4 ms·

Similar to interviewing where they never tell you why you weren't selected (or very rarely - it's happened once in my experience) - they don't want any kind of

Similar to interviewing where they never tell you why you weren't selected (or very rarely - it's happened once in my experience) - they don't want any kind of legal liability. The less info they give you, the less you have to file a lawsuit is the theory. It definitely sucks, though.

Kranar 6y ago
I don't let candidates know either and it has nothing to do with legal liability whatsoever. If I post a job up for a developer position, even as a small company in Toronto I get on the order of 1000 applicants in a matter of 2-3 weeks and I usually will only hire 1-4. I am not going to come up with a rejection reason for 996 people. The reason you got rejected is because there are a ton of you out there and I can only hire so many so I am going to hire the very few who I am very certain will do a good job for the specific requirements my company has right now, even if it does something means I end up rejecting even better qualified candidates who I am uncertain about. Every hire costs me on the order of 50k per person in straight up recruiting costs, ramp up time to get that member to be productive, time lost doing interviews and filtering 1000s of people. Hiring and firing people is basically the option of last resort because of how risky, expensive, and time consuming it is. Finally it's highly unlikely that anything I say will be of much help to you anyways.
- UncleOxidant 6y ago
  Not talking about all applicants here, I'm referring to people that have been interviewed and made it to some kind of final interviewing stage where typically you end up with only 3 or 4 applicants max. The one time this happened I had gone through the phone interview and had what I thought was one of the best onsite interviews I'd ever had (in over 25 years of software development). The hiring manager actually called me up a few days later and apologized for not selecting me. He said that I interviewed well and everyone on the team liked me, but that the other candidate had some extra experience in an arcane area that was quite relevant to what they were going to be doing. I thanked him and told him that I understood as not many people would have actual experience in that tech. It was helpful to know that my perception (that I had interviewed well) matched their perception.

Kranar 6y ago

I don't let candidates know either and it has nothing to do with legal liability whatsoever. If I post a job up for a developer position, even as a small company in Toronto I get on the order of 1000 applicants in a matter of 2-3 weeks and I usually will only hire 1-4. I am not going to come up with a rejection reason for 996 people. The reason you got rejected is because there are a ton of you out there and I can only hire so many so I am going to hire the very few who I am very certain will do a good job for the specific requirements my company has right now, even if it does something means I end up rejecting even better qualified candidates who I am uncertain about. Every hire costs me on the order of 50k per person in straight up recruiting costs, ramp up time to get that member to be productive, time lost doing interviews and filtering 1000s of people. Hiring and firing people is basically the option of last resort because of how risky, expensive, and time consuming it is. Finally it's highly unlikely that anything I say will be of much help to you anyways.

UncleOxidant 6y ago
Not talking about all applicants here, I'm referring to people that have been interviewed and made it to some kind of final interviewing stage where typically you end up with only 3 or 4 applicants max. The one time this happened I had gone through the phone interview and had what I thought was one of the best onsite interviews I'd ever had (in over 25 years of software development). The hiring manager actually called me up a few days later and apologized for not selecting me. He said that I interviewed well and everyone on the team liked me, but that the other candidate had some extra experience in an arcane area that was quite relevant to what they were going to be doing. I thanked him and told him that I understood as not many people would have actual experience in that tech. It was helpful to know that my perception (that I had interviewed well) matched their perception.