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Why Do Employers Rarely Offer Explanations to Rejected Candidates?

139 points by kelukelugames 11y ago

res0nat0r 11y ago
Quick answer from the article: >In a litigious society, and particularly in the aftermath of many of the class action and civil lawsuits of the late 90s and early 00s, companies became hypersensitive in order to protect their interests. As such, many companies adopted a blanket approach to dealing with things like interview feedback for candidates by simply declining to give any details.
- gozur88 11y ago
  Which makes perfect sense. The company doesn't derive any benefit from telling you why they didn't hire you. There's no reason to do it if it involves risk.
petercooper 11y ago
I've just hired several new employees and at the risk of sounding all "firstworldproblems" it's a more draining and tricky process than I expected (not too dissimilar to being the interviewee, to be fair). This article nails it by saying judgments are often subjective or open to argument - in my case, it was always either down to experience or personality, and with the latter one, you're not going anywhere good by telling a candidate they weren't proactive enough, keen enough, friendly enough, or whatever.
- beachstartup 11y ago
  as the old adage goes, finding a job is a full time job. and so is finding the right candidate. if you rush, it can lead to a huge, costly mistake.
jzwinck 11y ago
Not only does fear of lawsuits prevent companies from disclosing no-hire reasons, it prevents them from even recording those reasons internally. If you get rejected and don't know why, take heart: a year from now the company also won't know why. You can apply again as if it were Groundhog Day.
- joezydeco 11y ago
  Just pray you don't get the same people interviewing you again...
  - jeffwass 11y ago
    Why? From the other side of the desk, wouldn't you be impressed if you had a candidate come in for another interview, and they explicitly tell you that you had interviewed them previously and they understood their weaknesses at that time. And they're looking forward to show you just how much their chops have improved in the meantime, and then proceed to do just that?
    - bcook 11y ago
      Plausible, but is it probable? I have no clue how blindly political the internal bureaucracy of the company is. Sure, the recruiter might be sane, but that is possibly only a small part of what gets me hired or rejected.
    - joezydeco 11y ago
      No. I'd be wondering "where (if at all) did this person work for the last year, and why are they so eager to come back here?" Most people get bonged and move on. If you weren't a fit 12 months ago, the odds (and personal bias, let's be honest) are really against you.
    - whitegrape 11y ago
      If I'm very proud of my company, I might be flattered that they too want to work at the same company so much. If my company's just a'ight, I'll think "why? and where have you been working in the meantime?" Additionally I might feel a little sorry for them, at first. If they actually do amaze me with how much they've improved, I would kick myself for failing to notice their potential the first time, and recommend them for immediate hire. I don't think I'd ever feel impressed with them. They'd deserve to feel impressed with themselves though, unless they totally blow it / show no improvement in which case I'm back to just feeling sad for them...
    - 11y ago
praneshp 11y ago
Oddly, Facebook(where the author works) is the only tech company that has given me actionable feedback.
- kldavenport 11y ago
  This was my experience as well. It was refreshing.
  - Florin_Andrei 11y ago
    So, does that mean they're not afraid of lawsuits because they are the 800lb gorilla with a huge war chest?
    - praneshp 11y ago
      Or it could mean they are determined to change status quo. Take your pick
- silverlake 11y ago
  Yep. I asked the HR rep if people get mad or threaten lawsuits. She said a few people will argue ("I solved that problem!") but she just pleads ignorance on tech details.
- rjbrock 11y ago
  Facebook was great. The recruiter gave me detailed feedback on what each interviewer said for each round.
doktrin 11y ago
I once received feedback after being rejected for a position. In this particular case I knew full well why I hadn't been given me the job, but nonetheless their willingness to open up about their decision making process made a big and lasting impression on me. Of course, it was a startup. No company with more than 20 employees would probably even consider doing something like this, and unfortunately I doubt that will change anytime soon. However - if you're ever in a position to safely communicate with a rejected candidate, I would suggest you at least consider it. They may not be suitable now, but things do change. At the other end of the spectrum are companies or teams that don't even bother notifying candidates they've been rejected. I'm sure they have good reasons, but to me that sends a negative signal.
- Swizec 11y ago
  > At the other end of the spectrum are companies or teams that don't even bother notifying candidates they've been rejected. I'm sure they have good reasons, but to me that sends a negative signal. As someone who's done that before, it's because my plate is too full (my own fault), which is why I'm looking for candidates, and I'm busy dealing with everybody who is still in the pipeline or getting used to working with the person who got through the pipeline. Then I tell myself "Fuck, I really should send those people an email explaining my decision. But I don't know what to say or how to not sound like a dick. Fuck it, I'll do it tomorrow". Then this repeats for a week. Then two weeks. Then three weeks. Then I tell myself "Fuck, if I do it now, I'm just going to look like an even bigger dick for not having done it yet. Best never contact this person ever again and if they happen to bump into me in real life, pretend I didn't see them and hope they don't recognise me." That said, big companies have professionals whose job it is to make sure this doesn't happen.
  - vonmoltke 11y ago
    > That said, big companies have professionals whose job it is to make sure this doesn't happen. Big companies are supposed to have professionals whose job it is to make sure this doesn't happen. Some (Amazon) seem to just not give a shit.
  - kafkaesq 11y ago
geebee 11y ago
I get it, lawsuits. There's very little upside for the employer, the benefit would go to the candidate, and the liability is on the employer. I suppose one benefit for the employer might be that the candidate could improve, should there be an opportunity to interview again later. It's a problem, though. I once did a 7 hour take home exam, didn't hear back for a month, and finally got the one line rejection listed in this article "we've decided not to move forward…" A month is too long to make someone wait regardless, but I really would have appreciated some technical feedback, because all I could do is wonder. The test was in Java, and I did use what I believe is a somewhat outdated way of using threads, but that's just a guess… I also interviewed at Google, and I understand that this "exam" (I think we should start calling it an entrance exam rather than an interviews) does result in actual, numerical scores that are currently sitting in a database somewhere at google, but I'm not allowed to know what they are. Again, I'd really like to know. Was I way off, or close? No idea. I think this becomes especially toxic in the context of tech interviews, because they really do often amount to exams. I've spent some time reflecting on this, and I believe that exams usually come with a bill of rights for the examinee (or student). It's very unusual to take an entrance exam with no idea who will evaluate it, how it will evaluated, how you did, and why you did (or didn't) pass. This "bill or rights" isn't an accident, it evolved, I believe, to counter balance what we demand of a student, and to provide safeguards against abusive and capricious behavior from institutions that act as gatekeepers, whether it's the bar, the medical or nursing boards, a committee deciding whether to award a masters degree, and so forth. I understand why liability terrifies employers, and that there is no real benefit for them. But unfortunately, you do need to look at this from the perspective of the people who take the exam. We get all the negatives of high stakes and stressful exams, but without the considerations that offset the stress and safeguard against abuse. There may be reasons for it, but developers are the ones who don't really know why their performance at the whiteboard wasn't acceptable enough for a job offer, or what happened after they sent their take home exam to a recruiter where supposedly it was evaluated by a tech team. In short, just because there are good reasons an employer wouldn't want to do this doesn't make it acceptable from the perspective of an applicant who has to essentially sit for these exams. I consider this a very serious problem in the high tech industry, and is certainly something that deters talented people from entering or remaining in the field.
ry_ry 11y ago
I always make a point of trying to give unsuccessful candidates feedback - especially when it's "we love your enthusiasm, get some experience under your belt and let's talk again". A candidate who didn't get hired and came back stronger is EXACTLY who I want working with me, and its shortsighted of companies to burn off a candidate as soon as they stumble on fizzbuzz or something equally bullshitty.
beachstartup 11y ago
because the one doing the rejecting doesn't have to, so they don't. there's absolutely no upside unless you want to spite someone intentionally. see also: friendship, dating, sales, party invitations
- collyw 11y ago
  I think if a company provides feedback it would make me more likely to apply in the future. If they ignore you, definitely not.
- mturmon 11y ago
  Your "see-also's" provide good perspective. It's not just legal. Some of the situations you identify (dating, friendship, sales, as well as interviews) have the attribute of "found nothing compelling". There was no single problem, but nothing emerged in the package or the interview that stood out. In this case, the lack-of-match is not obviously the candidate's fault, and trying to provide feedback is forcing a conclusion ("that's your problem right there") that isn't justified by the information gathered. And the best thing in such a case may be to say nothing, because you know nothing. ("Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.")
bkovacev 11y ago
Nothing unknown was said in this article.
- mdturnerphys 11y ago
  http://xkcd.com/1053/ http://xkcd.com/1053/
  - bkovacev 11y ago
    While I agree about this - I never made fun out of anyone. I'm just saying it's common sense in corporate world not to reveal the info behind the rejection. It should be common sense for others. But I'm in no way making fun out of anyone.
desireco42 11y ago
I tried to implement at one place I was a Lead Dev. We wanted to let candidates allow to ask when we reject them why. We got a string of really bad candidates, it really didn't make sense as a policy and was shot down.
lazyant 11y ago
I get it that giving feedback can expose a company to lawsuits and takes a lot of time, now, what's the excuse for not even informing the candidate of the rejection? many companies simply stop communicating.
- gozur88 11y ago
  I think it's because they don't want to be in the position of making an offer to someone they explicitly rejected when the preferred candidate didn't work out.
  - lazyant 11y ago
    Hmm, in my case at least with a bunch of companies, they had laid out the interview process (say, 3 or 4 steps) and they stopped communicating after the 2nd or 3rd step (with more to come) so I don't think they had me as a secondary alternative, I don't know why they can't just say "Sorry, you are not the right fit for us" and _then_ stop communicating for the legal / time waste reasons the article gives.
    - gozur88 11y ago
      That does seem a bit rude.
- dms105 11y ago
  In my experience the lack of communication is caused by a combination of workload and lack of experience. A lot of the larger tech companies have an assembly line approach to recruiting, with teams of coordinators, sourcers, and recruiters each handling a portion of the process. These teams tend to grow fast and hire of a lot of junior people - that lack of experience combined with pressure and a huge volume of interviews(at a fast growing firm) results in a lot of inconsistent communication. When a sourcer/recruiter is dealing with 5-10 interviews a day with 80% of them not making the cut, sometimes they make the decision to prioritize building pipeline over closing the loop properly with people. And sometimes people just have poor time management abilities and let things get lost in the shuffle.
cortesoft 11y ago
The reason is almost always "There was a better candidate"
- thaumasiotes 11y ago
  This doesn't really describe large companies, which often aren't hiring to fill specific roles. If that was the only thing stopping them from hiring you, they'd just hire the both of you.
  - cortesoft 11y ago
    We had X number of openings, and there were X people who were better than you.
- verisimilidude 11y ago
  There are many more reasons. One time I got this, "We can't bring you on at this time because our department no longer has the funds we were expecting." They actually called back six months later, out of the blue, and offered me the job.
jstelly 11y ago
I try to do this whenever I am the one talking through the results of the interview with a candidate but only if the candidate seems open to it. It seems like a valuable thing to do even from the company's perspective. If you are considering doing this: It isn't always received positively so you have to be prepared for that. You and your company will be judged in this conversation and it's likely that the candidate will not agree with you. Also, if the decision is final (for now or forever) make that very clear right away so no one wastes their time arguing their case. It seems best to approach it with the mindset that no interview process is perfect and your conclusion is based on your side of the exchange you had (which may just be a few hours with the person); it's possible your company's assessment is wrong for some reason but you've made your best effort to make the correct decision. It's easy to come off as arrogant when you're the side doing the rejecting. I have successfully offered feedback and later hired a candidate (more than once!) when they returned after taking on a new project that helped them grow in a way that addressed the feedback. Our company has also changed its collective mind about some people when we have had success with another candidate or found a particular project or situation that minimizes the risk of whatever we were concerned about (for near-hires). An interview that results in a rejection isn't necessarily a permanent dead end.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
Spooky23 11y ago
The lawsuit explanation is only half the answer. The reason that companies need to worry about lawsuits is that the hiring process is usually not very strenuous. When people make arbitrary and capricious decisions, bias tends to be a thing.
bobinator606 11y ago
most companies don't even bother calling or writing you to tell you 'no'. or they string you along endlessly until you get tired of asking, or you feel like you're becoming a pain.
nsedlet 11y ago
At HireArt (W12) we've been working on a feedback feature for awhile and are close to finally releasing it. We have a fairly rigorous screening process, and every candidate is assessed by a grader according to a rubric. Our thinking was that if we provide this assessment to employers, surely we could provide it to candidates, too. When we spoke to a labor attorney about this awhile back, their first reaction was basically that we would be insane to do it, because of the legal liability. We got comfortable with the idea of feedback because we think that we have a clear, documented process that stands up to scrutiny. However, I think for many employers, recruiting decisions ARE arbitrary and unfair. Honest feedback would merely expose the decisions for what they are - reliant on personal affinity with candidates, vague notions of "culture fit", and gut decisions. There's very little quality training for how to ask good questions, evaluate those responses, and render a hiring decision. If candidates could actually hear the hiring manager and recruiter's thoughts, they'd rightfully be pretty angry.
- basseq 11y ago
  You're dead right: hiring is hard. Hiring with quality training, repeatable processes, feedback loops, etc. is incredibly hard. For most companies, whether they like to admit it or not, a B-grade process is "good enough". And the ROI to take it to A+ is either non-existent or hard to prove. Here's the thing, though: that doesn't mean your labor attorney is wrong. One employee says something to a rejected candidate that could be interpreted as labor discrimination, and it doesn't matter how rigorous your process is, you're still in for the cost and time of a lawsuit to prove it. How do you build the 0.1% risk of a company-ending lawsuit into your business case?
  - dclowd9901 11y ago
    It is hard. The problem is that it's also hard to back out of a bad hire, so the cost of making a mistake is tremendously high. I'm a very "right to work" (bullshit term I know) oriented person, in that I think neither companies nor their employees should be obligated to each other at all. Firing/quitting should be frictionless and easy. Instead, firing is wraught with legal problems such that you can't even fire an employee unless you can monetarily justify the cost of a lawsuit against their impact of being a negative influence, or they're part of some indiscriminate layoff procedure. If I'm quitting or changing jobs, I'm harangued about it left and right by managers as to why or how this could happen. Let's not pretend we owe each other anything and just move on like any other business transaction.
dms105 11y ago
Ive always offered to give detailed feedback to my candidates that didn't pass a technical screen. I'd say about 80% of them were eager to hear it, and were grateful to get information that could help them get better at coding, or at least interviewing. It leaves people with a good impression of the company, and you get the satisfaction of knowing you helped someone. You aren't going to get sued for telling someone which type of sorting algorithm is most efficient for x sized data set.
- loup-vaillant 11y ago
  Wait a minute, 1 candidate out of 5 wasn't eager to hear about the technical feedback? Any idea why?
  - dms105 11y ago
    Those have usually been ones that did very poorly, so they probably already have some idea of what they were missing. Some candidates have other offers to fall back on and just don't care that much, and some just don't want to discuss technical details with someone in a non technical role, which is understandable.
blammail 11y ago
It's rude for sure, but from what I've seen (And I don't necessarily agree), the company feels there's no upside. The relationship is already in a negative space and it's unlikely an explanation will make things better.
tristor 11y ago
My experience has been the reason that I (and my peers) say nothing is because of a disconnect between knowledge and authority. I've interviewed thousands of candidates in my career and I almost always know before I finish up the interview whether or not we are going to bring that person in for another interview (at which point the team votes if we offer). More than anything else, the number one reason that an otherwise good candidate doesn't get to continue is because of a disconnect around what the word "Senior" means. Every company has a different bar set for what qualifies as "Senior", but in most places I've been that bar is relatively high, so if we advertise for that position externally it means we don't have someone internal who's met the bar for promotion yet. We can't in good conscious hire someone in as a "Senior" that is not at least as qualified as the people we already have who didn't make the cut for promotion. Title inflation hurts because what happens is you might have been "Senior" at your last three employers but you don't make the bar for "Senior" or sometimes even "Mid" where you're applying. As the interviewer there's very little I can actionably provide you that addresses the above without getting into a conversation about the possibility of hire at a lower level, which I don't have the authority to offer since I'm not the hiring manager. Additionally, I try to do everything I can to respect the candidate and preserve their dignity during the interview process. If they're bombing it, I don't want them to feel like they're bombing it. It's not possible to both do that and tell them at the end that they aren't good enough to cross the threshold for the role. This is especially difficult for me and many of my peers because we're engineers and not really "people persons", so we err on the side of saying nothing vs risk saying something that crushes someone.
- tomp 11y ago
  Wouldn't that suggest that your job specs are rather lacking? I mean, instead of saying "Senior", you could just describe exactly what you expect and require in the candidate.
  - tristor 11y ago
    The issue there is because of the variability of meaning in the English language and the way job ads are written in general. Obviously my employer puts more than just "Senior" in a job ad, but it doesn't change the fact that companies everywhere put a laundry list of expected skills in their ads, so us doing the same doesn't provide any real filter mechanism. That's why we do technical phone screens.
bane 11y ago
The notion about lawsuits is basically the answer. I've interviewed and hired hundreds of people and the real reasons are usually pretty banal, e.g. not a good match between skills and requirements, wants too much money, etc. so in cases where somebody does hear something and they hear "not a good fit" that honestly is usually the case. It's hard to provide more specifics because interviews don't really uncover deep specifics about candidates. On occasion I've rejected people for less common reasons also, e.g. behavior problems during the interview, poor attitude, etc. and we have to keep those things pretty confidential from the candidate because it would be used in a lawsuit even if it's not an example of discrimination. All the "culture fit" notions in startup-land would be other examples of this kind of rejection. There's of course all kinds of discrimination in hiring and companies hide behind these practices all too often. I've never been part of this kind of thing thankfully, but I can imagine. tptacek's old company has more rigid hiring practices that produce what I would guess are strong metrics that help them find good candidates but also might protect them in the case of a lawsuit. I've also been on the receiving end of rejections of course. Before the second dot-com boom/bust companies used to actually contact you back with a "not a good fit". After that you usually just don't hear anything unless you really press the recruiters. On occasion, when the recruiting department isn't as well put together as might be expected, real reasons will leak out and those are also surprisingly interesting: - salary demands are too high and exceed even senior execs. I don't make all that much out of the ordinary for my experience level and position, so that brought a lot of insight into how they function as a company - bad culture fit - depending on the company I actually felt relieved by some of these rejections and perturbed by others. - the weirdest one was where the company's internal hr processes were so broken, and they had some sort of internal clock on candidates, that they were not able to process me through the interview rounds in a timely fashion, so they rejected me because it was taking too long to process me. I can say that the interview and hiring process was a real shit show so it didn't surprise me at all, but I found it impressively annoying. I did think about suing them, but then I thought about what I wanted out of the lawsuit and decided not to bother.
- foobarqux 11y ago
  What type of "behavior problems" have you seen?
sp527 11y ago
My last employer didn't offer reasons quite simply because that would have been intractable with our candidate flow (legal issues aside).
vonnik 11y ago
Former technical recruiter, current CEO here. The recruiting and hiring process as presently practiced by most firms is an enormous waste of everyone's time. We are inefficient in how we gather information from applicants and how we communicate it to them. This is partially because it's hard to standardize the information needed for each job and available from each candidate. By the time you meet the minimum requirements of gathering information about an applicant, sharing it with your team and getting them to make a decision, much time has passed. Time when you should have been doing other things. Then you face the question: How much more time can I spare sharing with the candidate the reasons why they were rejected? A recruiter may get the decision from the VP Engineering, but not know the reasons. If you do know the reasons, some of them will make the candidate upset, and they aren't always fixable. (What if all you can say is: The hiring manager didn't like you. Wasn't impressed. You don't seem smart enough for this role...?) That is: sharing all the reasons for rejection will lead to a huge waste of time and emotional energy with someone who you may never speak with again. Except in the rare cases where you see potential, there's almost no incentive to go into detail. I've written more here, for those who are interested: https://www.linkedin.com/today/author/13992315?trk=prof-sm https://www.linkedin.com/today/author/13992315?trk=prof-sm
- xivzgrev 11y ago
  To your point of huge emotional drain, I was surprised at the behavior that the article mentioned about rejected candidates reacting to feedback. It's like they never felt failure before... I like her saying - chew the meat, spit out the bones and thank them for the feedback.
jecjec 11y ago
because there is literally no marginal benefit?
- Afton 11y ago
  Maybe not 'literally', but the point is well taken. I got actionable feedback when I was applying as an intern at Microsoft, and I ended up working there a few years later. The feedback I got was crucial to my getting the job at MSFT (as well as to getting a different job before going to MSFT)
PhasmaFelis 11y ago
We don't accept "paranoid about litigation" as an excuse when, say, a kid gets expelled for bringing a butter knife to school.
- PeterisP 11y ago
  Don't we? If a kid gets expelled for bringing a butter knife to school and the given excuse is "paranoid about the litigation", then the general result after all the uproar is that the kid is still expelled and the policies stay in place, so de facto we do accept it and do keep doing things because of it.
known 11y ago
Quiz != Interview Interviewer might have quizzed the candidate.
BuckRogers 11y ago
I think the biggest reason is the generic self serving reason. They simply aren't going to waste time on you unless you can help them. Something to keep in mind.
rbritton 11y ago
The timing on this posting is somewhat darkly amusing for me -- I was just rejected by Stripe on Wednesday. I fit the job posting perfectly, so I asked why, and the answers I received were almost identical to those highlighted in the posting. It's unfortunate what the bad eggs in the hiring process have done to make it effectively useless for everyone else.
- dragandj 11y ago
  Maybe the reason is just that they have found the candidate that fits the job even more perfectly.
  - rbritton 11y ago
    In my experience I have usually been told if someone else beat me out (usually phrased as "We're moving forward with another candidate who is a better fit"). While it's possible, I don't think it was the case here. I think it came down to the interview. I went into it expecting the questions to focus around one thing and ran into another, so I wasn't as smooth with the answers as I think was necessary. That was ultimately my fault, but I'd have felt more comfortable with some confirmation of it so I knew where to focus my improvement efforts.
JamesBarney 11y ago
I think asking a less litigious and confrontational question might be more productive such as "What do you think I could do/change/improve to make my next interview more successful?"
- corysama 11y ago
  Unfortunately, this is a situation that requires zero-tolerance. The cost of a single candidate reinterpreting what you say and dragging you into court is too high to risk. Even if the case is complete BS, the cost of arguing over BS will make you regret every reasonable candidate that you tried to help.
SixSigma 11y ago
Relying on interviews is not a great hiring strategy [1] Better to use testing, either by psychometrics or assessment days (group tasks, short notice presentations etc.). [2] [1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140606071003-7589947-no-correlation-between-interviewing-and-on-the-job-performance https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140606071003-7589947-no-cor... [2] http://www.inc.com/articles/2002/01/23815.html http://www.inc.com/articles/2002/01/23815.html
Hoasi 11y ago
Lawsuits. They ruin everything.
Nursie 11y ago
Because I don't care. If you don't think I'm a good fit then it's fine, let's just move on with life. We in tech are lucky enough that there is always another job around the corner.
blubb-fish 11y ago
I am currently in the situation of playing the HR role for hiring a developer in our start-up - for which I am actually working as a Data Scientist. I not just almost always give a reason for why we decided against a candidate - I even often give advice which might be relevant for future applications. Why am I not afraid of a law suit? B/c the hiring process I designed is based on a couple of quick tests directly relevant to the position - so it's pretty clear and objective why we decide how we decide. Most companies though actually base those decision on unsound and subjective information ... of course, those are worried about being blamed for that.
- sreenadh 11y ago
  You are a rare breed. I wish it was standard practices everywhere. People really need feedback to correct something they are doing wrong. I would love to be interviewed by you just for the feedback.
  - jrochkind1 11y ago
    The internal recruiter at GitHub gave me a couple sentences of feedback passed on from the interviewers when I was turned down after the final interview round. I appreciated it, it was helpful, and I saw how I could have done better at the interview, although I still thought they were making a mistake. :)
- tyingq 11y ago
  Do you make any attempt to interview for things are inherently subjective? At least for some positions, personality and culture fit might be important.
  - blubb-fish 11y ago
    It might be tricky if person A is a better fit than person B - but B is at least slightly more competent than A. In that case - if we would decide in favor of A - I guess I would skip that reason. But if you design the testing sufficiently broad - then you not just get a very good insights of where an applicant's strength lie but also enough "reasons" to give for negative decision - which also are helpful for the applicant to improve.
paulsutter 11y ago
Turn it around. Imagine that you have several offers from different companies. After you choose one (and you can choose only one), do the other companies have reason to get all mopey and feel offended to hear no reason for the rejection? Of course they don't. Why should candidates feel any differently when a company chooses someone else?
- ennuihenry 11y ago
  How does a candidate improve on himself/herself if a company gives a stock phrase? Maybe doing a mock interview, but it's difficult to replicate the stressors associated with an interview.
cm2187 11y ago
Headhunters are a pain in the ass but they are useful in that respect. You can provide feedback to the candidate indirectly without the feedback starting to be a negociation or pissing off the candidate. Internal candidates aren't that lucky. Usually recruiters made their decision when walking out of the room on whether the candidate is suitable or not. This timeout process is a bit wasteful.
larryb 11y ago
Where there's a will there's a way. If you wanted to give candidates feedback, you could have them sign a form along the lines of "you agree not to sue us for giving you feedback" and give you feedback. Professors are already doing a variation of this, the reverse actually, when asked to send recommendation letters for grad students. They ask the student to sign a form that waives their right to a copy of the letter. Live everything else, the companies bold enough to provide better interviewing service will have a leg up on companies that don't.
raverbashing 11y ago
I wonder if having a mostly objective criteria would facilitate hiring and reduce frustrations For example, give them a coding test (not fizzbuzz bs mind you), it might be just a multiple choice test, hence if they don't get approved this is an objective criteria used to turn them down
yason 11y ago
I just assume the simplest explanation: there were at least a few good candidates and they had to pick one so obviously the rest got rejected by the very decision to hire one. Companies hiring employees don't explicitly spend time thinking about the reasons why they might reject someone: they spend all their time trying to think which candidate stands out the best and could be that best choice for hiring.
mapt 11y ago
Because they can. Because job openings are scarce enough that people are applying anyway, regardless of being treated like shit. That's why we tolerate "but we're scared of lawsuits" as a legitimate excuse. This sort of thing (and hundreds of other similar phenomena) doesn't show up in unemployment metrics, but in a healthier economy, it doesn't happen as much, because people dislike working for assholes. It's a bit like how an Australian 5% unemployment (at $12.30 minimum wage) is very different from an American 5% unemployment (at $7.25 minimum wage) or a North Korean 5% unemployment (making $0.40 at Kaesong); The supply demand curve on employment is real, but it extends beyond tangible quantities like wages and into ways the employer behaves towards its employees & potential employees, because for workers, civil treatment is to some extent fungible with wages. In the US, we have much less labor regulation and more lawsuits, and this is the equilibrium we have arrived at in the current economic climate; In a different economic climate, we would arrive at a different equilibrium. The official understanding of the problem is plagued by Goodhart's Law - you can measure wages, but not being an asshole, so we will favor policies which push on one but ignore the other, and we can expect assinine behavior wherever there is even a little bit of profit to be gained; We sample and optimize "Unemployment", "Inflation", and corporate revenue growth as indicators of the economy's health, and a lot of other things have fallen by the wayside as we have reassured ourselves or worried ourselves with those numbers.
StanAngeloff 11y ago
I used to offer feedback to rejected candidates... until a person felt that was unwelcome and left us an extremely angered review on a trusted website. I have been careful with words and have tried to avoid confrontational or subjective topics. That didn't seem to matter much to them. All in all be thoughtful of the person in front of you and try not to be a jerk. Be prepared despite that some people will not want to hear what you have to say.
MillerMichael 11y ago
I once applied for company X back in 2014. I spend about 2 months on the application, conducting research, getting advice from friends, and doing my utter best to come up with a resume/motivation letter that would stand out. I didn't receive any feedback. What's more... when I called to asked about my application they pretty much got angry and sad: ''well, we receive a lot of application and don't have the time to respond to each application''. Till this day, I still can't get over it!

139 points by kelukelugames 11y ago

Quick answer from the article: >In a litigious society, and particularly in the aftermath of many of the class action and civil lawsuits of the late 90s and early 00s, companies became hypersensitive in order to protect their interests. As such, many companies adopted a blanket approach to dealing with things like interview feedback for candidates by simply declining to give any details.

gozur88 11y ago
Which makes perfect sense. The company doesn't derive any benefit from telling you why they didn't hire you. There's no reason to do it if it involves risk.

petercooper 11y ago

I've just hired several new employees and at the risk of sounding all "firstworldproblems" it's a more draining and tricky process than I expected (not too dissimilar to being the interviewee, to be fair). This article nails it by saying judgments are often subjective or open to argument - in my case, it was always either down to experience or personality, and with the latter one, you're not going anywhere good by telling a candidate they weren't proactive enough, keen enough, friendly enough, or whatever.

beachstartup 11y ago
as the old adage goes, finding a job is a full time job. and so is finding the right candidate. if you rush, it can lead to a huge, costly mistake.

jzwinck 11y ago

Not only does fear of lawsuits prevent companies from disclosing no-hire reasons, it prevents them from even recording those reasons internally. If you get rejected and don't know why, take heart: a year from now the company also won't know why. You can apply again as if it were Groundhog Day.

joezydeco 11y ago
Just pray you don't get the same people interviewing you again...
- jeffwass 11y ago
  Why? From the other side of the desk, wouldn't you be impressed if you had a candidate come in for another interview, and they explicitly tell you that you had interviewed them previously and they understood their weaknesses at that time. And they're looking forward to show you just how much their chops have improved in the meantime, and then proceed to do just that?
  - bcook 11y ago
    Plausible, but is it probable? I have no clue how blindly political the internal bureaucracy of the company is. Sure, the recruiter might be sane, but that is possibly only a small part of what gets me hired or rejected.
  - joezydeco 11y ago
    No. I'd be wondering "where (if at all) did this person work for the last year, and why are they so eager to come back here?" Most people get bonged and move on. If you weren't a fit 12 months ago, the odds (and personal bias, let's be honest) are really against you.
  - whitegrape 11y ago
    If I'm very proud of my company, I might be flattered that they too want to work at the same company so much. If my company's just a'ight, I'll think "why? and where have you been working in the meantime?" Additionally I might feel a little sorry for them, at first. If they actually do amaze me with how much they've improved, I would kick myself for failing to notice their potential the first time, and recommend them for immediate hire. I don't think I'd ever feel impressed with them. They'd deserve to feel impressed with themselves though, unless they totally blow it / show no improvement in which case I'm back to just feeling sad for them...
  - 11y ago

praneshp 11y ago

Oddly, Facebook(where the author works) is the only tech company that has given me actionable feedback.

kldavenport 11y ago
This was my experience as well. It was refreshing.
- Florin_Andrei 11y ago
  So, does that mean they're not afraid of lawsuits because they are the 800lb gorilla with a huge war chest?
  - praneshp 11y ago
    Or it could mean they are determined to change status quo. Take your pick
silverlake 11y ago
Yep. I asked the HR rep if people get mad or threaten lawsuits. She said a few people will argue ("I solved that problem!") but she just pleads ignorance on tech details.
rjbrock 11y ago
Facebook was great. The recruiter gave me detailed feedback on what each interviewer said for each round.

doktrin 11y ago

I once received feedback after being rejected for a position. In this particular case I knew full well why I hadn't been given me the job, but nonetheless their willingness to open up about their decision making process made a big and lasting impression on me. Of course, it was a startup. No company with more than 20 employees would probably even consider doing something like this, and unfortunately I doubt that will change anytime soon. However - if you're ever in a position to safely communicate with a rejected candidate, I would suggest you at least consider it. They may not be suitable now, but things do change. At the other end of the spectrum are companies or teams that don't even bother notifying candidates they've been rejected. I'm sure they have good reasons, but to me that sends a negative signal.

Swizec 11y ago
> At the other end of the spectrum are companies or teams that don't even bother notifying candidates they've been rejected. I'm sure they have good reasons, but to me that sends a negative signal. As someone who's done that before, it's because my plate is too full (my own fault), which is why I'm looking for candidates, and I'm busy dealing with everybody who is still in the pipeline or getting used to working with the person who got through the pipeline. Then I tell myself "Fuck, I really should send those people an email explaining my decision. But I don't know what to say or how to not sound like a dick. Fuck it, I'll do it tomorrow". Then this repeats for a week. Then two weeks. Then three weeks. Then I tell myself "Fuck, if I do it now, I'm just going to look like an even bigger dick for not having done it yet. Best never contact this person ever again and if they happen to bump into me in real life, pretend I didn't see them and hope they don't recognise me." That said, big companies have professionals whose job it is to make sure this doesn't happen.
- vonmoltke 11y ago
  > That said, big companies have professionals whose job it is to make sure this doesn't happen. Big companies are supposed to have professionals whose job it is to make sure this doesn't happen. Some (Amazon) seem to just not give a shit.
- kafkaesq 11y ago

geebee 11y ago

I get it, lawsuits. There's very little upside for the employer, the benefit would go to the candidate, and the liability is on the employer. I suppose one benefit for the employer might be that the candidate could improve, should there be an opportunity to interview again later. It's a problem, though. I once did a 7 hour take home exam, didn't hear back for a month, and finally got the one line rejection listed in this article "we've decided not to move forward…" A month is too long to make someone wait regardless, but I really would have appreciated some technical feedback, because all I could do is wonder. The test was in Java, and I did use what I believe is a somewhat outdated way of using threads, but that's just a guess… I also interviewed at Google, and I understand that this "exam" (I think we should start calling it an entrance exam rather than an interviews) does result in actual, numerical scores that are currently sitting in a database somewhere at google, but I'm not allowed to know what they are. Again, I'd really like to know. Was I way off, or close? No idea. I think this becomes especially toxic in the context of tech interviews, because they really do often amount to exams. I've spent some time reflecting on this, and I believe that exams usually come with a bill of rights for the examinee (or student). It's very unusual to take an entrance exam with no idea who will evaluate it, how it will evaluated, how you did, and why you did (or didn't) pass. This "bill or rights" isn't an accident, it evolved, I believe, to counter balance what we demand of a student, and to provide safeguards against abusive and capricious behavior from institutions that act as gatekeepers, whether it's the bar, the medical or nursing boards, a committee deciding whether to award a masters degree, and so forth. I understand why liability terrifies employers, and that there is no real benefit for them. But unfortunately, you do need to look at this from the perspective of the people who take the exam. We get all the negatives of high stakes and stressful exams, but without the considerations that offset the stress and safeguard against abuse. There may be reasons for it, but developers are the ones who don't really know why their performance at the whiteboard wasn't acceptable enough for a job offer, or what happened after they sent their take home exam to a recruiter where supposedly it was evaluated by a tech team. In short, just because there are good reasons an employer wouldn't want to do this doesn't make it acceptable from the perspective of an applicant who has to essentially sit for these exams. I consider this a very serious problem in the high tech industry, and is certainly something that deters talented people from entering or remaining in the field.

ry_ry 11y ago

I always make a point of trying to give unsuccessful candidates feedback - especially when it's "we love your enthusiasm, get some experience under your belt and let's talk again". A candidate who didn't get hired and came back stronger is EXACTLY who I want working with me, and its shortsighted of companies to burn off a candidate as soon as they stumble on fizzbuzz or something equally bullshitty.

beachstartup 11y ago

because the one doing the rejecting doesn't have to, so they don't. there's absolutely no upside unless you want to spite someone intentionally. see also: friendship, dating, sales, party invitations

collyw 11y ago
I think if a company provides feedback it would make me more likely to apply in the future. If they ignore you, definitely not.
mturmon 11y ago
Your "see-also's" provide good perspective. It's not just legal. Some of the situations you identify (dating, friendship, sales, as well as interviews) have the attribute of "found nothing compelling". There was no single problem, but nothing emerged in the package or the interview that stood out. In this case, the lack-of-match is not obviously the candidate's fault, and trying to provide feedback is forcing a conclusion ("that's your problem right there") that isn't justified by the information gathered. And the best thing in such a case may be to say nothing, because you know nothing. ("Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.")

bkovacev 11y ago

Nothing unknown was said in this article.

mdturnerphys 11y ago
http://xkcd.com/1053/ http://xkcd.com/1053/
- bkovacev 11y ago
  While I agree about this - I never made fun out of anyone. I'm just saying it's common sense in corporate world not to reveal the info behind the rejection. It should be common sense for others. But I'm in no way making fun out of anyone.

desireco42 11y ago

I tried to implement at one place I was a Lead Dev. We wanted to let candidates allow to ask when we reject them why. We got a string of really bad candidates, it really didn't make sense as a policy and was shot down.

lazyant 11y ago

I get it that giving feedback can expose a company to lawsuits and takes a lot of time, now, what's the excuse for not even informing the candidate of the rejection? many companies simply stop communicating.

gozur88 11y ago
I think it's because they don't want to be in the position of making an offer to someone they explicitly rejected when the preferred candidate didn't work out.
- lazyant 11y ago
  Hmm, in my case at least with a bunch of companies, they had laid out the interview process (say, 3 or 4 steps) and they stopped communicating after the 2nd or 3rd step (with more to come) so I don't think they had me as a secondary alternative, I don't know why they can't just say "Sorry, you are not the right fit for us" and _then_ stop communicating for the legal / time waste reasons the article gives.
  - gozur88 11y ago
    That does seem a bit rude.
dms105 11y ago
In my experience the lack of communication is caused by a combination of workload and lack of experience. A lot of the larger tech companies have an assembly line approach to recruiting, with teams of coordinators, sourcers, and recruiters each handling a portion of the process. These teams tend to grow fast and hire of a lot of junior people - that lack of experience combined with pressure and a huge volume of interviews(at a fast growing firm) results in a lot of inconsistent communication. When a sourcer/recruiter is dealing with 5-10 interviews a day with 80% of them not making the cut, sometimes they make the decision to prioritize building pipeline over closing the loop properly with people. And sometimes people just have poor time management abilities and let things get lost in the shuffle.

cortesoft 11y ago

The reason is almost always "There was a better candidate"

thaumasiotes 11y ago
This doesn't really describe large companies, which often aren't hiring to fill specific roles. If that was the only thing stopping them from hiring you, they'd just hire the both of you.
- cortesoft 11y ago
  We had X number of openings, and there were X people who were better than you.
verisimilidude 11y ago
There are many more reasons. One time I got this, "We can't bring you on at this time because our department no longer has the funds we were expecting." They actually called back six months later, out of the blue, and offered me the job.

jstelly 11y ago

I try to do this whenever I am the one talking through the results of the interview with a candidate but only if the candidate seems open to it. It seems like a valuable thing to do even from the company's perspective. If you are considering doing this: It isn't always received positively so you have to be prepared for that. You and your company will be judged in this conversation and it's likely that the candidate will not agree with you. Also, if the decision is final (for now or forever) make that very clear right away so no one wastes their time arguing their case. It seems best to approach it with the mindset that no interview process is perfect and your conclusion is based on your side of the exchange you had (which may just be a few hours with the person); it's possible your company's assessment is wrong for some reason but you've made your best effort to make the correct decision. It's easy to come off as arrogant when you're the side doing the rejecting. I have successfully offered feedback and later hired a candidate (more than once!) when they returned after taking on a new project that helped them grow in a way that addressed the feedback. Our company has also changed its collective mind about some people when we have had success with another candidate or found a particular project or situation that minimizes the risk of whatever we were concerned about (for near-hires). An interview that results in a rejection isn't necessarily a permanent dead end.

deleted 11y ago

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Spooky23 11y ago

The lawsuit explanation is only half the answer. The reason that companies need to worry about lawsuits is that the hiring process is usually not very strenuous. When people make arbitrary and capricious decisions, bias tends to be a thing.

bobinator606 11y ago

most companies don't even bother calling or writing you to tell you 'no'. or they string you along endlessly until you get tired of asking, or you feel like you're becoming a pain.

nsedlet 11y ago

At HireArt (W12) we've been working on a feedback feature for awhile and are close to finally releasing it. We have a fairly rigorous screening process, and every candidate is assessed by a grader according to a rubric. Our thinking was that if we provide this assessment to employers, surely we could provide it to candidates, too. When we spoke to a labor attorney about this awhile back, their first reaction was basically that we would be insane to do it, because of the legal liability. We got comfortable with the idea of feedback because we think that we have a clear, documented process that stands up to scrutiny. However, I think for many employers, recruiting decisions ARE arbitrary and unfair. Honest feedback would merely expose the decisions for what they are - reliant on personal affinity with candidates, vague notions of "culture fit", and gut decisions. There's very little quality training for how to ask good questions, evaluate those responses, and render a hiring decision. If candidates could actually hear the hiring manager and recruiter's thoughts, they'd rightfully be pretty angry.

basseq 11y ago
You're dead right: hiring is hard. Hiring with quality training, repeatable processes, feedback loops, etc. is incredibly hard. For most companies, whether they like to admit it or not, a B-grade process is "good enough". And the ROI to take it to A+ is either non-existent or hard to prove. Here's the thing, though: that doesn't mean your labor attorney is wrong. One employee says something to a rejected candidate that could be interpreted as labor discrimination, and it doesn't matter how rigorous your process is, you're still in for the cost and time of a lawsuit to prove it. How do you build the 0.1% risk of a company-ending lawsuit into your business case?
- dclowd9901 11y ago
  It is hard. The problem is that it's also hard to back out of a bad hire, so the cost of making a mistake is tremendously high. I'm a very "right to work" (bullshit term I know) oriented person, in that I think neither companies nor their employees should be obligated to each other at all. Firing/quitting should be frictionless and easy. Instead, firing is wraught with legal problems such that you can't even fire an employee unless you can monetarily justify the cost of a lawsuit against their impact of being a negative influence, or they're part of some indiscriminate layoff procedure. If I'm quitting or changing jobs, I'm harangued about it left and right by managers as to why or how this could happen. Let's not pretend we owe each other anything and just move on like any other business transaction.

dms105 11y ago

Ive always offered to give detailed feedback to my candidates that didn't pass a technical screen. I'd say about 80% of them were eager to hear it, and were grateful to get information that could help them get better at coding, or at least interviewing. It leaves people with a good impression of the company, and you get the satisfaction of knowing you helped someone. You aren't going to get sued for telling someone which type of sorting algorithm is most efficient for x sized data set.

loup-vaillant 11y ago
Wait a minute, 1 candidate out of 5 wasn't eager to hear about the technical feedback? Any idea why?
- dms105 11y ago
  Those have usually been ones that did very poorly, so they probably already have some idea of what they were missing. Some candidates have other offers to fall back on and just don't care that much, and some just don't want to discuss technical details with someone in a non technical role, which is understandable.

blammail 11y ago

It's rude for sure, but from what I've seen (And I don't necessarily agree), the company feels there's no upside. The relationship is already in a negative space and it's unlikely an explanation will make things better.

tristor 11y ago

My experience has been the reason that I (and my peers) say nothing is because of a disconnect between knowledge and authority. I've interviewed thousands of candidates in my career and I almost always know before I finish up the interview whether or not we are going to bring that person in for another interview (at which point the team votes if we offer). More than anything else, the number one reason that an otherwise good candidate doesn't get to continue is because of a disconnect around what the word "Senior" means. Every company has a different bar set for what qualifies as "Senior", but in most places I've been that bar is relatively high, so if we advertise for that position externally it means we don't have someone internal who's met the bar for promotion yet. We can't in good conscious hire someone in as a "Senior" that is not at least as qualified as the people we already have who didn't make the cut for promotion. Title inflation hurts because what happens is you might have been "Senior" at your last three employers but you don't make the bar for "Senior" or sometimes even "Mid" where you're applying. As the interviewer there's very little I can actionably provide you that addresses the above without getting into a conversation about the possibility of hire at a lower level, which I don't have the authority to offer since I'm not the hiring manager. Additionally, I try to do everything I can to respect the candidate and preserve their dignity during the interview process. If they're bombing it, I don't want them to feel like they're bombing it. It's not possible to both do that and tell them at the end that they aren't good enough to cross the threshold for the role. This is especially difficult for me and many of my peers because we're engineers and not really "people persons", so we err on the side of saying nothing vs risk saying something that crushes someone.

tomp 11y ago
Wouldn't that suggest that your job specs are rather lacking? I mean, instead of saying "Senior", you could just describe exactly what you expect and require in the candidate.
- tristor 11y ago
  The issue there is because of the variability of meaning in the English language and the way job ads are written in general. Obviously my employer puts more than just "Senior" in a job ad, but it doesn't change the fact that companies everywhere put a laundry list of expected skills in their ads, so us doing the same doesn't provide any real filter mechanism. That's why we do technical phone screens.

bane 11y ago

The notion about lawsuits is basically the answer. I've interviewed and hired hundreds of people and the real reasons are usually pretty banal, e.g. not a good match between skills and requirements, wants too much money, etc. so in cases where somebody does hear something and they hear "not a good fit" that honestly is usually the case. It's hard to provide more specifics because interviews don't really uncover deep specifics about candidates. On occasion I've rejected people for less common reasons also, e.g. behavior problems during the interview, poor attitude, etc. and we have to keep those things pretty confidential from the candidate because it would be used in a lawsuit even if it's not an example of discrimination. All the "culture fit" notions in startup-land would be other examples of this kind of rejection. There's of course all kinds of discrimination in hiring and companies hide behind these practices all too often. I've never been part of this kind of thing thankfully, but I can imagine. tptacek's old company has more rigid hiring practices that produce what I would guess are strong metrics that help them find good candidates but also might protect them in the case of a lawsuit. I've also been on the receiving end of rejections of course. Before the second dot-com boom/bust companies used to actually contact you back with a "not a good fit". After that you usually just don't hear anything unless you really press the recruiters. On occasion, when the recruiting department isn't as well put together as might be expected, real reasons will leak out and those are also surprisingly interesting: - salary demands are too high and exceed even senior execs. I don't make all that much out of the ordinary for my experience level and position, so that brought a lot of insight into how they function as a company - bad culture fit - depending on the company I actually felt relieved by some of these rejections and perturbed by others. - the weirdest one was where the company's internal hr processes were so broken, and they had some sort of internal clock on candidates, that they were not able to process me through the interview rounds in a timely fashion, so they rejected me because it was taking too long to process me. I can say that the interview and hiring process was a real shit show so it didn't surprise me at all, but I found it impressively annoying. I did think about suing them, but then I thought about what I wanted out of the lawsuit and decided not to bother.

foobarqux 11y ago
What type of "behavior problems" have you seen?

sp527 11y ago

My last employer didn't offer reasons quite simply because that would have been intractable with our candidate flow (legal issues aside).

vonnik 11y ago

Former technical recruiter, current CEO here. The recruiting and hiring process as presently practiced by most firms is an enormous waste of everyone's time. We are inefficient in how we gather information from applicants and how we communicate it to them. This is partially because it's hard to standardize the information needed for each job and available from each candidate. By the time you meet the minimum requirements of gathering information about an applicant, sharing it with your team and getting them to make a decision, much time has passed. Time when you should have been doing other things. Then you face the question: How much more time can I spare sharing with the candidate the reasons why they were rejected? A recruiter may get the decision from the VP Engineering, but not know the reasons. If you do know the reasons, some of them will make the candidate upset, and they aren't always fixable. (What if all you can say is: The hiring manager didn't like you. Wasn't impressed. You don't seem smart enough for this role...?) That is: sharing all the reasons for rejection will lead to a huge waste of time and emotional energy with someone who you may never speak with again. Except in the rare cases where you see potential, there's almost no incentive to go into detail. I've written more here, for those who are interested: https://www.linkedin.com/today/author/13992315?trk=prof-sm https://www.linkedin.com/today/author/13992315?trk=prof-sm

xivzgrev 11y ago
To your point of huge emotional drain, I was surprised at the behavior that the article mentioned about rejected candidates reacting to feedback. It's like they never felt failure before... I like her saying - chew the meat, spit out the bones and thank them for the feedback.

jecjec 11y ago

because there is literally no marginal benefit?

Afton 11y ago
Maybe not 'literally', but the point is well taken. I got actionable feedback when I was applying as an intern at Microsoft, and I ended up working there a few years later. The feedback I got was crucial to my getting the job at MSFT (as well as to getting a different job before going to MSFT)

PhasmaFelis 11y ago

We don't accept "paranoid about litigation" as an excuse when, say, a kid gets expelled for bringing a butter knife to school.

PeterisP 11y ago
Don't we? If a kid gets expelled for bringing a butter knife to school and the given excuse is "paranoid about the litigation", then the general result after all the uproar is that the kid is still expelled and the policies stay in place, so de facto we do accept it and do keep doing things because of it.

known 11y ago

Quiz != Interview Interviewer might have quizzed the candidate.

BuckRogers 11y ago

I think the biggest reason is the generic self serving reason. They simply aren't going to waste time on you unless you can help them. Something to keep in mind.

rbritton 11y ago

The timing on this posting is somewhat darkly amusing for me -- I was just rejected by Stripe on Wednesday. I fit the job posting perfectly, so I asked why, and the answers I received were almost identical to those highlighted in the posting. It's unfortunate what the bad eggs in the hiring process have done to make it effectively useless for everyone else.

dragandj 11y ago
Maybe the reason is just that they have found the candidate that fits the job even more perfectly.
- rbritton 11y ago
  In my experience I have usually been told if someone else beat me out (usually phrased as "We're moving forward with another candidate who is a better fit"). While it's possible, I don't think it was the case here. I think it came down to the interview. I went into it expecting the questions to focus around one thing and ran into another, so I wasn't as smooth with the answers as I think was necessary. That was ultimately my fault, but I'd have felt more comfortable with some confirmation of it so I knew where to focus my improvement efforts.

JamesBarney 11y ago

I think asking a less litigious and confrontational question might be more productive such as "What do you think I could do/change/improve to make my next interview more successful?"

corysama 11y ago
Unfortunately, this is a situation that requires zero-tolerance. The cost of a single candidate reinterpreting what you say and dragging you into court is too high to risk. Even if the case is complete BS, the cost of arguing over BS will make you regret every reasonable candidate that you tried to help.

SixSigma 11y ago

Relying on interviews is not a great hiring strategy [1] Better to use testing, either by psychometrics or assessment days (group tasks, short notice presentations etc.). [2] [1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140606071003-7589947-no-correlation-between-interviewing-and-on-the-job-performance https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140606071003-7589947-no-cor... [2] http://www.inc.com/articles/2002/01/23815.html http://www.inc.com/articles/2002/01/23815.html

Hoasi 11y ago

Lawsuits. They ruin everything.

Nursie 11y ago

Because I don't care. If you don't think I'm a good fit then it's fine, let's just move on with life. We in tech are lucky enough that there is always another job around the corner.

blubb-fish 11y ago

I am currently in the situation of playing the HR role for hiring a developer in our start-up - for which I am actually working as a Data Scientist. I not just almost always give a reason for why we decided against a candidate - I even often give advice which might be relevant for future applications. Why am I not afraid of a law suit? B/c the hiring process I designed is based on a couple of quick tests directly relevant to the position - so it's pretty clear and objective why we decide how we decide. Most companies though actually base those decision on unsound and subjective information ... of course, those are worried about being blamed for that.

sreenadh 11y ago
You are a rare breed. I wish it was standard practices everywhere. People really need feedback to correct something they are doing wrong. I would love to be interviewed by you just for the feedback.
- jrochkind1 11y ago
  The internal recruiter at GitHub gave me a couple sentences of feedback passed on from the interviewers when I was turned down after the final interview round. I appreciated it, it was helpful, and I saw how I could have done better at the interview, although I still thought they were making a mistake. :)
tyingq 11y ago
Do you make any attempt to interview for things are inherently subjective? At least for some positions, personality and culture fit might be important.
- blubb-fish 11y ago
  It might be tricky if person A is a better fit than person B - but B is at least slightly more competent than A. In that case - if we would decide in favor of A - I guess I would skip that reason. But if you design the testing sufficiently broad - then you not just get a very good insights of where an applicant's strength lie but also enough "reasons" to give for negative decision - which also are helpful for the applicant to improve.

paulsutter 11y ago

Turn it around. Imagine that you have several offers from different companies. After you choose one (and you can choose only one), do the other companies have reason to get all mopey and feel offended to hear no reason for the rejection? Of course they don't. Why should candidates feel any differently when a company chooses someone else?

ennuihenry 11y ago
How does a candidate improve on himself/herself if a company gives a stock phrase? Maybe doing a mock interview, but it's difficult to replicate the stressors associated with an interview.

cm2187 11y ago

Headhunters are a pain in the ass but they are useful in that respect. You can provide feedback to the candidate indirectly without the feedback starting to be a negociation or pissing off the candidate. Internal candidates aren't that lucky. Usually recruiters made their decision when walking out of the room on whether the candidate is suitable or not. This timeout process is a bit wasteful.

larryb 11y ago

Where there's a will there's a way. If you wanted to give candidates feedback, you could have them sign a form along the lines of "you agree not to sue us for giving you feedback" and give you feedback. Professors are already doing a variation of this, the reverse actually, when asked to send recommendation letters for grad students. They ask the student to sign a form that waives their right to a copy of the letter. Live everything else, the companies bold enough to provide better interviewing service will have a leg up on companies that don't.

raverbashing 11y ago

I wonder if having a mostly objective criteria would facilitate hiring and reduce frustrations For example, give them a coding test (not fizzbuzz bs mind you), it might be just a multiple choice test, hence if they don't get approved this is an objective criteria used to turn them down

yason 11y ago

I just assume the simplest explanation: there were at least a few good candidates and they had to pick one so obviously the rest got rejected by the very decision to hire one. Companies hiring employees don't explicitly spend time thinking about the reasons why they might reject someone: they spend all their time trying to think which candidate stands out the best and could be that best choice for hiring.

mapt 11y ago

Because they can. Because job openings are scarce enough that people are applying anyway, regardless of being treated like shit. That's why we tolerate "but we're scared of lawsuits" as a legitimate excuse. This sort of thing (and hundreds of other similar phenomena) doesn't show up in unemployment metrics, but in a healthier economy, it doesn't happen as much, because people dislike working for assholes. It's a bit like how an Australian 5% unemployment (at $12.30 minimum wage) is very different from an American 5% unemployment (at $7.25 minimum wage) or a North Korean 5% unemployment (making $0.40 at Kaesong); The supply demand curve on employment is real, but it extends beyond tangible quantities like wages and into ways the employer behaves towards its employees & potential employees, because for workers, civil treatment is to some extent fungible with wages. In the US, we have much less labor regulation and more lawsuits, and this is the equilibrium we have arrived at in the current economic climate; In a different economic climate, we would arrive at a different equilibrium. The official understanding of the problem is plagued by Goodhart's Law - you can measure wages, but not being an asshole, so we will favor policies which push on one but ignore the other, and we can expect assinine behavior wherever there is even a little bit of profit to be gained; We sample and optimize "Unemployment", "Inflation", and corporate revenue growth as indicators of the economy's health, and a lot of other things have fallen by the wayside as we have reassured ourselves or worried ourselves with those numbers.

StanAngeloff 11y ago

I used to offer feedback to rejected candidates... until a person felt that was unwelcome and left us an extremely angered review on a trusted website. I have been careful with words and have tried to avoid confrontational or subjective topics. That didn't seem to matter much to them. All in all be thoughtful of the person in front of you and try not to be a jerk. Be prepared despite that some people will not want to hear what you have to say.

MillerMichael 11y ago

I once applied for company X back in 2014. I spend about 2 months on the application, conducting research, getting advice from friends, and doing my utter best to come up with a resume/motivation letter that would stand out. I didn't receive any feedback. What's more... when I called to asked about my application they pretty much got angry and sad: ''well, we receive a lot of application and don't have the time to respond to each application''. Till this day, I still can't get over it!