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One time we gave feedback on request and the candidate contested the feedback, then went out on a social media rampage. So yeah, we stopped after that. It only

• leothekim 7y ago
  +1 on this. The company has nothing to gain in delivering more feedback other than a thumbs up/down, and a lot more to lose.
  • Nuzzerino 7y ago
    What are they losing in this case? I don't see how a company is actually harmed by someone complaining about an interview. Unless you're trying to attract people who subscribe to cancel culture, I don't see a problem.
    • kenhwang 7y ago
      Employee hours. Someone has to collect, document, sanitize, and explain the feedback. Then respond to the response to the feedback. In the time it takes our recruiter to provide feedback to a candidate, they could have sourced 20 more candidates. edit: I'll argue instant feedback is even more expensive and risky. It's not coordinated, potentially duplicative, may impact/contaminate later rounds, and may not be complete or representative of the interview as a whole. Engineers aren't known for being naturally HR/legal-compliant, and having multiple expensive engineers spend time doing things not in their typical skillset that's typically done by a single resource that specializes in said skillset doesn't sound cheaper at all.
      • mixmastamyk 7y ago
        The article recommends instant feedback, presumably much less costly.
      • eropple 7y ago
        They've only disrupted their day to talk to you, in many cases having done these increasingly-prevalent and always-bullshit 4+-hour "exercises", and they have way less time to be allocating than you do. That's all they've done. Their time isn't deserving of respect and it's just downright ridiculous to think that it's the decent thing to do to tell them something that might, just might, not make it a waste for them to have spent it. ...Or, you know. Don't be that guy. Candidate, candidate, candidate--depersonalizing language for depersonalized processes. How about person? These are people you're talking about. They matter more than your recruiter's cattle-call throughput, each and every one of them. Have some empathy, my dude. Or at least some enlightened self-interest, for someday will be your day in the barrel.
        • kenhwang 7y ago
          Interviewing is a business transaction, not social services. They'll min-max their time just like you'll mix-max your compensation. I'll happily give advice, feedback, mock interviews, and other sorts of help on my own time in more appropriate environments. When it's company time, it's just business.
          • eropple 7y ago
            You can rationalize how you'd like, but it's never "just business." These are people you're talking about. They matter more than your company does. Be decent.
            • kenhwang 7y ago
              They're getting a prompt, professional, inoffensive response in exchange for their time. That is decency. You can't expect a business to feed the hungry, cure the sick, and house the poor out of the goodness of their hearts because these are people that spent a couple hours of their day with you. There are more appropriate institutions for charity.
              • Apocryphon 7y ago
      • Apocryphon 7y ago
        On the other hand, by giving good feedback, your company engenders goodwill and brownie points ratings on Glassdoor and elsewhere. Shouldn’t good PR be worth a little work from a company?
        • justforyou 7y ago
          Companies that are that concerned about PR spin their situation with actual PR.
          • Apocryphon 7y ago
            Word of mouth is also a thing.
      • wwweston 7y ago
        > Someone has to collect, document, sanitize, and explain the feedback. Either something like this is being up collected and articulated up through the decision points in the hiring process, or the decisions are being made on a fuzzy basis that can't even be explained internally, which presumably represents a risk that decisions couldn't be properly justified should a candidate suspect discrimination and pursue a claim. (This is especially true for any kind of exercises, btw. If an employer asks me to do some, I am going to screen them on whether they have (a) complete reference solutions with (b) numbers on how long it took to complete each and why they're confident those numbers are reliable(c) a written rubric for evaluating candidate solutions that (d) they'll agree to share with me when we're done.)
        • kenhwang 7y ago
          Considering most of the interview is evaluation of soft skills and unique backgrounds there's almost certainly fuzzy basis.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  • cnst 7y ago
    In my experience, they often like to give feedback on subsequent interviews about the past interviews. Google has some pretty detailed feedback on a interview I did years ago, which they were happy to reveal over the phone on a subsequent onsite invitation.
  • bumby 7y ago
    I've always considered it just a professional courtesy, within reason. Just like it would be nice, but not required, for an applicant to say why they turned down a job offer. It can help us understand what's lacking to determine whether or not it's worth improving upon.
    • claudiawerner 7y ago
      Professional courtesy doesn't matter much when it's now the norm not to be curteous, and thought to be unprofitable (in all the ways benefit is measured, not just in monetary terms) if the company is curteous. There is no professionalism above the level requried to maintain an increasing rate of profit. Workers in all industries since the beginning of waged labour have learned this fact the hard way.
      • chrisweekly 7y ago
        Strong disagree. Eroding standards of civility are no excuse for lowering the bar on how you behave. I'd urge you to set an example, honor yourself and contribute to the solution, rather than compounding the problem by sinking to the lowest common denominator.
        • claudiawerner 7y ago
          I do think we should be curteous, far from it (and employers doubly so); I'm not excusing their beahviour, but I am saying it many cases it pays to not be curteous (note, not being curteous isn't the same as being definitely uncurteous). It is the sort of behaviour interviewees have grown to expect. The pursuit of protit over courteousness is bound to happen when positive courteousness has a negligible and potentially negative impact on profit.
  • wolco 7y ago
    If you want the candidate to be more likely to reapply feedback would help. In fairness I received feedback I didn't get the position because I was too chatty from a hr person who told me to act more chatty because qualified candidates on paper were failing for being too quiet. I kinda wished they didn't provide feedback because I have an opinion on the internal culture that would make me avoid them in the future.
    • scrooched_moose 7y ago
      > If you want the candidate to be more likely to reapply feedback would help. I'd be so happy simply hearing feedback on whether I should bother with the company again. "You were barely beat out by another candidate, we hope you apply again next time!" "You are not a fit for this company, don't try again"
      • vosper 7y ago
        > "You were barely beat out by another candidate, we hope you apply again next time!" If this is true and if the company is half competent they'll be reaching out to you proactively next time, not hoping you might see the position and think to apply :)
    • dahfizz 7y ago
      > If you want the candidate to be more likely to reapply feedback would help. Do companies really want that? Presumably they didn't hire the candidate because they believe better candidates exist. Why invest in someone if there are better candidates readily available?
      • vonmoltke 7y ago
        Google, Facebook, and Amazon have made a sport of shoving people through their interview pipeline multiple times.
      • cle 7y ago
        They do want it. A strong signal is when a weak candidate comes back a year later and kicks ass.
  • benjaminjosephw 7y ago
    If a candidate has given my company their time and energy to interview with us I think we owe them a chance to understand why we didn't hire them. We're not obliged to but, if requested, offering feedback is quite clearly beneficial. There's an obvious benefit for the candidate and the subsequent companies they interview with. There's also an indirect benefit to my company - if everyone else behaves like this it means that we'd be much more likely to find our next hire. I suppose if you're thinking exclusively about a short-term benefit to the company alone without considering the impact to the candidate, the wider ecosystem and culture in general then it wouldn't make sense to take the risk.
    • chrisweekly 7y ago
      When I've been on the other side of this -- ie, as a candidate rejecting a decent offer -- I've made a point of writing a personal non-boilerplate "letter" (email, but tone and format of a traditional letter) -- thanking those on the hiring side and giving some context for my decision. Relationship-building and mutual respect are only ever full of win.
  • Thriptic 7y ago
    I disagree with this. I've had two companies contact me and offer legitimate feedback after interviews, and I always left feeling happy and with good feelings about them. I applied to one company and got a response back which was effectively "we really like you as a candidate, but it doesn't seem like you would be the right fit for this job / it doesn't seem like the interests you expressed in your interviews [which they correctly restated] matched up well with the duties we would have you perform. We will likely have jobs opening up which would align with what you like and you will be on the shortlist of candidates if you apply for those". Was it truthful? Who knows, but it left me feeling happy about how things went and I would consider applying there again. Similarly, earlier on in my career after taking a few CS classes I applied for a different job, and the response was effectively "You are smart but you don't have the skills we require yet which are [x, y, z]. Come back when you do". What they said was true and I appreciated the feedback. Contrast that with the myriad companies I applied to and never heard a response back from or didn't get a response back for many months from. I will never apply to these places again because it is clear that they don't respect prospective employees enough to even send a perfunctory email. Boiler plate rejections aren't as irritating but they are definitely still irritating. If you don't provide reasons for not hiring then employees will construct their own reasons, and they may not be true and / or favorable towards your company.
    • vosper 7y ago
      So what exactly did these companies gain? They didn't hire you now, but might be able to hire you in the future because you would maybe apply again (assuming you get passed the "we already didn't hire this person" filter)? With all the risk, that doesn't seem like much of a payoff to the company, to me. (Though I am glad you got feedback you considered valuable, and I think it's cool that the companies did that)
      • Thriptic 7y ago
        They gain the goodwill of a prospective employee who might cycle back and be a great fit later on in their career (and who has more skills then). It's also about what they don't lose, which is not only me but potentially other prospective candidates. Know what happens when someone mentions they are considering applying to a place that never got back to me? I tell them don't apply there, they waste your time / they don't care about candidates / their interview process sucks. How many people does that person then go tell? I've absolutely punted on applying to places which my friends have said similar things about. Reputation matters a lot.
• mc32 7y ago
  I think this is the main problem. People just don’t take rejection well, or it’s taken too personally. Sometimes it’s no one’s fault and it’s simply a bad fit. And of course like you say, people aren’t taught how to evaluate feedback and they may actually contest what is a courtesy in an adversarial manner and thus make things so much worse.
• bassman9000 7y ago
  FTFA Anyway, the way to avoid negative reactions and defensiveness from candidates is to practice giving feedback in a way that’s constructive. We’ll cover this next.
• rickspencer3 7y ago
  I am not afraid of getting sued, but experience makes me afraid of getting dragged into an argument about my conclusions and judgement, the last thing I need when managing a hiring process. I do still provide feedback when it is politely requested, though.
• zomglings 7y ago
  You have it exactly right. Companies are protecting themselves from more than just legal action - Glassdoor reviews have a huge influence on how candidates view your company (especially true for startups).
  • baron816 7y ago
    I once left a bad review on Glassdoor after a truly awful interview experience for a startup. The next day they called me up and threatened legal action. Edit: Just for context on the interview—they had me do a take home assignment in Django, which I had never worked in. Was desperate, so I learned Django and completed it in a week. Went onsite and their whole office was a one tiny, dated swelteringly hot room. The interview was mostly around a bunch of basic syntax stuff, and had me implement merge sort. Didn’t hear from them at all for a month so I wrote on Glassdoor about it.
    • aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 7y ago
      What happened next?
      • baron816 7y ago
        A day after I wrote the review, they tried to email me and offer me the job. I was pretty desperate, but not THAT desperate knowing they had only done so because of the review. So I replied, saying I wasn’t interested. The day after that is when the CEO called me to threaten me. They probably couldn’t have done much to me, but still nothing for me to gain from the situation, so I took it down and moved on with my life.
        • balfirevic 7y ago
          It would've been funny if you added to your review that they've threatened you.
    • stevula 7y ago
      This is why it’s a good idea to use a burner email for Glassdoor
• mrfusion 7y ago
  You should produce it in “I feel” phrases. That makes it known that it’s your opinion and could be wrong. Treat it like couples therapy.
  • pgwhalen 7y ago
    That in no way solves the problem though, it just makes it ever so slightly less likely to happen.
  • SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
    The challenge isn't figuring out how you or I personally would deliver feedback, given time to plan it out and a good set of feedback to deliver. The challenge is establishing a process that ensures everyone at the company will always do it, even when the real reason is something like "meh I'm not sure the candidate quite clears our bar".
    • taneq 7y ago
      > even when the real reason is something like "meh I'm not sure the candidate quite clears our bar". That's the problem, though - you're trying to make a hiring decision on hopelessly incomplete information, and so it will come down in large part to gut feeling. And the moment you admit to using some non-quantifiable feeling as a basis for not hiring someone, you open yourself up to claims of some form of discrimination. It's all around safest to just stay quiet.
  • mc3 7y ago
    My internal translation: "I feel" -> "I have concluded, based on no evidence"
    • rimliu 7y ago
      Or, alternatively, based on intuition. Which, in many cases, is an internalized experience.
• bob33212 7y ago
  It goes both ways. I have had a couple of interviews go south and have no interest in continuing the conversation even in a constructive way. Best to say thank you for your time and move on.
• yibg 7y ago
  This is only one side of the equation. What’s the cost of not providing the feedback? Either similar negative feedback on social media, which is maybe less intense but more numerous, or the negative feeling the candidate gets from the experience, which can impede future applications or applications from friends. I don’t know which way it tips, but looking at just the potential damage of providing feedback seems insufficient.
  • ironmagma 7y ago
    The cost is that you further the misery of the application experience for candidates. Keep in mind for every candidate you interview, they may have applied for anywhere between 10 to 100 other jobs. If you were in their position, you would want to have a way to improve for the next interview too.
• ddelt 7y ago
  Hot take: you could hire someone who did absolutely well in the interview, and they could find a few weeks into the job that they loathe everyone, and go on a social media rampage. What I’m getting at is, there will always be bad apples, or people who react in a way that damages your organization. But not providing useful feedback to people who ask for it simply because one person went crazy is punishing a lot more people because of that one. Who knows if all of their negative karma ends up being worse in the grand scheme of things? I personally avoid applying to places that other engineers tell me to avoid because I trust their opinion more than I trust a company selling me the highlight reel in an interview. If a trusted engineer said he got a rejection in an interview, asked for feedback, and none was given, I’d avoid that place too.
  • nkingsy 7y ago
    This is a tried and true practice in dating, and it translates well to hiring, which is basically the same thing. Most people, ESPECIALLY people who ask you for feedback, do not want feedback. They want to get in a fight with you. Edit: I don't remember ghosting anyone personally in either setting, but it's happened to me plenty. Getting upset about it just means you're new to the experience.
    • Apocryphon 7y ago
      Then maybe there can be a system that provides a disclaimer where they waive all ability to sue or otherwise get into a fight with you.
      • bobthepanda 7y ago
        If they blab their mouth on social media and it goes viral they've already done the damage before you could serve court papers. Why even bother with the risk?
        • Apocryphon 7y ago
          Because that’s allowing risk adverse mentalities to prevent companies from innovating in their hiring processes to build a more transparent and improved culture of hiring, and a chance to differentiate themselves from competitors with a reputation of good interviewing practices?
• dblohm7 7y ago
  I appreciate what you're saying, and I realize that social media is a cesspool, but isn't your stance condescending toward candidates that you do want to hire? Surely a reasonable person with good critical thinking skills can look at one of those "rampages" and recognize it for what it is.
• winrid 7y ago
  That might not be a bad thing. Free PR. Other devs see you don't hire those kind of people.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• vonseel 7y ago
  Just don’t abruptly hang up on them like some interviewers.
• ken 7y ago
  Does providing feedback make this effect worse, or better? How do we know? N=1 isn't exactly a significant sample size. It used to be common knowledge that doctors should never say they're sorry, for the same reason (fear of lawsuit). Then research showed that apologizing actually reduced the number and severity of malpractice lawsuits. I see plenty of people attacking tech company interview processes on social media already, without being provoked by honest feedback. I'm having trouble imagining how feedback could make a person more angry.
  • kenhwang 7y ago
    Engineers can't even go through a code review without getting butt hurt. And that's when you're on the same team with mostly the same goal. Usually the blowback to the company hits marketing/legal/HR. Gathering and delivering feedback takes work. It's really politically expensive to explain why you're going out of your way to do work to cause other departments to do work for the sake of tech community altruism, especially right after it just burnt you. Giving career advice to strangers after an interview isn't the norm in any other field. I don't really care if the candidate tries to sue the company. I don't work in legal, that's mostly not my problem. But if legal doesn't want to deal with it and ends up being a pain in my ass, yeah, I'm dropping the practice.
• ohwaitnvm 7y ago
  My personal data point is that I received feedback that was negative on specifically my base level of concept understanding on one out of ~7 short sections I did for a company, and it made me skeptical that it was the actually the real reason. It was a whiteboard session on how to manage scheduling and reporting progress/success/failure information for long-running jobs to a frontend UI... which is something I had been specifically doing at my previous company for a year, and have done many times in many ways before. I took some lessons about communication and focus from it, but in my mind it showed that either that section's interviewer was not very good at evaluating candidates, or some other reason was the real reason and they chose to voluntarily tell me something else as a cover instead. I'm assuming the former, because I never asked nor expected a specific reason for rejection - no cover was necessary. Finding out just frustrated me further - I really wanted that job, and of course you can't go back saying "Maybe someone else should give that section? I think I'm really good, trust me, the guy you just rejected!"
• dominotw 7y ago
  > then went out on a social media rampage you monitor candidates social media post interview? quite disturbing trend if so.
  • dustincoates 7y ago
    A more charitable (and probably likely) scenario is that the company monitors mentions of its brand name on social media and saw public posts by the candidate, or the candidate tagged/posted to their social channels.
    • dominotw 7y ago
      But do we know that candidate wouldn't have gone on rampage had they not given him feedback?
  • kaikai 7y ago
    companies don’t have to follow candidates on social media to hear about getting badmouthed on social media, especially if it blows up.
• codeisawesome 7y ago
  What was your feedback like? Did it have data and actionable suggestions to improve?
• downerending 7y ago
  Sympathies. On the flip, side, though, if the interview process was horrible, and the company doesn't provide some sort of mitigating feedback on what happened, I tend to assume the worst. And yeah, I don't necessarily keep it a secret.
• bartread 7y ago
  > then went out on a social media rampage. Fear of the occasional keyboard ninja is not a rational reason for giving every single job applicant a worse experience. Not to mention that generally they end up looking worse than you do, and you've probably done the rest of us a favour by outing them as an asshole (I'm assuming you were respectful and constructive in the feedback that you gave).