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.
The World Economic Forum reported last year that approximately 88% of companies already use some form of AI in candidate screening. And around 65% of job candidates rely on AI at some point in the application process, whether to guide them through an interview, insert keywords, draft a cover letter or even cheat on an assessment. There are even HR platforms selling AI designed specifically to screen applications for AI.
Here’s the tension; AI isn’t inherently bad for hiring, but it’s creating a “polished sameness” problem. As a result, high-ability workers are being hired almost 20% less often than they should be, because their output is indistinguishable from that of lower-ability candidates who used AI tools to generate the perfect resume.
Qualified job candidates need to trust that their résumés cut through the noise without discrimination. HR teams need tools that can sift through high volumes of applications, as well as assessments that guide them toward a good fit. And ultimately, the tools and processes being used to determine the right candidate for the job also need to hold up in court.
Where hiring tools create legal liability
The legal standard underlying hiring decisions has been settled law for more than 50 years. In Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971), the Supreme Court ruled that neutral hiring criteria can be unlawful if they produce a disparate impact on a protected group without a clear connection to job performance. That applies whether decisions are made by an algorithm or a hiring manager.
More recent cases, like Mobley v. Workday, Inc., have brought that into sharper focus, with courts affirming that anti-discrimination protections extend to job seekers at the application stage, not just employees after a hire.
Yet many organizations still run with the assumption that their hiring criteria work. They deploy assessments, set standards and make decisions without asking whether the tools they use to do so are empirically validated against actual on-the-job performance or whether they affect some demographic groups more than others.
Why job targeting matters more than ever
This is where job targeting becomes critical, and not only as a legal safeguard.
A job target is a set of behavioral and cognitive requirements for a role that serve as criteria to guide an individual or team in assessing a candidate’s fit for that role, defined by people with direct knowledge of what success in that role looks like.
At PI, candidates are measured against four behavioral factors: dominance, extraversion, patience and formality. The job target for each role is set through a structured assessment completed by the hiring manager and key stakeholders — those with the contextual knowledge to define what the role actually demands.
Here’s why this matters:
- Job targets help teams cut through the noise to determine highly qualified candidates. While a candidate can use AI to adjust their résumé to fit the given job description, they don’t have access to the predetermined target. They can’t game the system and adjust their behavioral profile to fit the job target they’ve never seen.
- Job targets make the candidate selection process far more defensible, anchoring hiring decisions to a clearly defined role and the behavioral traits and drives required for success in that role.
A job target adds an extra layer of defensibility to the hiring process, ensuring your team finds the right fit while protecting applicants’ rights and opportunities. Beyond setting job targets, however, organizations also need to know whether their assessments, when deployed, affect some candidate groups differently than others. Adverse impact studies test for this kind of bias.
What is an adverse impact study (and why your hiring process needs one)
Running an adverse impact study of hiring assessments requires methodological expertise, access to selection rate data across demographic groups and, ideally, an independent party willing to scrutinize the results.
PI runs these adverse impact studies on all of our assessments every three years through the European Federation of Psychologists’ Associations (EFPA), which appoints independent auditors from Det Norske Veritas Consulting Group (DNV), all of whom hold PhDs in IO psychology.
In doing so, we invite them to find problems with our assessments and try to break our science.
We also measure test-retest reliability, meaning the same person should get similar results, whether they take the assessment today or years from now. That consistency over time is a key indicator that the assessment is capturing stable behavioral traits rather than momentary context or guesswork.
By using scientifically validated assessments, HR teams can trust that their decisions are bias-free and legally defensible.
What a defensible hiring process looks like
AI tools, AI-polished applications and evolving case law have raised both the complexity and the stakes in hiring and legal protection. Job targeting, backed by validated assessments and rigorous adverse impact analysis, ensures organizations meet standards and maintain legal protection in every hiring decision.
In doing so, you won’t simply avoid lawsuits, you’ll also produce better hires, stronger teams and employees who stay.
With PI’s job targeting tools and behavioral assessments, invest in a hiring approach you can trust. Learn more about our science-backed approach.
