The fear of litigation was by far the biggest reason we heard, but there were some other popular reasons (mostly relating around conflict avoidance):

* Notably, giving feedback feels like an opening for the candidate to submit a rebuttal instead of ending the conversation (e.g. "You didn't do well on X" "Well here's a list of reasons why I didn't do well, and here's me demonstrating I actually understand X").

* It was just a personality conflict that few people would admit to in writing (e.g. "You're kind of an asshole, I don't want to work with you" isn't something you tell a candidate).

* There just isn't much actionable feedback to give. "Nobody felt excited to potentially work with you" isn't really actionable feedback, and sharing that just feels kinda mean for no reason.

* Someone better came along to fill the role and nobody wants to tell a candidate "We found someone better than you".

This was many years ago, but one time I did an all-day onsite interview (~6 hours long) and I was ghosted and never heard from the company again.

That infuriates me even to this day. At least give me some kind of news that it was a no.

If you ghost, they’re likely going to continue to contact over multiple channels. Because they want an answer so that they can take next steps. Same as a candidate.

If you say thanks but no thanks, they’re going to want to know why, is there anything they could have done differently, or try to convince you that you have it wrong.

There’s basic human reasons for these very common reactions, we just put a construct in front of one of those groups and tried to explain it away as being acceptable.

There are too few jobs now. Paul Krugman called it a "savings glut". There are no opportunities to invest the cash you are holding productively, consequently interest rates are low and the best thing you can do is buy back your own stock.

There's asymmetry from the other side too.

What's preventing someone from trying to extract $3M in settlement money from a rich company that doesn't want its reputation tarnished in a long running discrimination lawsuit?

And $3M is a lot of money that lawyers would eagerly represent someone that has an evidence of discrimination.

When I did hiring, I had several top candidates take a different position, so I had to go to a second or even third choice.

Anyway, no answer is sometimes preferable to some of the nonsensical standard doublespeak letters you might receive ("niet weerhouden...").

Respect is far to be found in these HR practices, in my experience. It usually reflects in the business who took them on board. Once you see through all these efforts to make people behave exactly like they want, I doubt there will be much workplaces left considering.

If the first company rejects you and tells you so, you can immediately accept the second choice. If the first company rejects you and ghosts you, you instead wait a month hoping the first company will get back to you, then accept the second choice.

If you are willing to completely burn bridges, you could accept the second choice, with the intention of immediately leaving should you hear back from the first choice. While possible, I'd have some qualms about doing so.

Be specific with the details, to make it clear there is no bluff. (If they are so inclined, they could call XYZ and confirm everything you said.) And if they don't respond, then go through with XYZ.

Anyway, unless the first versus second choice thing is about something concrete like compensation/benefits, or work location, a lot of it is just in your head; you have not actually worked at either place.

Sometimes they'll dangle candidates if they're waiting to hear whether their first choice accepts, but even then it's rare not to communicate at all once you've done an on-site.

I was expected to prepare (in advance) a number of things including a technical presentation and detailed answers to a large number of questions, which took me several evenings and most of a weekend. I flew there on a monday for what was an exhausting full day of interviews before my return flight that evening. The recruiter phoned me the following day to say they were very impressed and would be making an offer, but there were some other people who wanted to meet me.

So a few days later I took another day off work to fly down for a second round of meetings. At the end of this second day I was told that the senior manager was abroad and they would finalise the offer when he returned.

I flew back home and waited a week or 10 days before emailing to hear how things were progressing. The recruiter responded "to recap, we are waiting for $manager to return before finalising the offer".

That was about 7 years ago, and it was the last thing I heard from them. I get that employers can't be bothered responding to every CV that crosses their desk, but this was a demanding process that cost me several days effort and 2 days salary. Maybe they lied when they said they liked me, I have no idea and don't really care. But I certainly didn't expect to be ghosted after all that.

A year or two later I had a new colleague who had been working there around the time of my interview, and I told him this story. His response? "You dodged a bullet".

It's probably at least 50% of my interviews. Roughly 1/4 of my interviews have any kind of follow up at all.

It doesn't hurt to tell people that someone else was hired. Closure is important to job seekers.

The only reason I called was because they stiffed my the reimbursement for travel expenses which they had agreed to pay for. The HR turnover was so high that everyone I had talked to before the interview was gone by the time I put in for the reimbursement.

Clearly things went your way if you didn't get the job in that environment.

Funny story about that, I'd set up a macro to fire off said email with one keypress. Finishing up a phone screen that went horribly, I thanked him for his time and all the other niceties, and pressed the key right as I was about to hang up.

"But wait! I have some questions for you, too!"

Cue the longest 5 minutes of my life.

After reading some of the comments here about candidates who want to debate the interviewer's decision, it seems to make sense.

This attitude it toxic and feels like you're looking to turn an interview into a lose-lose situation. It doesn't have to be.

You, on the other hand, are quite possibly still thinking about it every day, and turning down or delaying (and missing) other offers.

I had a one candidate come thru who wasn't a fit. But on top of that, his clothes were filthy and his resume had a bunch of typos in it. I told him after the interview that we wouldn't be hiring for skills match reasons, but also offered the feedback on his appearance. He wrote me a letter a couple years later thanking me for the advice, which I guess he hadn't realized was holding him back.

Another time a hiring manager told me that a candidates mullet haircut was too unappealing. I decided to pass that feedback tactfully to the candidate after buying him a beer. Mullet guy actually ended up interviewing me for a job years later, and brought that up. He said his job prospects got much better after he got a haircut and thanked me for the feedback.

While I think giving no feedback is good advice in general, I think it's fine to tactfully offer feedback to a candidate if they really need to hear it. No one is going to try justifying the ketchup stain on their shirt. Haircuts might be more sensitive, but I was fairly confident mullet dude wasn't rocking business-in-the-front-party-in-the-back style for religious or cultural reasons.

I think you're a ---- for considering someone's haircut a reason not to hire.

* We already had a candidate in mind but our hiring process requires us to publicly post the opening and interview other candidates before we hire the person we already decided on.

Maybe it's to spread the fault around if it goes bad?

This is actually the most common feedback i that i get :D

Definitely. Send feedback from a no-reply box and make this apparent.

It was just a personality conflict that few people would admit to in writing (e.g. "You're kind of an asshole, I don't want to work with you" isn't something you tell a candidate).

Nothing wrong with pointing out a perceived deficit in written & verbal communication skills.

There just isn't much actionable feedback to give. "Nobody felt excited to potentially work with you" isn't really actionable feedback, and sharing that just feels kinda mean for no reason.

If you stress during the interview that culture fit is a large component of the hiring process, simply stating that there wasn't a strong enough culture fit should be enough. No need to go into further detail, there are a lot of applicants.

Someone better came along to fill the role and nobody wants to tell a candidate "We found someone better than you".

It can be relieving to know that the fault doesn't lie with your character or presentation, and that management simply decided to hire the person with more experience.

Barring liability cases, it's all about managing expectations.

On the contrary, most automated reject messages from recruitment systems use something along the lines of "we regret that other candidates were a better fit for this job".

This turns it to be widely useful, inoffensive and can be used instead of the real reason.

What's the benefit of feedback to someone you already decided won't be on the team?

It's meant to be a gesture of good faith towards the candidate that invested their time and energy to interviewing with you, i.e. at least the candidate didn't walk away with nothing from the process.

They were not, but they were super, super nice about it. I was on all their email lists and they would reach out from time to time. In fact the founder took me out to lunch at least three years later just to catch up and see where I was.

He didn't have to do any of this. I've never had anyone but consultancy recruiters keep in touch for that long, and they often feel fake and exploitative.

There was an old saying in Seattle that 'Seattle is a small town'. From a software perspective, there are a ton of people in the city, but up until pretty recently you were virtually guaranteed to bump into old coworkers again, or at least work with people who also worked with them. It's no good pissing off people who aren't a fit for this job now but might be a great fit in three years. They may remember how you treated them... Google.

For those curious, the two companies were Coinbase and Envoy. Interviewers at both companies were across the board superb.

I would probably apply again at places that ghosted me, but not ones who use stress tests. Only two types of people use stress tests. Sadists, and groups that spend most weeks running around with their heads on fire.

You’re not going to learn this about me in an interview, but if you put me in a room of panicked people I’ll be the calmest one. If you keep us there, I may not be the last person to tap out but when I do there will only be one or two left in the room and the end will be in sight. And for sure I’ll remember more details for the postmortem than the next two people combined, and I’ll do more with that info than anyone else.

The ugly truth is that I keep going even when I get into deficit territory, and since I know this about myself I’m highly motivated to prevent such situations for recurring. I’m always on the lookout for antagonistic people and processes. I’ll work my ass off on these problems on my schedule if that means that they don’t keep happening at random to me or others. If the antagonist is a person you immediately go into the untrustworthy bucket.

So if you antagonize me in an interview, we’re already off on the wrong foot, I don’t trust you, and who likes to collaborate with engineers they can’t trust? And since you didn’t give me time to ask revealing questions, how do I know you aren’t like this every day? Working for crazy people just makes you crazy too.

IMO, judgement feedback (you screwed up how you handle your yak shaving, or I don't think we'll get along with each other) is too subjective to be constructive.

And, I get it. As someone who's interviewed a lot of candidates, my biggest fear is hiring someone who is either incompetent or difficult to get along with. Evaluating a candidate is so subjective that feedback beyond "your experience doesn't match our needs" is just flame bait, or worse.

To paraphrase Joel Spolsky: It's safer to pass on a good candidate than hire a bad employee.

It's always easier to hear "I'm breaking up with you because I'm moving for a new job and want to concentrate on my career" than "I'm breaking up with you because you're awkward around my friends and aren't interesting".

Perhaps it's not the rejection, but the energy in creating the next steps I need to take (more resumes, taking classes, new career, therapy, etc).

Sounds extreme. Were you applying to random jobs?

For example: As a candidate you might submit a resume and get an automated "Thank you, we'll be in touch". There's a large variety of reasons why you might face a very low probability that someone will indeed be in touch that have nothing to do with you.

The most common is that you're just too late in the process. They might already have dozens of viable candidates in later stages. They are being economical about their interviewers' time, thinking: Well, the probability that all of those later-stage candidates will end up getting terminated is low, so we're not doing first-round interviews for now. But they are not being economical about expectations created in candidates' minds about the likelihood of getting an offer. They've simply defined the process to say: We pull the advertising after the role has been filled, because there is always the chance that we will have to go back to candidates in earlier rounds.

There might be even more extreme cases. Not saying that this is particularly common, but imagine a company has decided they need a diversity hire, say hiring a woman to an all-male tech team. All applications by men may be dead on arrival. They may not want to send out rejection letters so as not to establish the pattern.

Or the role may have already been filled and there may simply be clerical error or clerical laziness to blame about why the advertising hasn't been pulled yet.

So, from a candidate's point of view: "We will be in touch" means almost nothing. Having come across a job ad means less than nothing. Your calculation is simply going to be: I get one human contact out of every ten times I submit a resume. I get one firm offer out of every ten times I get a human contact. I'm shooting for three firm offers to choose from. So that means I have to submit my resume 300 times. Consequently you can't afford to be all too picky. You just submit to everything that could even remotely be a match. You only start putting real brain power into thinking about whether you actually want to work there in later stages of the process.

It's a sad state of affairs, but it's just the world we live in now.

The whole point of web-based application process is to weed out as many candidates as possible. If you can skip that step and first make contact with a human, the odds are much better and it's less work and stress for everyone.

Tailoring resumes to specific postings, and trying to find someone at the company you have some sort of connection with, are both pretty damn important unless, as you say, you're shot-gunning an identical resume to every company within 50 miles.

Luckely my experience in job searching has not involved ghosting or spamming. Is that an US thing? Or is "job dating" less parallell in smaller cities or countries?

I would recommend that you attend local user group meetings and talk to people. Weak social connections are an excellent source of referrals.

At the very basic level you should understand what are the expectations of the employer and whether you can fill those expectations. Try to find and talk to people at those positions you are applying to. Try to understand where you fall short.

I interviewed for a position that I am way qualified for. I check every box, in terms of skills and abilities and experience. I'm essentially doing the job right now, just with a different title.

And I was passed over for a less qualified, less experienced candidate. The reason I was given, as I dove through the organization (it's where I work now) to ask for feedback to improve myself professionally, was that there wasn't really anything I can get better at, it was just 'fit'.

I was able to ask probing questions to get to the root of that, and it turns out that, outside of the folks I work with daily, people outside of my division don't necessarily know my leadership abilities. But tell me, how would you even go about quantifying that for an external candidate, other than saying the, very safe, 'we found a better candidate'?

Honest feedback hurts but it’s how you grow.

And if people cared at all about interviewees they’d give some semblance of honest feedback rather than “no thanks.”

A former Apple architect once gave me "honest feedback" about the languages I work with. It was his opinion about industry direction, that 8 years later, was 100% wrong. (Although I don't think I was a good match for his startup.)

That's why I consider honest feedback flame bait.

If you get similar pieces of feedback from 3 people, you now likely know what you need to do differently to get hired, period.

It’s not about getting specific, individual pieces of feedback. It’s about being able to triangulate toward what you need to do differently.

And maybe you get 3 pieces of feedback that are all completely contradictory. That tells you that what you need to do is keep trying.

This is a non-helpful statement. Humans are bias machines. We function based on our collective experience or in some cases differed experience. Saying there is systemic bias doesn't really add anything other than saying exploit what ever bias you can find to your advantage.

If he had said, "I need someone with more experience in language XXX," it would have been 100% true for his case, and 100% appropriate for me. I can read the market for technology.

Instead, he basically said, "you have a lot of experience in language YYY, which isn't going anywhere." That was quite subjective, as language YYY has significantly more use and investment since our conversation.

It also isn't really appropriate, because the job was in language XXX, not language YYY. Assuming he hired me, we'd have to agree that my learning curve in language XXX was appropriate for his needs in a developer. (He clearly needed someone who could hop in without much of a learning curve.)

(Remember, sometimes you hire the candidate and expect them to learn the stack on the job, other times you hire someone because they are already an expert in the stack.)

Debates on languages like this are really just pissing matches. IMO, dressing up the debate as "constructive feedback on my merit as a candidate" hurt his credibility in his leadership role.

It may be not your fault. Or, it might have been your lucky day, not getting that job. In any case, you need to make damn sure that you know your trade.

You can categorize some cases into these:

1) Someone has observed something you do that you're unaware of, and could work on.

2) Someone has misinterpreted something you do, and now you know they have, but can be glad they told you so you know where they stand, and/or clear the confusion by explaining what really happened.

3) Someone doesn't like something you do, but you are already aware of you doing it, but think your way is better, for reasons X, Y and Z, and if you feel like it you can explain that.

4) Someone who has more experience than you recognizes a behavior from their earlier selves, and points this out so that you get a head start at learning their lesson.

Regardless of the merit of the feedback, you can't process it and deal (or not deal) with it until you hear it.

If you can step away from yourself and just observe and reflect, there are so many things you can learn that I wish I could imprint on a younger me. But at least I'm trying to catch up as a 30-something now.

After a decade of building teams in machine learning, I regard this as one of those hallowed mythical pieces of wisdom that is just totally wrong.

It dramatically over-estimates both the chances and costs of hiring a bad employee, while discounting the huge, huge opportunity cost of not hiring rare, exceptional candidates.

I’d much rather spend a year or two managing someone out as a result of actually trying to hire exceptional people than living with mediocre hires who memorized the right fizzbuzz HackerRank crap and said all the right Team Player catch phrases to get hired.

A small company can not afford that luxury so they have to be more careful in their hiring. A bad hire completely distracts a small team.

We had a new hire that didn't work out at a place I used to work at. Fired after 3 months. No hard feelings, he took it well and found a good job a few weeks later. Everyone is happy.

Which means you probably went 6 months or more without a role properly filled.

On a small team that's a huge dent. For half a year.

Not to mention the time spent in the hiring process itself, which you now get to repeat.

So either you pay the cost by trying more people more quickly, or you pay the cost desperately waiting and waiting because you’re so confident your interviewing filter is tuned correctly and that you know better regarding who to hire.

(In a small company, the process of hiring is often quite poor because it’s idiosyncratically controlled by the early employees and founders, and usually reinforces their cultural views and their biases of interviewing, so having a restrictive filter is even more harmful to small companies.)

This should prove that numbers speak towards the idea that bad hires are very costly. Google's policy is also not to give feedback. 50 percent of their hires had to apply more than once.

I would say large companies do not need that exceptional candidate since they have so many great ones already. Exceptional won't make a difference unless it is executive role or something like that.

That's one of the reasons why I pass when a Google recruiter comes why way.

(The other is that I don't want to move. I'm no longer a bachelor who can move on the drop of a hat, moving is way to disruptive to my family.)

Why? I do not agree that Google’s hiring practices have anything to do with “bad hire” costs.

But none of that has anything to do with the screening process itself, and it's certainly not advocating screening based on bullshit.

Any policy about the relative importance of true/false positives vs negatives is a policy about screening processes.

"The thing I enjoyed working on the most was ..."

"In five years time, I see myself ..."

"If I could choose to be any animal, I would be a ..."

After the interview the recruiter sent me an email and told me that he wouldn't work with me anymore as I was hostile during the interview.

It was insanely bizarre. It was like being found guilty without ever even being given a trial or being told there was a trial.

The interviewer comes in and starts berating me for not finishing and how I must’ve gone to a bad school, must not be smart, etc. Then he goes on and on about how I’m clearly not suited for the job and his young assistant is sitting beside him laughing.

It was a crazy interview. I mentally gave up after a few minutes because the guy was clearly fucking with me and didn’t want me, so I started giving smart ass responses since there was no reason to let myself get beat up.

I get a call a few hours later telling me I can start any time. I told the recruiter to tell the company that the interviewer was a dick (in nicer words) and I’d pass.

Worse than no feedback is opposite feedback. Don’t play mental games with people.

After lunch interview was with a xoogler and everyone earlier warned me it would be a “google interview”. So he struts in and asks what I know about number theory. I say nothing and he tells me he was a math major and proceeded to ask math proof questions and push on the math side of things the whole time. Weirdly instead of asking how to make a Cartesian product in SQL he had this round about way of describing baseball players and teams and generating a report of games played.

So as it went on I gave up. He asked me toward the end how many prime numbers there are... I answered “optimus prime”. He looked at me and asked if I seriously wanted him to write down “optimus prime” for my answer and I swear on my life I looked at him and said “yep. Autobots roll out”.

Man I've been steady on the job hunt and I have to say I needed a funny story like this. Thank you.

I'd like to think there is a good follow up but my guess is you got ghosted.

I don't think it's possible to have a finite number of primes though? But it's a programming interview, so really, who gives a shit?!

In your example it would be (2 * 3) + 1 = 7, prime.

This is Euclid's proof [1] and it's some 2300 years old.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid%27s_theorem

I was distraught by it, but then I talked to a friend and he told me - well, maybe they were looking for someone to handle stress really well, and it's not you.

Looking back, I think it was utterly bizarre (for a programming job, anyway). But, hey, to each his own.

Something along the lines of: "To pay you as much money as you requested, we'd have to categorize you as a [Senior/Prinicipal] developer, but your skills/experience only put you at [Junior/Professional]".

If, as a candidate I had received this kind of feedback from two or three companies in one vertical, I would know that I have the choice between getting payed less and switching to a different vertical that pays better.

I usually say (and I happen to be in a country that is not very litigious) "While I can't tell you how you did in this interview -- we have to go through HR's process first -- I could offer you some general advice based on my experience", and would give some positive suggestions based on what I've observed. E.g. "try to read up more on how technology X works under the hood" or "when faced with a complex problem, it's okay to take time to think it through or ask questions", or "your communication skills are good, but you can be even better if you lead with the answer and have the lengthy explanation follow the answer" etc.

I'm wondering whether this is a good practice?

We try to hire more long term (we aim for 5+ years retention), dunno if that's related, or if there is any evidence to back this procedure.

I find it a bit weird myself, which is why as a candidate I'd like to know about it :-)

It's better to offer the candidate what the company is prepared to offer, both in terms of position and compensation. Let the candidate decline. At least some candidates will like the company enough to try working their way back up.

Though I'm sure acceptance rate is in some KPI, so there could be some bureaucratic nonsense involved.

Normally, the good interviews begin with some kind of high-level salary discussion with HR or the recruiter. Typically, the recruiter (or HR rep) casually asks what I make in my current job. In one case, I accepted an interview where I'd get a small paycut. (Some things are worth taking a lower salary.)

Being terminated by phone or in person is respectful compared to email. Being rejected by phone for something that for most times is going to not be successful, that's just twisting the knife.

At the moment I don't know how to respond to call requests when it's not successful. I fear that saying: "Hey if this is a rejection, I would prefer to just get an email. I understand."

I don't care if it wastes the caller's time as a misplaced (and insincere) gesture of respect. They've wasted enough of my time at this point and don't deserve any more.

I've got two such calls from FAANGs and I'm glad they told me I did great in such and such interview but fell short in this other one, apply again etc (even if it may not have been true). Better than the boilerplate emails.

Now, not every one became awesome. But, there are places for even the non-best developers to be productive. Good management is putting best employees on critical systems and others in supporting roles.

But how many did you reject because your other reports said no?

Hence the byzantine process interviewing has become. Like most of what Joel says it’s flattering to the audience but just not true. Pretty much every company in the universe operates a 3-month probationary period. The risk of a bad hire in the real world is well mitigated. Also true in the real world, it is better to do this than waste months of time looking for the perfect candidate when you could easily get someone decent on board in mere weeks.

Now, everyone gets a form letter, and I don't deviate from that.

A form letter, email, whatever would be better than what I experienced in my last job hunt. It was silence after silence. Was the rec closed/filled? Am I even in the running or was I rejected early on and now I am just waiting for no reason?

A lot of the companies used automated submission systems, which confirmed they received the resume, but they never sent out a notification that the position was filled/closed/rejected. Just a one line email would have been better than nothing. I feel even that common (and super automatable) courtesy has been lost.

Even 2-5 person companies will sometimes receive ~20-30 resumes a day for an open job, and 90% of them will be obviously inappropriate for the job even just from glancing at their resume.

It's a positive feedback loop: People have learned to "shotgun" their resume everywhere, and as a result even small companies have learned to process resumes as "efficiently" as possible (which often includes not sending responses to rejected candidates at that stage). This leads to more shotgunning, etc. etc.

Or at bare minimum, automatically mail them when the position is set to closed?

None of that can be claimed due to efficiency.

1. You're assuming they're using an ATS with that feature, which isn't as common as you'd think. You'd be surprised how many companies track incoming candidates using spreadsheets and email.

2. Part of that "efficiency" is not actually taking the 5 extra seconds to reject candidates, but instead just ignoring rejected candidates.

Think of it as leaving something read in your email inbox vs. choosing to archive it. Imagine you're getting 100 emails a day. Now imagine how many people you know (not necessarily you) who would leave those emails as unread in their inbox and quickly scan for important ones vs. choosing to go through each one and archive them as necessary.

> Or at bare minimum, automatically mail them when the position is set to closed?

Many places will leave positions open for opportunistic hires, e.g. see how many places are constantly hiring for "software engineer". Many job positions never actually close.

This is a good point, and while it's weird and a little frustrating from the outside, it's awesome from the inside:

The right time to hire is not when you're ramping something up or strapped for time and really need someone immediately. The right time to hire is when you've got someone awesome who is really interested in the job.

Keeping the req open gives you a better chance of grabbing that awesome person: whenever they are ready, the position is waiting. If you have to align the stars so that you're looking at the same time they are, you're going to miss some opportunities.

However, in my own hiring I always send a thank you for the candidates time, because I'm old, and manners, etc. but also I consider it the long game. You never know when you will run into someone again and in what context, and the extra effort to email a "thanks for interviewing with us" is tiny compared to potential upside/downside.

> it's not like the candidate can do anything to the interviewing company

It's true to a point. However, when you ghost someone, you've effectively as a company burned your bridges with someone, all for want of a simple and not at all burdensome small amount of courtesy. Even if you're not interviewing them in person, a simple notification that the application will not be considered further means they aren't left hanging on pointlessly.

If you want to hire them in the future, they might just blow you off.

If they pass on their bad experience to others, your reputation has suffered and you'll make it harder to recruit others in their social circle.

You might be immune to the effects of rude behaviour in the short term, but it will come back to bite to some degree later. As an example, after some really rather abrupt telephone interviews with Google, and a really rude on-site interviewer, I told them never to contact me ever again. I have no intention of considering them again in the future.

I think your point about considering the long game is spot on. I had the dilemma of interviewing with two companies and getting two good offers. The company I ended up rejecting were really nice, made a really great effort to sell themselves, and I left with nothing but positive feelings. Nearly a year later, they would still love to have me on their team. Should I need to in the future, I'm fairly certain I could give them a call and start work the next day, all because they did a really good job of building a good relationship.

Phone call with hiring manager or team members? I expect a rejection of some sort.

The irony of the automated hiring process for me is that it is more unlikely than ever that I would ever get a job any other way than through personal contacts.

We interviewed three people and then it was decided to let the manager role go unfilled. So I ended up being the one to call them.

Two of them handled it with grace and professionalism. The third decided to go over my head and call the VP who was in charge of IT at the time and have a surly conversation.

So the moral is - transparency might make you feel like a good person but from a business perspective there are valid reasons not to choose that path.

Also - part of working in HR is that you must deal with the general public - which means people will be unpredictable and you have to take worst-case scenarios into consideration.

The biggest problem is the lack of any response whatsoever is that you cannot simply move on with your job search. Frankly it's just rude and unprofessional, I don't care how commonplace it is.

More detailed feedback is a nice to have, I certainly appreciated it when I got it, but it's a different thing from being ghosted altogether.

I've never given any detailed feedback, but I have made sure that they at least get a "sorry, we can't offer you a job" form letter quickly.

Noone has ever complained, except:

At one job, we did run into a pretty annoying situation. We were recruiting mostly from a particular pool of uni grads, and everyone was communicating via the same particular "forum". (Late 90s/early 00s.)

We interviewed a particular person in depth. He wasn't nervous. He was just not able/smart enough. So, we didn't hire him. We were very polite and friendly through this entire process. Gave him plenty of graceful exits from the problems we posed to him.

We sent him the usual polite email how he unfortunately bla bla.

Later that day, he started a major propaganda campaign against us, in the local forum.

We felt trapped - how could we say (semi-publicly) that we just rejected him because he was well.. not that intelligent? We ended up just ignoring (ghosting) him.

A few smart people there who could have joined us probably took this clown seriously though. :(

Any chance it was Something Awful?

(Again: our problem was that we were mostly recruiting from a small, geographically localized online forum.)

People in general are naturally curious about details of what's supposed to be a block box procedure. So they'll be drawn like a moth to flame like to something like this, even if the moth is a crazy person.

For job interview it should be also easier of you get no and then some reason, deal is off the table.

So maybe if people get feedback they think that something is still there and this has to be communicated as well in bold font "NO THANKS"?

I think it is with people who are not that confident, they try to hold on to a deal? Which also could be people you don't want to hire...

curious why you were giving feedback in person if you expect candidates to not say anything back. what were your expectations during this process?

did you set expectations with the candidates before the call that they are not supposed to question your analysis?

It's a bit like arguing with a potential romantic partner who doesn't want to go on a second date: You might win the argument logically, but you're not getting another date unless there was a comical misunderstanding.

I was asking why gp was doing this ^, seems weird.

This is also why people get ghosted while dating nowadays. Many of the same reasons at play.

I'm not sure I understand this. I'm under the impression that ghosting people while dating is a newish phenomenon. Is requesting justifications a similarly newish thing? If one didn't change, why would the other? It doesn't seem like we've gotten to the root of the matter.

But I am asking do ppl respond to this with a phone call detailing the reasons behind their rejection.

Why was OP doing it.

His problem could've been simply solved by setting the expectation that his analysis was not up for debate.

This one seems like "blaming it on the victim" to me. You get too many candidates, you're unable to give each of us an in-depth review, you may as well say a single sentence like "You resume was quickly filtered out based on this one requirement." It's like they're ashamed to admit they pre-filter people based on hasty criteria to deal with the deluge of candidates.

> Stalling For Time > There is a belief by corporate executives that there is an abundance of qualified candidates. They erroneously believe that if the HR department waits longer, they will eventually find the perfect person suited for the role for a cheaper price.

This explains why we don't initially get feedback, but not why we often don't get it at all.

So, the obvious application of feedback would be that you try to rectify the problem and then reapply.

I suspect companies don't want you to reapply, regardless of whether you've improved. They already said no.

But in that case, what's the feedback for?

Your idea here hits a similar problem: if the company starts giving out the information "we threw away your resume because you have it in Times New Roman, and we prefer to hire Courier people", they just gave away their valuable resume-filtering trade secret. Once they've done that, all of the resumes they get will use Courier, and they'll have to come up with a new filtering system. So they just imposed a cost on themselves without benefiting anyone, themselves, you, or third parties.

One small anecdotal counterpoint: I interviewed at Google many years back and didn't get an offer. They were nice enough to call and let me know, which I very much appreciated. Since then I've been getting hit up by their recruiters on a regular schedule, every 6-12 months.

At some point I was short on patience and straight up said "you guys know I already interviewed with you back in 20XX, right?"

Their response was "Well yeah, but so what? That was a while ago."

You do walk a fine line and create a lot of overhead to give feedback to all candidates. Generic feedback like "you weren't the right candidate" or "we were looking for someone who is a better fit" isn't any more helpful than a simple "no".

More detailed feedback can be tainted with personal bias and potentially skewed personal perspective based on how well you got along with an interviewer.

If I was in charge of HR/recruiting/etc I would advocate for not giving feedback, but build more robust communication mechanisms that give candidates a notification or view into the process. For example: 1. I submitted my resume and can see that a recruiter has reviewed it and moved me on to phone screen or its pending recruiter review. > I wasn't selected, but I am a good candidate for other jobs so my resume has been recycled.

Honestly, I don't want feedback from some of the places I've interviewed but I sure hate being ghosted and feeling like I sent me resume into the abyss for no reason.

Absolutely. Two weeks ago, interview at a certain top-10 liberal arts college. Meetings with 4 or 5 faculty members, the usual.

Chitchat throughout, nothing substantial is being said, certainly nothing pertaining to the role. There is a tour of the facilities, the research labs are empty, even though the semester is still ongoing. You marvel at the unstructuredness of it all and ask: is this Potemkin's Village? The general impression is that the institution is living on past glories.

The rejection arrives in less than a week, and just for grunts, you ask if there is any feedback to be had. There is feedback: the interviewers could not assess your competence.

Guys, it was your job to convey expectations and bring the conversation back on track, if necessary. You just managed to turn a disappointed candidate into a completely enraged one. What a waste of time. People talk to each other, if anyone asks about the institution I would strongly recommend not to have anything to do with it, not as student, not as faculty, not as staff.

s/More detailed feedback/Your decision to reject the candidate/

What can we tell #2 and #3 that is helpful? ("You are a very strong candidate and the cosmic die roll came up a 1-2, where your number was 3-4 or 5-6.")

What can we tell #4 and #5 that is helpful? ("Sorry, three other candidates seemed more intelligent, had a stronger demonstrated tech background, and though you made the cut to on-site, you were the one of the two weakest links.")

I'm not sure what the candidates would do to "fix" anything about that; the high order bit (that they didn't get an offer) is the information that I'd need as a candidate. Sure, I want more, but there might not be anything more there.

In other cases in the past, I have given feedback to candidates about why we didn't select them or what I saw as gaps that they could close, but if I don't think there's any reasonable action the candidate could do to change the outcome in a similar interview situation 2 years from now, I'm probably not going to give them any detailed feedback.

I think a lot of job offer/no-offer situations come down to this, because most of us are well meaning, hard working people. The default response to rejection should basically be this (alongside some non-punitive self-reflection to micro-optimise some parameter or the other).

I didn't get the job, as expected. But the memorable thing about the process was that the recruiter made a point of calling me to tell me I was getting rejected.

The reasons given were fairly generic as far as I recall, but I appreciated him having the class to actually speak with me.

If I ran a tech company, I'd make that guy head of recruiting.

I assumed the California ban on recording phone conversations without consent made the conversation legally non existent.

So... I'd say they have something like that in mind.

Unfortunately, it is becoming more and more common to just go silent on candidates. What a cowardly thing to do.

And this is why we can't have nice things.

I think the opposite is true; when given no concrete feedback, one begins to hypothesize why they were rejected, and their mind will often point them to discrimination as the reason.

If one is given clear, concrete feedback ("We rejected you because you didn't come up with a simpler algorithm, and you lack experience with framework x"), there is little room for them to think they were discriminated against in any way but their skills/experience.

Or even more likely, someone will inadvertly show his bias that could have stayed under cover. People are not that great in hiding their biases over many interactions.

If they were confident about having processes with no discrimination, it would likely be advantageous to the company to show their cards and give the feedback.

Then a few days later they sent me an email asking for my feedback! I n/a'd everything and made sure to list all of my interviewers names.

prbly inconsequential .

fact is that you cannot do anything but move on after a rejection.

Knowing this, I'll frequently pivot to feedback mode during the interview itself if they clearly aren't going to make the cut. Not sure if that's allowed or exposing us to liabilities, but it does feel better (unless the person is an asshole or seems like they are very likely to use the feedback as leverage against the decision).

I used to ask for feedback, but it turns out it's absolutely pointless to do so, since bad interviewers give bad feedback, which ends up only, even subconsciously, costing you. Absolutely 100% of the feedback I've got back has been of this kind.

It's very hard to actually think of any actionable feedback someone who's not clueless about how hiring works could get anyway. Sure, if you were to tell me "study basic algorithms" or "take a bath" it would be helpful but provided I know I need to tick those boxes, then what?

Furthermore, if it WAS unilateral, wouldn't that mean that the head of HR who set the policy was the biggest believer in said policy?

I think people who give that answer honestly believe it's a valid answer possibly because they're thinking of the rationale behind the policy rather than the literal meaning of what they're saying. But when I've heard it, it's felt like an insult to my intelligence, like it's some stupid word game to dodge my question.

Head of HR don't set these policies unilaterally.

Having said all that, The other angle that always nags me is the fact that our (in all the three companies I've been part of) interview process isn't a perfect measure. In theory, you may be able to crack it if you prepare for it and are well versed in full-stack engineering. In practice, this is just 5 hours of 5 different people trying to look for good signs and feelings and converge after. There just isn't enough information, so most of the time we work towards avoiding a false positive (which have been disastrous in the past). We have tried other mechanics around building a test project etc., but nothing stuck. Those just added a not more non-determinism compared to this model where we know what to expect. I've done more than a 1000 of these, so there are patterns I can fallback on.

If I were to start a company, I know how I'd want to hire: It will be just like finding co-founders. But that doesn't scale and probably becomes illegal when it goes beyond the founding members. I do like the doctor group models where everyone joining graduates to a full partner eventually and take a share of yearly profits until they work there: But our current world of software development that's highly leveraged on future performance (stocks), doesn't seem amenable to the same :(. But yes - It would be awesome to see if somehow we can replicate that model.

This rings true to me (both parts), and it makes me wonder if it's a viable path to attack it from the other side, where you restrain yourself to markets/projects of a size that it doesn't have to scale.

These types of people take rejection as an affront to all they hold dear and make it their mission to slam your company on any platform that will give them a voice.

You don't know who these people are ahead of time. Due to the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Bullshit_asymmetry_... you will spend way more time defending claims from people like this.

As far as I can tell, this is still the case in Belgium and the Netherlands for everyone who makes it to the interview stage. It would be considered very rude to have someone go through the associated stress and logistical hassle otherwise. Is this a U.S. trend for now?

A lot of managers I know conflate feedback with critiques or praise, which are very different tools used for very different purposes.

Feedback in the interview process is invaluable, whereas critiques are unvaluable.

For example, here might be a piece of feedback that would help someone perform better in a future interview:

"During the debugging brainstorming work scenario, we liked that you brought ideas in many different parts of the architecture, but some of the best solutions we saw for this scenario indicated which options were most likely and grouped them by system or issue type."

That feedback is about performance and provides suggestions for improvement. In my experience, that's the type of feedback that's really well received and rarely debated.

Personally I don't care if I'm not given feedback after a phone interview, or even an on-site interview.

But when it comes to technical tests, I would really appreciate feedback, since it could actually help me improve my coding skills, or at least know where I need to improve. If I'm not given feedback on these, it's just another red flag to me, the company doesn't value my time, and seems to treat the interview process as a one way street.

I recently was asked to do a coding test, the HR person told me to do it over the weekend, as most candidates needed all the time they can get. I told HR I was only willing to spend around 4 hours on it, they could judge me on whatever I could do in that time. And even working for free for 4 hours was as stretch, after all, I'm not getting paid, there are other things I could've been doing. And to this day they haven't even acknowledged my test, I did get through to the next round, but no mention of my test whatsoever.

The big one is starting a debate. Because I'm a helpful person when someone asked for feedback why they weren't getting the job I would offer them my thoughts. Way too often this turned into a discussion by them to me about how I was wrong about them and my thoughts didn't apply. Sometimes it might be due to a phenomenal lack of self awareness and sometimes it might be a negotiation tactic, but it always was awkward and uncomfortable.

At Google, the 'sourcers' really didn't want to put 'not a fit' into the application tracking system (ATS) because if they did so they would not be able to call that person back if another position opened up. Inevitably applicants would say they had other people who were talking to them and would probably provide offers (I think some people think that is a useful tactic for pushing things along) and the sourcers would just cross their fingers and hoped they would take that other job, or another candidate that was a better fit would get accepted. Either way they preserve a 'possible' in their list of candidates for the future.

In my discussion with Google's recruiting folks at the time I argued that the ATS system was hurting Google because while someone might be a poor fit in one role, there may be another role where they were a superstar. I've seen it in my career many times where a change of roles completely changed the evaluation of the person doing the job. I never got very far in that discussion but did learn of the 'trick' of just not talking to them as a way of leaving them in a viable 'possible candidate' state for the next role that might come up.

One alternative is to be really clear in what you want out of someone in a role and if they don't meet the standard move them out. But that is very risky for "protected" people such as older engineers, or other races or religions. You can combat that risk by managing to a very diverse workforce but it feels to me that way too many people hire people like themselves.

At the end of the day these can be opportunities for startups to get some great talent.

Train interviewers to explain their reasoning for the questions they're asking and what they're trying to evaluate.

And then, at the close, identify all the positive things the candidate demonstrated and what bullet points they're going to bring to the debrief.

I've been doing the former quite routinely, and in the last interview I did, the candidate just asked me why I asked those questions so I went ahead and explained it.

I think it helps make an interview less nerve wracking, and it helps me to think aloud about the case I'm going to present in the debrief.

And, frankly, some interviewers are asking stupid questions and it may help if they have to explain themselves.

I wish I only had to apply for dozens of jobs.

I think a lot of folks tend to only focus on the large, well known companies when applying to internships, which I think exacerbates the first problem. I've told some friends who are still in college to try and apply for places beyond the major Silicon Valley companies and that pretty much any company that they can think of 1) Leverages software engineering heavily 2) Has an internship program.

I think it'd be interesting to see a "wage-distribution" style chart of who gets internships in Fortune 500 companies. When I say that, I don't mean actual wage, but moreso "what percentage of engineering students are getting what percentage of internships" and similar questions.

It seems like dev jobs in particular are interview meat grinders.

>There is also the concern over a social media backlash because of something an employee said to a candidate.

This right here, is 90% of it. Sure, the other stuff like too few resources, or too many applicants is partly true, but the crux of it is that people are far too sensitive right now. And if you say "we didn't think you were a good fit for our company culture" to somebody that is even the slightest bit insecure about some part of themselves, you can guarantee you'll be hearing about it.

The hand-wringing sorts who are simultaneously so protective of a company's "culture" but are so unable to substantiate how someone might not fit in in a way that isn't telling on themselves should be worried, but not because somebody might get mad at them on Twitter. It's because they're at best losing out on good candidates and at worst perpetuating dark and shitty behaviors onto people who don't deserve it.