Inside the Order: Five Takeaways Employers Can’t Ignore
- A Single, AI‑Driven Policy Is Enough
Workday insisted its customers, not its software, make hiring decisions. Judge Lin disagreed, pointing to discovery excerpts showing that Candidate Skills Match (CSM) automatically assigns “strong,” “good,” “fair,” or “low” scores, while Workday Assessment Connector (WAC) can down‑rank protected‑class applicants when employer behavior trains it to do so. That unified scoring framework—“the digital gatekeeper,” as the court puts it—creates a common question for every applicant over 40.
- Sliding‑Scale Burdens Rejected
Workday urged a tougher evidentiary standard because some discovery had occurred. The court refused, sticking to the Ninth Circuit’s two‑step collective action test, where stage one is “loosely akin to a plausibility standard” and stage two resembles summary judgment NYC.gov. Translation: Plaintiffs do not need full statistics now; credible allegations plus a coherent theory suffice.
