When it comes to leadership in any company, especially Google, a company’s culture is what sets the standards to how the company functions. Leadership plays an integral role when it comes to age discrimination. When it comes to hiring practices or just the employee’s talent in the job, some forty or older employees face trying to show leadership that they can do said tasks and have the knowledge and ability to do their work. Google’s hiring process, in a way, leads to these age discriminations. Their assessment of an applicant’s cognitive knowledge and their creativity determines if they are “fit” to work at Google.
But what also plays a huge role is that they peer-review applicants, which could be a good thing but also a bad thing. Depending on the case, whoever is in the peer review can hire or not, aand if it’s a peer-review group that consists of mostly people younger than thirty years of age, the chances of them agreeing to hire a sixty-year-old is slim. When it came to Robert Heath’s case, he had the qualifications to be hired for the job, but his age led Google not to hire him, which was unfair and led him to sue Google. He had the advantage since, at the time, according to Google’s databases, the median age they hired consisted of people who were twenty-nine years of age. When it came to Google’s culture and their hiring process, this is what made Google not hire Heath and fire Reid just because of their age.