5 ms·

The reason you don't get a reply (in the US anyways) is for legal reasons. If you say anything which could be even remotely (mis)interpreted as some sort of bi

by getsat 11y ago

The reason you don't get a reply (in the US anyways) is for legal reasons. If you say anything which could be even remotely (mis)interpreted as some sort of bias, your company could lose lots of money/time and potentially go bankrupt due to a discrimination lawsuit. It's sadly safer to just not reject candidates at all. Don't hate the player, hate the game.

gkop 11y ago
This is merely a convenient excuse for companies behaving inconsiderately. Since many companies in the U.S. do send rejection emails, it's clearly one of any number of other reasons why some companies neglect this basic courtesy. The silver lining is, you probably don't want to work for these companies anyway :)
- justizin 11y ago
  I have often found myself working _for_ people who had the same negative experiences at other companies, so not only do all bad hiring practices create negative reputation, they create an entire class of people who would be perfectly happy if you didn't exist at all. :)
  - gkop 11y ago
    On "Who is hiring", you can abstain from upvoting those companies where you had a negative experience (or even downvote them, if you feel that's justified).
    - Akkuma 11y ago
      I stated on the update about "Who is hiring" that there needs to be a way to track and review the interactions with these companies. Glassdoor doesn't really have a "these guys never bothered to reply to my job application" section. I just went and "reviewed" companies on "Who is hiring" as this community should try to promote those we'd recommend others try to apply and those we don't believe others should waste their time with. Eventually, we'd be left with only quality job postings.
- vdaniuk 11y ago
  >Since many companies in the U.S. do send rejection emails Are you able to provide any kind of data backing up that claim? I am strongly in the "don't hate the player, hate the game" camp on this issue. This is NOT a basic courtesy but a business process that requires a lot of resources to be at least somewhat meaningful. How long do you think it takes to write a rejection letter that provides useful, actionable data for the potential candidate? Multiply that by 10-100 for every position. Oh, and I've seen much more nasty replies and general insults than thank yous in response to rejection letters. I would be in support of rejection letters if the process would be mandated by the hiring platform / shared culture / etc.
  - reagency 11y ago
    Facebook gives candidate feedback.
  - gkop 11y ago
    Try applying for a position at a large company with a reputation for a highly-engineered hiring process, eg. Google [0]. Rarely will you get specific feedback, but you can expect to get a notification when you are no longer under consideration. [0] At Google's scale, some candidates fall through the cracks. But their recruiting process does mandate rejection notifications. It'd be great if a Google recruiter would back me up here :)
    - thaumasiotes 11y ago
      I interviewed at Google; they said they would give me a decision at some (soon) future point, and they did. They called me during work hours to do it... but they definitely did give me an explicit rejection.
  - ghaff 11y ago
    My impression is that rejection letters are fairly common but they're almost universally in the form letter "no fit at this time. Will keep on file" vein. Maybe some companies do more personalized responses but I've never seen it and I would think it would often be difficult. As with many other things, say picking talks for conferences, you're usually not so much rejecting as you're picking some other person or thing. And, yes, there are a lot of reasons the typical HR department would have issues with brutal honesty even aside from the effort it would take.
rbcgerard 11y ago
A simple "you are no longer being considered for the [x] position, thank you for your application" is all most people are looking for.
- binxbolling 11y ago
  Exactly! And modern HR tech makes rejection en masse so ridiculously easy. So if your company has an ATS that doesn't make it ridiculously easy to reject en masse with a boilerplate message, then you badly need to upgrade your ATS. (LEGO even sent me a nicely formatted, well-branded letter within 7 business days despite not even making it to the phone screen stage.)
- burger_moon 11y ago
  Yes this is all I want. I track all my applications and what stage I'm at with each company. It makes it incredibly difficult when they can't even be bothered to send me a generic rejection email.
- pauloteixeira 11y ago
  Exactly something so simple but so important!
uncletaco 11y ago
I'm pretty sure laziness would have more to do with not getting a proper rejection than the chance of triggering a lawsuit. If I'm applying to a small to medium sized business in my neck of the woods then nine times out of ten when I don't get a reply its because the hiring manager hasn't taken the time out of their week to get back to me. When I applied to a local company the hiring manager kept emailing me about how he was "swamped" or some other variation of the word busy and would get back to me in the next few days. He did that for about two weeks before calling me and finding out I had accepted an offer somewhere else. Heck when I applied to Google the recruiter (who contacted me first) took 5 months to get back to me after I sent in my CV and transcript, apologized profusely, and told me that the reason it took so long was because who ever was handling my case left abruptly without handing off the cases she was working on. I know these are anecdotal but I have an extremely hard time believing that HR managers in the US are so worried about triggering a discrimination lawsuit that they choose inaction. Very little, if anything, supports your claim. A quick search on the topic of why recruiters don't follow up with candidates reveals that the vast majority of people in the industry just have a really hard time with the hiring process. Its just plain broken. Does your company not get back to candidates because they fear a discrimination lawsuit? Someone else's? I would love to know which companies' HR teams or recruiters have discrimination lawsuits at the top of their "things I'm really scared could happen if I reply to a job seeker" list.
- Spooky23 11y ago
  Legal/compliance is a significant part of it. That rejection letter has zero upside to the employer and offers many opportunities to screw up. If a company has: a mature HR process, people who know wtf they are doing, and give a crap, they'll do rejection letters. Most lack at least one of those things. The guy at your SMB example is some jack of all trades, and dealing your resume is a priority-2 in a sea of P1's. He doesn't have a recruiting process. Google does, but even there it's still dependent on a human making a judgement call about what to write.
  - uncletaco 11y ago
    What you said about my resume being priority-2 in a sea of P1s is spot on in my opinion. However the OP's assertion about fearing a legal reprisal on the grounds of discrimination is farfetched to me. People don't just go around trying to sue people who send them nasty rejection letter. If the candidate could afford the legal fees then they probably wouldn't be looking for a job.
takeda 11y ago
As other said there are plenty of companies that do notify you, personally majority of companies that I applied to do that. I noticed though that my current company sometimes does it. It typically is when you did not do too well on an interview and effectively failed (or passed with flying colors but you are an international student, and they don't want to sponsor ), but they still won't notify in case they can't find anyone better. From my observation they generally never come back to those candidates.

by getsat 11y ago

gkop 11y ago

This is merely a convenient excuse for companies behaving inconsiderately. Since many companies in the U.S. do send rejection emails, it's clearly one of any number of other reasons why some companies neglect this basic courtesy. The silver lining is, you probably don't want to work for these companies anyway :)

justizin 11y ago
I have often found myself working _for_ people who had the same negative experiences at other companies, so not only do all bad hiring practices create negative reputation, they create an entire class of people who would be perfectly happy if you didn't exist at all. :)
- gkop 11y ago
  On "Who is hiring", you can abstain from upvoting those companies where you had a negative experience (or even downvote them, if you feel that's justified).
  - Akkuma 11y ago
    I stated on the update about "Who is hiring" that there needs to be a way to track and review the interactions with these companies. Glassdoor doesn't really have a "these guys never bothered to reply to my job application" section. I just went and "reviewed" companies on "Who is hiring" as this community should try to promote those we'd recommend others try to apply and those we don't believe others should waste their time with. Eventually, we'd be left with only quality job postings.
vdaniuk 11y ago
>Since many companies in the U.S. do send rejection emails Are you able to provide any kind of data backing up that claim? I am strongly in the "don't hate the player, hate the game" camp on this issue. This is NOT a basic courtesy but a business process that requires a lot of resources to be at least somewhat meaningful. How long do you think it takes to write a rejection letter that provides useful, actionable data for the potential candidate? Multiply that by 10-100 for every position. Oh, and I've seen much more nasty replies and general insults than thank yous in response to rejection letters. I would be in support of rejection letters if the process would be mandated by the hiring platform / shared culture / etc.
- reagency 11y ago
  Facebook gives candidate feedback.
- gkop 11y ago
  Try applying for a position at a large company with a reputation for a highly-engineered hiring process, eg. Google [0]. Rarely will you get specific feedback, but you can expect to get a notification when you are no longer under consideration. [0] At Google's scale, some candidates fall through the cracks. But their recruiting process does mandate rejection notifications. It'd be great if a Google recruiter would back me up here :)
  - thaumasiotes 11y ago
    I interviewed at Google; they said they would give me a decision at some (soon) future point, and they did. They called me during work hours to do it... but they definitely did give me an explicit rejection.
- ghaff 11y ago
  My impression is that rejection letters are fairly common but they're almost universally in the form letter "no fit at this time. Will keep on file" vein. Maybe some companies do more personalized responses but I've never seen it and I would think it would often be difficult. As with many other things, say picking talks for conferences, you're usually not so much rejecting as you're picking some other person or thing. And, yes, there are a lot of reasons the typical HR department would have issues with brutal honesty even aside from the effort it would take.

rbcgerard 11y ago

A simple "you are no longer being considered for the [x] position, thank you for your application" is all most people are looking for.

binxbolling 11y ago
Exactly! And modern HR tech makes rejection en masse so ridiculously easy. So if your company has an ATS that doesn't make it ridiculously easy to reject en masse with a boilerplate message, then you badly need to upgrade your ATS. (LEGO even sent me a nicely formatted, well-branded letter within 7 business days despite not even making it to the phone screen stage.)
burger_moon 11y ago
Yes this is all I want. I track all my applications and what stage I'm at with each company. It makes it incredibly difficult when they can't even be bothered to send me a generic rejection email.
pauloteixeira 11y ago
Exactly something so simple but so important!

uncletaco 11y ago

I'm pretty sure laziness would have more to do with not getting a proper rejection than the chance of triggering a lawsuit. If I'm applying to a small to medium sized business in my neck of the woods then nine times out of ten when I don't get a reply its because the hiring manager hasn't taken the time out of their week to get back to me. When I applied to a local company the hiring manager kept emailing me about how he was "swamped" or some other variation of the word busy and would get back to me in the next few days. He did that for about two weeks before calling me and finding out I had accepted an offer somewhere else. Heck when I applied to Google the recruiter (who contacted me first) took 5 months to get back to me after I sent in my CV and transcript, apologized profusely, and told me that the reason it took so long was because who ever was handling my case left abruptly without handing off the cases she was working on. I know these are anecdotal but I have an extremely hard time believing that HR managers in the US are so worried about triggering a discrimination lawsuit that they choose inaction. Very little, if anything, supports your claim. A quick search on the topic of why recruiters don't follow up with candidates reveals that the vast majority of people in the industry just have a really hard time with the hiring process. Its just plain broken. Does your company not get back to candidates because they fear a discrimination lawsuit? Someone else's? I would love to know which companies' HR teams or recruiters have discrimination lawsuits at the top of their "things I'm really scared could happen if I reply to a job seeker" list.

Spooky23 11y ago
Legal/compliance is a significant part of it. That rejection letter has zero upside to the employer and offers many opportunities to screw up. If a company has: a mature HR process, people who know wtf they are doing, and give a crap, they'll do rejection letters. Most lack at least one of those things. The guy at your SMB example is some jack of all trades, and dealing your resume is a priority-2 in a sea of P1's. He doesn't have a recruiting process. Google does, but even there it's still dependent on a human making a judgement call about what to write.
- uncletaco 11y ago
  What you said about my resume being priority-2 in a sea of P1s is spot on in my opinion. However the OP's assertion about fearing a legal reprisal on the grounds of discrimination is farfetched to me. People don't just go around trying to sue people who send them nasty rejection letter. If the candidate could afford the legal fees then they probably wouldn't be looking for a job.

takeda 11y ago

As other said there are plenty of companies that do notify you, personally majority of companies that I applied to do that. I noticed though that my current company sometimes does it. It typically is when you did not do too well on an interview and effectively failed (or passed with flying colors but you are an international student, and they don't want to sponsor ), but they still won't notify in case they can't find anyone better. From my observation they generally never come back to those candidates.