I tried giving honest and actionable interview feedback at first.

A scary number of candidates did not take rejection well and tried to use my feedback against me. I had people trying to argue that my feedback was wrong, someone stalking me across social media and trying to argue everything there, and eventually someone who threatened to use my feedback as the basis for a discrimination lawsuit.

So now we’re back to simple “we’re proceeding with other candidates” feedback.

If we’re going to play the blame-game, then you have to see the full picture. Many candidates can be awful and even vengeful. Many people do not handle rejection well.

The line isn't between detailed feedback and brief, uninformative feedback.

The line is between saying something brief and saying nothing.

Somehow, it has become standard to say absolutely nothing instead of telling people a simple no.

I've even had situations where people said they wanted to keep talking to me, and then went completely silent.

But brief feedback is probably more likely to result in pushback / being sued by candidates, since candidates will feel like you didn’t properly consider them.

The sad truth of the situation is that all the incentives for a company point in the direction of giving no feedback at all. This isn’t because hiring managers are sociopaths.

I'm not arguing for feedback, I'm arguing for an answer.

It's just common decency. "Sorry, we're not continuing" is not going to get you sued.

See after just having through 3 rounds of recruiting over the past three years, I don't think the ghosting is intentional from most companies. I would say 60% of companies give a "not continuing" response after 1-2 months from application, while ~25% seem like they have a configuration/software mistake that causes it to send the rejection 6 months - a year later, which people in the meantime think was just ghosting. Not sure why this is so common

I think there's something wrong with a hiring process where it takes 1-2 months to decide whether to proceed to next step (screening call, or interview, or offer) with a candidate, not to mention the fact that a well qualified candidate isn't going to be waiting around that long - they'll be applying to other jobs at the same time, and if good will be snapped up.

The time to send the "Sorry, not continuing" email is as soon as the company has decided that, and if that really is 1-2 months later, you may as well have just ghosted the candidate.

I think part of it may be they're not saying no until someone else is actually hired just in case they need a fallback, so everyone else gets to wait however long it takes for the role to be filled, most likely...

> A scary number of candidates did not take rejection well and tried to use my feedback against me.

This happened to one of my bosses. As a result, I've never attempted it.

Except once, a candidate realized at the end of a technical screen they had done poorly and demanded feedback. I gave an initial bit (shouldn't have, my mistake) and instantly turned it around on me.

> So now we’re back to simple “we’re proceeding with other candidates” feedback.

Hell if companies would even do that - I've spent a lot of time (7+ hours) interviewing with some known companies including meeting with the VP of engineering and then they just stop messaging and ghost you (looking at you Glassdoor..)

At least some kind of feedback is greatly appreciated. A simple, "No" would do so much more for me than being ghosted.

I've also seen the "your feedback is wrong" pushback. Like... do they expect me to say "oh woops my bad. actually here's an offer"?

I agree with what you're saying, but it can be immensely frustrating when you're rejected for a job when the interviewer themselves is actually wrong, which has happened a few times. I've been given technical questions in interviews, and I answer the questions correctly (I always double-check when I get home), and the interviewer pretty much tells me that I'm wrong.

For example, in an interview once I got the typical "design Twitter" whiteboarding question, and it's going fine, until the topic of databases and storage comes up.

I ask "do we want consistency or availability here?"

The interviewer says that he wants both. To which I say "umm, ok, but I thought you said you wanted this to be distributed?", and he said yeah that's what he wants.

So I have to push back and say "well I mean, we all want that, but I'm pretty sure you can't have stuff be distributed or partitionable while also having availability and consistent."

We go back and forth for about another minute (or course eating away at my interview time), until I eventually pull out my phone and pull up the Wikipedia article for CAP theorem, to which the interviewer said that this is "different" somehow. I said "it's actually not different, but lets just use assume that there exists some kind of database X that gives us all these perks".

Now, in fairness to this particular company, they actually did move forward and gave me a (crappy) offer, so credit there, but I've had other interviews that went similarly and I'm declined. I've never done it, but I've sort of wanted to go onto LinkedIn and try and explain that their interview questions either need to change or they need to become better informed about the concepts that they're interviewing for. Not to change anything, not to convince anyone to suddenly give me an offer, but simply to prove my point.

Not sure how the dialog went irl, but if the conversation was that adversarial and with as little diplomacy applied, I'd not hire the person nor accept the role if I was on either side of it...

I think people are just upset when they submit a resume, or even go on an interview, and get NO response at all .. I don't think most people care about feedback - they just want a response. A one-line auto response would be fine.

Yep. As an undergrad, one of my first "proper" interviews was with Mozilla for an internship. I was obviously super excited since I actually cared about their products. I spent a lot of time carefully preparing for the two rounds of interviews, just to get ghosted! Sent a follow-up email a couple weeks later -- no response! I was crushed!

That seems "on brand" for Mozilla, based on the sheer number of WTAF moves that org makes

And I say that even while writing this comment in Firefox

>I wish I could respond to denied applicants like a human, but the threat of legal action

... Legal action on what basis, exactly?

Not the person you're responding to, but if you give any kind of specific feedback, then you're effectively saying "Reason X is why I didn't hire you".

Dumb example, say you didn't hire someone because they wore a Marilyn Manson Antichrist Superstar shirt to an interview and you think that's not appropriate attire for an interview, and suppose you put that into your feedback for the rejection letter.

Now the candidate has a specific "I was rejected for this shirt". They might come back and say "Actually I'm a satanist and this shirt is part of my religion, so I'm going to sue you for religious discrimination". Suddenly you have a lawsuit on your hands, simply because you thought they were dressing unprofessionally.

Obviously this is a hyperbolic example and I doubt that there are a ton of Marilyn Manson fans trying this, but it's just to show my point: It's much safer to simply leave it vague with something generic like "while we were impressed with your qualifications, we've decided to pursue other candidates" email. They can maintain plausible deniability about the reasons they rejected you, and you don't really have fodder to sue them over that.

That said, I absolutely hate how normalized ghosting is in the job world. A candidate isn't entitled to a job, but I do think they're entitled to a response, even if it's just a blanket form rejection.