Just weeks before Patrice White’s 62nd birthday, and before she would have vested in her retirement benefits, she was fired from a job she had held for 33 years. When she took the case to court, her former employer, a Washington D.C. government agency, cited poor performance as the basis for her termination.
The jury didn’t buy it.
The case was sealed by what leadership failed to document, communicate and justify. After dedicating decades to the company, leadership had never shared performance concerns with her directly. The lower scores used against her were part of an agency-wide policy shift applied selectively. And the only evidence that did exist was in the form of handwritten notes, overheard conversations and a clear pattern of scrutiny applied to older employees. In the end, the jury awarded White $525,000 in back pay.
White v. District of Columbia may be an age discrimination case, but the liability behind it came from something more mundane: undocumented criteria, inconsistently applied standards and decisions untethered from any defensible, job-related rationale.
Those same patterns can surface just as easily at the hiring stage.
What a defensible hiring process actually looks like — and why most companies don’t have one.
