From an interviewee perspective, it's even worse when you don't hear anything; they just ghost you. That's the norm in my experience, though it's been a long ti

From an interviewee perspective, it's even worse when you don't hear anything; they just ghost you. That's the norm in my experience, though it's been a long time since I've done the cold interview thing. From an interviewer perspective, I suspect it's mostly a time/volume thing. Last time I did it, I put out a req for a position, I'll get 10-20 resumes trickle in over the next week or four. I pick the ones that are the best of the lot and schedule interviews until I find someone that I think has the best chance of being successful. Some of it is the way the resume reads, some of it is how well the skills match what we need, some of it is just gut. I certainly don't have the time to go through all the ones that I didn't pick and give a detailed (re: useful) explanation on why. Most of them I could't really offer much advice other than there were better matching resumes. It's usually someone has more years experience, or were better able to articulate their experience, or had more skills that matched what we need, or had more experience in my particular industry. Also, for most smaller shops, it's the devs that are doing the interviewing and filtering. Typically, we should have hired someone months ago, but companies usually hire later than they should, so I'm buried in work and I have the additional task of filtering resumes and interviewing on top of my already overburdened workload.