evidence ledger
- Items
- 30
- Documentation
- 13
- Public statement
- 9
- Product feature
- 1
- Absence
- 7
- With a source URL
- 23 of 30
- Source hostnames
- 4
- Fewest items
- 2
- FRIA Support
These figures measure how thoroughly Arena Analytics was reviewed, not how Arena Analytics performed — an absence row, recording that nothing was located, is counted like any other item.
Article 11 Technical Documentation
4 items30
- DocumentationCaptured Sep 25, 2026
In the abstract of a 2020 MLconf talk, Arena's then Chief Data Scientist (now CTO) describes 'Adversarial Fairness': a KPI-predicting network is trained against a discriminator that tries to recover EEOC protected classes until they reach Nash equilibrium, and the method is said to be demonstrated in a scaled production environment.
https://mlconf.com/sessions/adversarial-fairness-in-the-labor-market/
- Public statementCaptured Sep 25, 2026
The Retention Prediction page says Arena uses 'scores of data points specific to each role and organization' and combines proprietary, external and applicant data with a proprietary bias-mitigation model, but names no features, model type, validation results or limitations.
- Public statementCaptured Sep 25, 2026
A January 2021 release announces an external AI Ethics Advisory Board chaired by HR-tech analyst John Sumser, but no outputs from the board could be found and its page on arena.io now returns 404.
- AbsenceCaptured Sep 25, 2026
No model card, system card, technical documentation pack, explainability statement, AI policy or ISO 42001 reference exists on arena.io or in the help.arena.io help center; all 19 sitemap URLs are marketing or legal pages, and /security, /trust, /responsible-ai and /ethics return 404.
Bias Audit Transparency
3 items25
- Public statementCaptured Sep 25, 2026
The homepage says Arena removes 'protected characteristics and related signals' from its models and that its recommended candidate group 'consistently exceeds the EEOC's 80% compliance threshold, often surpassing 95%', with no auditor, date, sample or impact-ratio tables.
- Public statementCaptured Sep 25, 2026
A November 2020 release claims Arena's adversarial technique removes '92%-99% of latent bias' and lifts representation above 95%, based on Arena's own demographic-parity measurements rather than an independent audit.
- AbsenceCaptured Sep 25, 2026
We found no NYC LL 144 bias-audit summary or independent audit on arena.io, help.arena.io, the ACLU's crowd-sourced LL 144 audit tracker or Warden AI (trust.warden-ai.com/arena returns 404), and no BABL AI, DCI, ORCAA, Holistic AI or Credo AI audit of Arena.
FRIA Support
2 items25
- AbsenceCaptured Sep 25, 2026
We found no EU AI Act material, Article 27 FRIA template, deployer-obligation guidance, intended-use statement or system card on arena.io, in its 27-article help center or in its press releases.
- DocumentationCaptured Sep 25, 2026
The privacy policy (updated March 30, 2022) says the services are controlled and operated from the United States and warns users outside the US that their data may be stored in a country EU regulators do not deem an 'adequate jurisdiction', without mentioning the EU AI Act or deployer duties.
Data Governance Disclosure
7 items42
- DocumentationCaptured Sep 25, 2026
The privacy policy lists the applicant data Arena collects (resume, background, question responses, on-platform interactions, device usage and information 'in the public domain'), says demographic data is used only to validate bias reduction and client-supplied hire and termination dates only to train the algorithms, and sets no retention period beyond 'as long as reasonably necessary'.
- DocumentationCaptured Sep 25, 2026
The homepage says Arena's dataset covers 4.2 million people and their career outcomes, growing by 70,000 a month, and that protected characteristics and related signals are removed from its models.
- Public statementCaptured Sep 25, 2026
Arena's founder said adversarial debiasing let the company start using data 'once considered unusable, such as commuting distance', a location-derived input that can act as a proxy for protected classes.
- DocumentationCaptured Sep 25, 2026
The candidate FAQ says Arena collects applicant 'responses, text, and interactions' on its platform to generate a prediction for each candidate in each position, with no feature list or exclusion list.
https://help.arena.io/api/v2/help_center/en-us/articles/115004279747.json
- Public statementCaptured Sep 25, 2026
The Why Arena page claims the platform is 'SOC 2, type II compliant', but no report, bridge letter or trust portal is published.
- Public statementCaptured Sep 25, 2026
The only public record of an actual examination is an April 2021 release announcing a SOC 2 Type I examination by the CPA firm A-LIGN under the AICPA security principle.
- AbsenceCaptured Sep 25, 2026
Arena publishes no training-data provenance statement, detailed exclusion list, subgroup performance metrics, subprocessor list, DPA or retention schedule.
Human Oversight Design
7 items38
- DocumentationCaptured Sep 25, 2026
The Talent Discovery page says Arena scores all interested candidates and 'will only recommend people who scored as likely to be retained', so others are filtered out before any employer sees them.
- DocumentationCaptured Sep 25, 2026
The homepage says Retention Prediction flags first-day risk, prioritises candidates 'statistically more likely to stay' before offers are made and reroutes others to different openings, and describes no override controls, score explanations or audit logs.
- Public statementCaptured Sep 25, 2026
A 2018 customer account says hiring managers received the retention prediction as 'an additional piece of information' alongside the application, and people conducted the interviews and made the final hiring decision.
- Public statementCaptured Sep 25, 2026
In 2019 Arena's then-president said algorithms 'don't replace' human judgment and 'you can't have an algorithm make a hire'.
- DocumentationCaptured Sep 25, 2026
The candidate FAQ says applicants cannot see their results 'in accordance to company policy' and that the score is about retention, not intelligence, skill or experience.
https://help.arena.io/api/v2/help_center/en-us/articles/203883878.json
- DocumentationCaptured Sep 25, 2026
The candidate FAQ says completing the questionnaire is not obligatory but that an application 'may not be considered complete' without it, and it describes no alternative selection process.
https://help.arena.io/api/v2/help_center/en-us/articles/115004278567.json
- AbsenceCaptured Sep 25, 2026
We found no public documentation of recruiter override controls, confidence thresholds, in-product score explanations, per-jurisdiction settings or decision audit logs.
Post-Market Monitoring
3 items28
- DocumentationCaptured Sep 25, 2026
The Retention Prediction page says post-hire reports 'clearly lay out the retention prediction numbers' to back its guarantee of greater retention for 'Likely' hires; this is customer-facing outcome tracking, not public or fairness monitoring.
- DocumentationCaptured Sep 25, 2026
The candidate help center gives a support email and toll-free number for questionnaire access problems, the only public support channel besides legal@arena.io.
https://help.arena.io/api/v2/help_center/en-us/articles/115004427928.json
- AbsenceCaptured Sep 25, 2026
We found no working status page (status.arena.io points to Atlassian Statuspage but serves no page), no security.txt or vulnerability-disclosure contact, no incident history and no model-update changelog.
Customer Documentation
4 items38
- DocumentationCaptured Sep 25, 2026
The public candidate help center has 27 FAQ articles covering the 10-15 minute questionnaire, supported devices, six-month result validity and support contacts, but nothing for employers on bias, notices or accommodations.
https://help.arena.io/api/v2/help_center/en-us/articles.json?per_page=100
- Product featureCaptured Sep 25, 2026
The Retention Prediction page lists ATS/HRIS integrations with Workday, ADP, UKG, Paycom, iCIMS, Talent Reef, Jobvite, Oracle and Symplr.
- DocumentationCaptured Sep 25, 2026
Product pages such as Internal Mobility describe each product in a few marketing lines (for example, employees searching 'a curated list of open jobs within your organization where they are likely to be retained') with no setup, configuration or compliance guidance.
- AbsenceCaptured Sep 25, 2026
Arena publishes no resource hub, whitepapers, deployer or admin guide, DPA, or guidance on NYC LL 144, Illinois, Colorado, California or the EU AI Act; /blog and /news redirect to a /resources page that returns 404.
§ 05 - Editorial notes
Company overview
Arena Analytics Inc. (branded Arena) is a Baltimore company founded by Michael Rosenbaum, who also founded Catalyte and is now Arena's CEO and chairman. It says it has sold AI workforce predictions since 2015, mostly to hospitals, health systems and senior-living operators. Its Retention Prediction product scores how likely each applicant is to show up and stay in a specific role at a specific location, marks which candidates are likely to be retained, and reroutes others to different openings. Talent Discovery sends employers pre-scored candidates from a database Arena puts at 4.2 million people. Flight Risk, Internal Mobility and workforce dashboards apply the same outcome models to current staff. Arena has publicly described these inputs: a short applicant questionnaire, applicant-tracking-system (ATS) data, third-party and public data, and clients' hire and termination outcomes. It says a proprietary 'Adversarial Fairness' model strips protected-class signal from its predictions.
Regulatory exposure
Arena's score ranks, filters and reroutes applicants and points employees toward internal moves. Employers that use it for New York City hiring or promotion therefore fall under Local Law 144, which requires an annual independent bias audit, a published summary and notice to candidates. No Arena audit is public, and after a December 2025 State Comptroller audit found enforcement ineffective, DCWP committed to tougher enforcement. Illinois' amended Human Rights Act (from 1 January 2026) requires notice when AI is used and bars using zip codes as proxies for protected classes. That matters here because Arena has said it models commuting distance and predicts fit by location. California's FEHA automated-decision rules (in force since 1 October 2025) add anti-discrimination duties and four-year record retention. California's CPPA rules on automated decision-making and Colorado's SB 26-189 disclosure regime both start on 1 January 2027. Arena appears to operate only in the US. Any EU use would count as high-risk under Annex III point 4 (recruitment and promotion), with obligations deferred to 2 December 2027.
Path to a higher score
Arena's biggest gain would come from commissioning and publishing an independent LL 144-style bias audit of the retention score for each product, with impact ratios by sex, race/ethnicity and intersectional groups. It should also publish the ongoing adverse-impact monitoring behind its four-fifths claims. Next, it should release a model or system card listing inputs, exclusions and validation results, including how it controls commute distance and other location data. It should also document recruiter override, score explanations and audit logs, and give candidates notice, an alternative selection process and access to their own result. Finally, it should refresh the 2022 privacy policy with retention periods, subprocessors and a data processing agreement (DPA), and publish the claimed SOC 2 Type II report through a trust center. A status page, a security contact, and deployer guidance for NYC, Illinois, Colorado, California and the EU AI Act would complete the set.
§ Regulatory frame
What applies to screening ai.
Treated as high-risk under Annex III §4 when the screening output is decisive. EU AI Act Article 13 transparency obligations apply; deployers must give candidates a way to contest.
§ Compare
Build any comparison→Arena Analytics against its nearest-scoring peers.
In Screening AI.
§ Others rated in Screening AI
All screening vendors→Ranked 154 of 160 by weighted total under rubric v1.0. The ordering is arithmetic on the rubric and carries no view on which tool suits a given hiring process.
- 151Qureos33F
- 152Entelo33F
- 153Emi33F
- 154Arena AnalyticsThis profile32F
- 155Intervue.io31F
- 156Moonhub30F
Conflicts of interest
No vendor pays for placement, scoring, or removal. Casework - the consulting firm that operates this directory - provides paid services to some vendors. Any active or recent (within 24 months) commercial relationship is disclosed on the affected vendor profile and the review is reassigned to an independent reviewer. See the full policy on About.
Casework has no commercial relationship with this vendor.