> While researching this piece, I spoke to a few labor lawyers and ran some Lexis Nexis searches to see just how often a company’s constructive feedback (i.e. not “durrrr we didn’t hire you because you’re a woman”) to a rejected eng candidate has resulted in litigation.
> Hey, guess what? IT’S ZERO! THIS HAS NEVER HAPPENED. EVER.
> As some of my lawyer contacts pointed out, a lot of cases get settled out of court, and that data is much harder to get.
It seems like this is the best possible methodology (Lexis Nexis + survey of labor lawyers) that one can ask for.
If it went to court it is public knowledge by the US constitution. If someone settled out of court that is not easy to find (as the article points out)
You don’t have to file any court documents to inform somebody that you believe they have wronged you, and that you believe you are entitled to compensation for the resulting damages. The civil court system is there to handle things if you can’t work it out among yourselves.
If you haven’t filed any documents, you haven’t sued anyone, either. I find it really hard to believe that every single case of an engineer suing over post-interview feedback has settled out of court, too.
Definitely. The fact that there are no known cases at least demonstrates the risk is very low. Much less risky than the kinds of things people do all the time in interviews.
It could just as likely demonstrate that very few companies provide feedback to rejected candidates, or at least that when companies do, that they legally vet the feedback first (which would make you question the value and candidness of it). I have personally never heard of anybody giving or receiving it myself. So I’m not surprised that you would fail to find cases of disputes originating over it.
I give it whenever asked. Last I was interviewed, I got it at about half the places I talked to.
It's a very natural thing for people to ask about. And answering questions is also pretty natural. The notion that it happens approximately never strikes me as something that needs a lot more evidence than your personal experience.
The entire premise of the OP is that candidates are “rarely told why they got the outcome that they did”. The author claims to have a survey supporting this, but they didn’t publish any of those details. I did a bit of googling and found this[0] article citing a report that claims:
* 69.7% of rejected candidates receive no feedback
* Of those that did, 77.3% said the feedback wasn’t useful
That leaves 6.8% of rejected candidates receiving useful feedback, which sounds quite plausible to me. In reality “risk of getting sued” is over simplified. If you want to give feedback to candidates, you can choose between two options. Just do it (and risk getting sued), or have your feedback legally vetted. The number of people receiving useful feedback is so small that it’s entirely plausible that those cases mostly represent the employers who choose to accept such an expense when rejecting candidates. The author makes no attempt to explain why they think such risk aversive behaviour is not the cause of the lack of lawsuits, instead jumping to the conclusion that the aversion is unnecessary.
The other half of the headline claim (regardless of any debate about its technical accuracy) is spurious at best. Any plaintiff would know that the threat of filing a discrimination case is leverage in a settlement negotiation. Without knowing how many settlements of that nature take place, it’s not possible to draw such a conclusion.
Finally, the authors methodology is questionable. A survey (especially one that doesn’t report its sample, or methodology) is not sufficient to draw the conclusion “never”. Putting aside the matter of out of court settlements, you’d need to perform a rather extensive study of case law to draw such a conclusion. Certainly something more than “had a quick look, didn’t find anything”.
I don't understand how you reconcile "It could just as likely demonstrate that very few companies provide feedback to rejected candidates" and "69.7% of rejected candidates receive no feedback".
It doesn't have to be useful feedback for somebody to sue over it. But even if it were, I still don't see how your point makes sense. Let's say there are a million software developers in the US. Let's assume they change jobs every 3 years and do 3 interviews when they do change. That's 68,000 things that people could sue over. Even if one in a thousand actually reaches the lawsuit stage, that's over a thousand lawsuits over the last 20 years.
I agree "never" is too strong, but I think this search puts a plausible upper bound on the rate of lawsuits.
That’s getting a little bit nit-picky over the definition of “sue”. In this context the risk people are talking about is that a candidate will make some sort of legal claim against them. Whether that claim ends up in court really only changes the potential impact of that risk. Especially considering most HR related legal complaints end up with an out of court settlement (even a lot of the frivolous ones), because the cost of litigation (including potential reputations damages) usually outweighs the cost settlement.
There’s no legal definition of “sue”. You can’t go to court and file “suing documents”. If you define “sue” as to make a legal claim against somebody, then it’s immaterial whether they do that via a letter from a lawyer, or by serving them documents to appear in court.
There is a legal definition of "sue" and it does mean just that, to file a civil claim in court. You may receive a nasty letter from a lawyer threatening to sue you unless you fulfil their demands, but that's kind of the point, they're threatening to sue you but at this moment you haven't been sued yet and won't be until (and unless) they actually do file a claim; and it might as well be just empty threats asserting that they could do that with no actual intention to follow up (lawyers do that), so it's an important difference between threatening to sue (which can be done frivolously) and actually suing.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sue - "to seek justice or right from (a person) by legal process" (all the letters and negotiations up and until a suit has been filed is not the legal process); "to take legal proceedings in court".
So you think the phrase “I’m worried I’ll get sued” would commonly be understood to mean “I’m worried that formal legal proceedings will be initiated against me, but I’m not at all worried that legal proceedings might be threatened in an attempt to leverage me into a settlement”?
If somebody hired lawyers to negotiate with another party to pay them damages, under threat of a lawsuit, I’d say that would commonly be described as “suing” or “getting sued”.
If an employer says “I don’t provide feedback to candidates for risk of getting sued over it”, they are absolutely referring to the risk associated with providing that candidate said feedback. Which includes both lawsuits and out of court settlements. So regardless of what you think the common usage is, that’s certainly how it’s used in this situation. Otherwise you could just tell said employers “you never have to worry about getting sued, because you can just pay the settlement lol...”.
> So you think the phrase “I’m worried I’ll get sued” would commonly be understood to mean “I’m worried that formal legal proceedings will be initiated against me, but I’m not at all worried that legal proceedings might be threatened in an attempt to leverage me into a settlement”?
Yes, that is what that means in the English language.
As some of my lawyer contacts pointed out, a lot of cases get settled out of court, and that data is much harder to get.
Anecdotally I've heard of and worked for companies that have been sued due to bias or perceived bias in the interview process. I have not heard of anyone suing or getting sued for feedback on technical interview performance, but in most cases there would be no basis for a candidate to sue.
That said I think the feedback suggestions are really off base unless the person writing the feedback personally knows the candidate. All of the suggestions are in the vein of "you clearly don't know X, you should learn it", which is fine if a candidate is actually completely unfamiliar with a topic. But the more common case, especially with basic CS stuff like Big O notation as used in the example article, is the candidate is familiar and got it wrong due to nerves, being rusty or interview time pressure. The same goes with the suggestion to recommend or buy a book for the candidate. Unless you are completely sure the candidate does not own the book already this is a terrible idea. Imagine how demoralizing buying, or even recommending, the candidate a book that they already owned and studied pre-interview could be.
I'm pro no feedback, but if the candidate absolutely insists I think feedback should be direct and based on the candidates interview performance, not perceived judgement of their skillset or knowledge (even if this is what most employers are trying to get from interviews). For example...
"You reached a working brute-force solution but did not solve the problem optimally. Here is a link on leetcode or hackerrank and a geeks for geeks solution to help you practice the problem."
"You did not come up with complete solutions to 2 out of 5 questions, even if given more time you were on the right track. Leetcode more and come back in 6 months"
But no one is that direct with interview feedback because the same set of leetcode questions that everyone asks are "company trade secrets". The feedback suggestions I gave are also not particularly tactful, but they are more useful given the current state of most tech interview process. I've learned a lot more about becoming a good interviewee from Blind and Hackernews than from any employer feedback. Richard Geldreich also has good insight into how the process works for senior candidates, and some of the political games that happen during the interview process that make any feedback even more of a joke.
Glassdoor is absolutely filled to the brim with reviews clearly written by HR, marketing firms or by current employees who were told to write reviews.
If a review's only advice to management are: "Continue doing what you're doing!", "keep up the good work!" or "make sure our awesome culture isn't diluted as we grow!", then they're fake.
If a review's only cons are reframing the cons left my legitimate reviewers as sour grapes by someone who can't handle fast-paced environments, startups, or responsibilities that aren't clearly defined, they're fake.
But the biggest red flag is positive reviews left in succession over the period of a few days to a month.
Much like Amazon reviews, it seems that the only reviews you can glean worthwhile information from are the bad reviews.
In 2014, Glassdoor was a goldmine and it saved me from several very toxic companies. Once companies began to catch on, it became a cesspool of corporate cheerleaders softballing points to make their reviews sound convincing. Things like, "Sure, work/life balance could use some tweaking but, overall, it's not too bad". It's pretty easy to scope out the fake reviews.
It’s also filled with reviews from disgruntled former employees who write massively exaggerated reviews, or complete works of fiction. I also have no reason to believe that people don’t write poor reviews for their competitors. It’s an anonymous review system that has many incentives in place that competing with “write thoughtful, honest reviews for you employers” along with all the typical review system biases (like a strong selection bias).
It also doesn’t mean that it is. How many times have you read a review on Glassdoor that said “great company, but I was fired for being a completely toxic bully”? The lack of credibility in the reviews cuts both ways.
Maybe. I suspect there might be some value hidden in the aggregate data on Glassdoor (but that really is just as susceptible to the same type of manipulation). The number 5 may also be significant or insignificant depending entirely upon the size of the organisation.
But really, if your reasoning was robust, it would work in both directions. I don’t think you’d agree with the statement “if five people say that their work environment is great, there may be something to it”. The system can be (and is) gamed in both directions, and there are people who have incentives to do so in either direction, for both “justified” and “unjustified” reasons. Any reason you come up with to be skeptical of a good review also applies to a bad one.
I left a poor review for an employer only one time in the 10 years or so I've been on Glassdoor (there were only a couple other reviews). And almost immediately after, there were about 20 or 30 5 star reviews posted in a short amount of time. The company only had about that many employees, which proves that the CEO (or someone at the top) either told everyone to write a good review, or some of them were fake, both clearly 'incentivized' by any sane definition of the term. I reported this to Glassdoor and they refused to do anything about it, and I even had the report escalated and re-reviewed, without any effect.
Steer clear of what? Almost all companies have this “no feedback” policy in some form. I’ve gotten rejection calls (a sadistic practice, if you’re not going to offer feedback IMO), where I’ve explicitly asked for feedback and literally been told “no.” If I limited myself to companies that provide feedback, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have a career right now.
> rejection calls (a sadistic practice, if you’re not going to offer feedback IMO)
Perhaps you're referring to other channels of communication, but I'd much rather have a rejection call than no contact at all. Corporate ghosting is much more sadistic.
Ouch. Talk about adding insult to injury (or, at least, mild inconvenience). At least in my case, they scheduled the call, which avoids being woken up or otherwise interrupted, but prolongs the agony a little.
One time we gave feedback on request and the candidate contested the feedback, then went out on a social media rampage. So yeah, we stopped after that. It only takes one bad candidate to make it not worth the effort.
What are they losing in this case? I don't see how a company is actually harmed by someone complaining about an interview. Unless you're trying to attract people who subscribe to cancel culture, I don't see a problem.
Employee hours. Someone has to collect, document, sanitize, and explain the feedback. Then respond to the response to the feedback. In the time it takes our recruiter to provide feedback to a candidate, they could have sourced 20 more candidates.
edit: I'll argue instant feedback is even more expensive and risky. It's not coordinated, potentially duplicative, may impact/contaminate later rounds, and may not be complete or representative of the interview as a whole. Engineers aren't known for being naturally HR/legal-compliant, and having multiple expensive engineers spend time doing things not in their typical skillset that's typically done by a single resource that specializes in said skillset doesn't sound cheaper at all.
They've only disrupted their day to talk to you, in many cases having done these increasingly-prevalent and always-bullshit 4+-hour "exercises", and they have way less time to be allocating than you do. That's all they've done. Their time isn't deserving of respect and it's just downright ridiculous to think that it's the decent thing to do to tell them something that might, just might, not make it a waste for them to have spent it.
...Or, you know. Don't be that guy. Candidate, candidate, candidate--depersonalizing language for depersonalized processes. How about person? These are people you're talking about. They matter more than your recruiter's cattle-call throughput, each and every one of them.
Have some empathy, my dude. Or at least some enlightened self-interest, for someday will be your day in the barrel.
Interviewing is a business transaction, not social services. They'll min-max their time just like you'll mix-max your compensation.
I'll happily give advice, feedback, mock interviews, and other sorts of help on my own time in more appropriate environments. When it's company time, it's just business.
They're getting a prompt, professional, inoffensive response in exchange for their time. That is decency.
You can't expect a business to feed the hungry, cure the sick, and house the poor out of the goodness of their hearts because these are people that spent a couple hours of their day with you. There are more appropriate institutions for charity.
Perhaps the easiest business-oriented solution to this mess is to simply comp applicants for investing their time in interviews with a company. At least then there isn’t the sentiment of having wasted time.
This is an excellent suggestion that treats people as people and as professionals whose time is valuable. It would, of course, never happen, because those same employers fear of what might happen if they granted the same respect they demand, but I admire your lateral thinking.
Uh. I can certainly expect a business to be responsible in it's treatment of others. They exist at the sufferance of the society that grants their charter. Why should shitty behavior be normalized, ever?
And why are you stanning so hard for a process whose bloodless mind would bleed you dry and kick you to the curb for a nickel? Was Steinbeck really that right?
It's interesting how "it's business" has become catch-all for absolving every breach of previously accepted social norm.
As a hiring manager, you're unlikely to be on the clock. And even if, I am somewhat certain that you could come up with good justifications for giving feedback if anybody asks, which nobody will.
It seems to be a specific disease of middle management to feel the need to demonstrate their "professionalism" by going out of their way to deny their humanity. At Wall Street, they buy ugly but expensive clothes for this purpose. But I guess on the West Coast you only have the Gordon Gecko playbook to fall back on.
I used to work at a branding agency, and it was interesting to see how risk averse middle management was: ideas for product names tend to only be good if they evoke some sort of not entirely pure concept. Think of "Plan B", "Virgin", or "CockroachDB". These would always get shot down by middle management as "unprofessional". Go a level up and people are far more open to be human. I don't know if they are just more self-assured and therefore willing to trust their instincts, or if the selection process for higher management actually works quite well.
I feel like the reason that is, because middle managers believe they need to be better by not making mistakes, and things without mistakes are bland and inhumane, also some of them maybe have a some kind of complex. I might be wrong tho?
Sure, and as a business transaction, what do you think will happen if you treat potential business partners poorly?
The answer is that they'll leave negative reviews, tell people to avoid your company or decimate any goodwill your company might have. I have in the past left scathing reviews on Glassdoor and was on some occasions the first one to drop my experience. Because after long projects or a company promising to get back in touch, they decided to instead ghost me or make me do ridiculous tricks for the application process.
If you view something as a business transaction, then you should know one of the worst things you can do in business is spurn the person you're working with.
I had someone ghost me right before a christmas holiday once, after the hiring manager (a VP) told me they'd for sure give me a call the next day. It was right before a major storm went through the area, and because I had waited for their call at home I had to drive 10 hours through the storm to see my folks as the storm had arrived the following day.
I naturally left a scathing review for that place, but Glassdoor removed it (of course).
On the other hand, by giving good feedback, your company engenders goodwill and brownie points ratings on Glassdoor and elsewhere. Shouldn’t good PR be worth a little work from a company?
> Someone has to collect, document, sanitize, and explain the feedback.
Either something like this is being up collected and articulated up through the decision points in the hiring process, or the decisions are being made on a fuzzy basis that can't even be explained internally, which presumably represents a risk that decisions couldn't be properly justified should a candidate suspect discrimination and pursue a claim.
(This is especially true for any kind of exercises, btw. If an employer asks me to do some, I am going to screen them on whether they have (a) complete reference solutions with (b) numbers on how long it took to complete each and why they're confident those numbers are reliable(c) a written rubric for evaluating candidate solutions that (d) they'll agree to share with me when we're done.)
In my experience, they often like to give feedback on subsequent interviews about the past interviews. Google has some pretty detailed feedback on a interview I did years ago, which they were happy to reveal over the phone on a subsequent onsite invitation.
I've always considered it just a professional courtesy, within reason. Just like it would be nice, but not required, for an applicant to say why they turned down a job offer. It can help us understand what's lacking to determine whether or not it's worth improving upon.
Professional courtesy doesn't matter much when it's now the norm not to be curteous, and thought to be unprofitable (in all the ways benefit is measured, not just in monetary terms) if the company is curteous. There is no professionalism above the level requried to maintain an increasing rate of profit. Workers in all industries since the beginning of waged labour have learned this fact the hard way.
Strong disagree. Eroding standards of civility are no excuse for lowering the bar on how you behave. I'd urge you to set an example, honor yourself and contribute to the solution, rather than compounding the problem by sinking to the lowest common denominator.
I do think we should be curteous, far from it (and employers doubly so); I'm not excusing their beahviour, but I am saying it many cases it pays to not be curteous (note, not being curteous isn't the same as being definitely uncurteous). It is the sort of behaviour interviewees have grown to expect.
The pursuit of protit over courteousness is bound to happen when positive courteousness has a negligible and potentially negative impact on profit.
If you want the candidate to be more likely to reapply feedback would help.
In fairness I received feedback I didn't get the position because I was too chatty from a hr person who told me to act more chatty because qualified candidates on paper were failing for being too quiet. I kinda wished they didn't provide feedback because I have an opinion on the internal culture that would make me avoid them in the future.
> "You were barely beat out by another candidate, we hope you apply again next time!"
If this is true and if the company is half competent they'll be reaching out to you proactively next time, not hoping you might see the position and think to apply :)
> If you want the candidate to be more likely to reapply feedback would help.
Do companies really want that? Presumably they didn't hire the candidate because they believe better candidates exist. Why invest in someone if there are better candidates readily available?
usually there's only a few open positions. after a long process of phone screens and on-sites, you might have five viable candidates but only two slots at that particular time. if you would have been happy to hire any of the remaining three if the first two didn't accept your offer, you might encourage them to apply again later.
Sounds like you met a very particular HR archetype and they likely took delight in the games they played with you. You're better off knowing about those sort of HR depts than not.
If a candidate has given my company their time and energy to interview with us I think we owe them a chance to understand why we didn't hire them. We're not obliged to but, if requested, offering feedback is quite clearly beneficial. There's an obvious benefit for the candidate and the subsequent companies they interview with. There's also an indirect benefit to my company - if everyone else behaves like this it means that we'd be much more likely to find our next hire.
I suppose if you're thinking exclusively about a short-term benefit to the company alone without considering the impact to the candidate, the wider ecosystem and culture in general then it wouldn't make sense to take the risk.
When I've been on the other side of this -- ie, as a candidate rejecting a decent offer -- I've made a point of writing a personal non-boilerplate "letter" (email, but tone and format of a traditional letter) -- thanking those on the hiring side and giving some context for my decision. Relationship-building and mutual respect are only ever full of win.
I disagree with this. I've had two companies contact me and offer legitimate feedback after interviews, and I always left feeling happy and with good feelings about them.
I applied to one company and got a response back which was effectively "we really like you as a candidate, but it doesn't seem like you would be the right fit for this job / it doesn't seem like the interests you expressed in your interviews [which they correctly restated] matched up well with the duties we would have you perform. We will likely have jobs opening up which would align with what you like and you will be on the shortlist of candidates if you apply for those". Was it truthful? Who knows, but it left me feeling happy about how things went and I would consider applying there again.
Similarly, earlier on in my career after taking a few CS classes I applied for a different job, and the response was effectively "You are smart but you don't have the skills we require yet which are [x, y, z]. Come back when you do". What they said was true and I appreciated the feedback.
Contrast that with the myriad companies I applied to and never heard a response back from or didn't get a response back for many months from. I will never apply to these places again because it is clear that they don't respect prospective employees enough to even send a perfunctory email. Boiler plate rejections aren't as irritating but they are definitely still irritating. If you don't provide reasons for not hiring then employees will construct their own reasons, and they may not be true and / or favorable towards your company.
They didn't hire you now, but might be able to hire you in the future because you would maybe apply again (assuming you get passed the "we already didn't hire this person" filter)?
With all the risk, that doesn't seem like much of a payoff to the company, to me.
(Though I am glad you got feedback you considered valuable, and I think it's cool that the companies did that)
They gain the goodwill of a prospective employee who might cycle back and be a great fit later on in their career (and who has more skills then). It's also about what they don't lose, which is not only me but potentially other prospective candidates. Know what happens when someone mentions they are considering applying to a place that never got back to me? I tell them don't apply there, they waste your time / they don't care about candidates / their interview process sucks. How many people does that person then go tell? I've absolutely punted on applying to places which my friends have said similar things about.
And providing feedback is very likely to hurt your reputation. One major company did give me feedback, and I've made fun of them endlessly for it - they explained that the manager loved me, I did great on systems design and architecture, but I couldn't pass the hiring committee because I didn't do well enough on tree traversal tricks.
Even that in a way is useful to them. If they are constantly getting confused, bemused, or angry responses to what they think is honest feedback, it is a red flag about their hiring process.
Every hiring process under the sun has a large, vocal group of people who think it's shit-tier. (Some people like me are equal opportunity haters - I've never seen a process that didn't have stupid flaws.) If you give feedback, eventually the group for your hiring process is going to find you.
Reputation only matters if your candidate pipeline isn't full enough. For example, Google is notorious for their awful hiring gauntlet, but people still line up around the block to work for them. If your pipeline is fine, reputation and goodwill from people you rejected are worthless.
Most companies are not Google, so their (local) reputation matters a lot.
I'm a .Net developer. In my area there is a well known company that hires a lot of .Net devs. I heard from 2 people that .Net devs are basically treated as 2nd class citizens (after Delphi devs). So now I will not consider applying there. I don't know if they would want to hire me, but I have nothing to gain finding out.
It’s not clear what you disagree with, since everything you mention is entirely a personal benefit. The company itself only increases its risk with feedback simply by exposing a larger surface area to potentially contest.
I think this is the main problem. People just don’t take rejection well, or it’s taken too personally.
Sometimes it’s no one’s fault and it’s simply a bad fit.
And of course like you say, people aren’t taught how to evaluate feedback and they may actually contest what is a courtesy in an adversarial manner and thus make things so much worse.
Anyway, the way to avoid negative reactions and defensiveness from candidates is to practice giving feedback in a way that’s constructive. We’ll cover this next.
I am not afraid of getting sued, but experience makes me afraid of getting dragged into an argument about my conclusions and judgement, the last thing I need when managing a hiring process. I do still provide feedback when it is politely requested, though.
You have it exactly right. Companies are protecting themselves from more than just legal action - Glassdoor reviews have a huge influence on how candidates view your company (especially true for startups).
I once left a bad review on Glassdoor after a truly awful interview experience for a startup. The next day they called me up and threatened legal action.
Edit: Just for context on the interview—they had me do a take home assignment in Django, which I had never worked in. Was desperate, so I learned Django and completed it in a week. Went onsite and their whole office was a one tiny, dated swelteringly hot room. The interview was mostly around a bunch of basic syntax stuff, and had me implement merge sort. Didn’t hear from them at all for a month so I wrote on Glassdoor about it.
A day after I wrote the review, they tried to email me and offer me the job. I was pretty desperate, but not THAT desperate knowing they had only done so because of the review. So I replied, saying I wasn’t interested. The day after that is when the CEO called me to threaten me. They probably couldn’t have done much to me, but still nothing for me to gain from the situation, so I took it down and moved on with my life.
The challenge isn't figuring out how you or I personally would deliver feedback, given time to plan it out and a good set of feedback to deliver. The challenge is establishing a process that ensures everyone at the company will always do it, even when the real reason is something like "meh I'm not sure the candidate quite clears our bar".
> even when the real reason is something like "meh I'm not sure the candidate quite clears our bar".
That's the problem, though - you're trying to make a hiring decision on hopelessly incomplete information, and so it will come down in large part to gut feeling. And the moment you admit to using some non-quantifiable feeling as a basis for not hiring someone, you open yourself up to claims of some form of discrimination.
It goes both ways. I have had a couple of interviews go south and have no interest in continuing the conversation even in a constructive way. Best to say thank you for your time and move on.
This is only one side of the equation. What’s the cost of not providing the feedback? Either similar negative feedback on social media, which is maybe less intense but more numerous, or the negative feeling the candidate gets from the experience, which can impede future applications or applications from friends.
I don’t know which way it tips, but looking at just the potential damage of providing feedback seems insufficient.
The cost is that you further the misery of the application experience for candidates. Keep in mind for every candidate you interview, they may have applied for anywhere between 10 to 100 other jobs. If you were in their position, you would want to have a way to improve for the next interview too.
Hot take: you could hire someone who did absolutely well in the interview, and they could find a few weeks into the job that they loathe everyone, and go on a social media rampage.
What I’m getting at is, there will always be bad apples, or people who react in a way that damages your organization. But not providing useful feedback to people who ask for it simply because one person went crazy is punishing a lot more people because of that one. Who knows if all of their negative karma ends up being worse in the grand scheme of things?
I personally avoid applying to places that other engineers tell me to avoid because I trust their opinion more than I trust a company selling me the highlight reel in an interview. If a trusted engineer said he got a rejection in an interview, asked for feedback, and none was given, I’d avoid that place too.
This is a tried and true practice in dating, and it translates well to hiring, which is basically the same thing.
Most people, ESPECIALLY people who ask you for feedback, do not want feedback. They want to get in a fight with you.
Edit: I don't remember ghosting anyone personally in either setting, but it's happened to me plenty. Getting upset about it just means you're new to the experience.
If they blab their mouth on social media and it goes viral they've already done the damage before you could serve court papers. Why even bother with the risk?
Because that’s allowing risk adverse mentalities to prevent companies from innovating in their hiring processes to build a more transparent and improved culture of hiring, and a chance to differentiate themselves from competitors with a reputation of good interviewing practices?
> Then maybe there can be a system that provides a disclaimer where they waive all ability to sue or otherwise get into a fight with you.
This ain't gonna help though, because it's not particularly useful at preventing the damage that these companies are afraid of, so it's not really going to tilt the existing balance.
I just think companies don’t nearly take anonymous social media backlash as seriously as this discussion alleges they do. Anecdotally, companies barely take customer/client complaints on social media seriously, unless it goes viral- but how would that happen in the case of giving feedback to an applicant? Hard for it to be big news unless actual discriminatory practices emerged- in which the current system already fails to protect against.
Perhaps companies are just behaving too conservatively, and there is room for interviewing platforms to improving the hiring process by giving the helpful feedback that applicants crave.
This is the sad truth of it. As a candidate I greatly appreciate feedback but I know there are others who will try to paint their not getting hired as due to bias (classism, racism, sexism, etc) without any evidence. I don't blame those who have been burned and ended the practice. An accusation might as well be a conviction in some situations.
So that we can all work together to improve the hiring process. Seriously. I could get hit by car because I stopped to pick up some trash on the side of the road. But it's still a decent thing to do.
And deal with all the blowback for yet another NDA? Plus the inevitable decision where you need to decide to enforce it and come across as even more of an asshole? For what benefit again?
What right does someone have to sue before they’ve been hired, anyways, unless it’s on a discrimination basis (in which this case, it is clearly not)?
Here in Texas, at least, that sort of thing does not seem like something that would ever be a real legal risk. This is a right-to-work state; I figured it’s pretty hard to get sued here.
Hiring bias litigation is common and expensive in other states.
The advice you will get on HR side is because no binding arb. agreement is in place you are exposed to full litigation efforts including attorney fees.
These can involve disparate effect or implicit bias - which can be difficult to defend against.
Are you serious? Imagine the first HN headline that reads "Company X requires you to waive your ability to sue if you apply to them". Come on, man. Apply some tests to your ideas.
That's already how most EULA click-through NDAs are, and no one blinks an eye. People are just numb to legal disclaimers now. One outrage article will not go viral, and will not sink any companies.
Honestly as someone who is looking for a junior role this could not be further from the truth. I just want to know how to improve so I can stop being unhappy at my current job and get a new one.
This has the implicit right answer: A job interview is the worst moment/place for feedback. There is just too much heart/animosity at stake on both sides.
I've been interviewing candidates for more than 15 years (for PhD /RA positions and then for Engineering) and every time I've given honest feedback, candidates just get into an argument on why they think the feedback does not apply to them...
It is just not worth it. If I want to know how am I at certain skills... I test myself in a less "charged" environment.
This could be true, and people probably believe it, but my experience stepping in towards the end of an interview and guiding candidates towards the solution was nearly always immediate counter arguments. "I was going to do that next!"
> Most people, ESPECIALLY people who ask you for feedback, do not want feedback.
The data I've seen suggests you're totally wrong about this.
I work at a company in the recruiting space. My primary role is interviewing technical candidates, and we provide very detailed feedback to candidates of all levels, regardless of whether or not we move forward with them.
People consistently tell us they love the feedback that we provide - in fact, people say the feedback we provide is one of the best parts of their experience with us.
Probably. Our feedback doesn't contain question-by-question breakdowns or numerical scoring. Instead we try to make it actionable, practical and specific. It looks roughly like this:
"Based on our interview we think you would really benefit from studying up on data structures and algorithms. If you want to study this stuff on your own, many people find (link) and (link) useful. But there's also (link) or (link) books available on amazon that we've had people recommend."
Or: "We were impressed by your spoken communication skills, but sometimes you seemed to struggle to remember specific technical terms for some of the concepts and areas we discussed...."
The feedback emails themselves are assembled from a mix of interviewer notes and reused snippets for comments we give frequently. This sort of stuff has been very time consuming for us to prepare. At the volume of candidates we interact with, we think its definitely worth it. But its possible that no feedback is better than bad feedback, and most organizations might not have the time to write good feedback to candidates.
But I can say with confidence that almost everyone really appreciates the feedback we send. While its easy for senior people to find work at the moment, there's lots of junior people out there sending dozens of resumes for every call back. Receiving rejection after rejection from companies (or worse, being ghosted) without even being told what you're doing wrong is a really awful experience.
Constructive feedback is the key. No one is going to feel good about getting back a score card that says "Communication: 6/10, Technical Ability: 5/10..." etc. That just leaves you with more questions and no actionable feedback. "6/10? I'm at least 7/10!" or "I'm mostly 6-7s, why was I not given an offer".
Does your company actually hire programmers directly? I'm a bit confused by what you mean with working at a company in the recruiting space.
Detailed feedback can mean a lot of different things. Recruiters always think they're giving people detailed feedback. That's nothing compared to an honest code review.
Bearing in mind that code reviews often cause tension even in fully employed people, it's hard to imagine they're always well received by job seekers.
This. It took me one single experience of being threatened after sharing feedback to never want to do it again. Lesson learned.
Once you've been a hiring manager and reviewer long enough, it becomes obvious that, while the intent behind giving feedback is good, the reality of it is messy, and provides no consistent upside to the company.
They want to explain themselves. There is a difference. What you consider an argument or fight is just a Hail Mary, almost an involuntary recovery attempt, for some.
Accepting feedback without trying to dig your way out of a hole or justify your actions is a sign of maturity.
A couple of years ago, I was ghosted by a company after being interviewed. A few weeks later, I realized that the guy that interviewed me was just hired as a consultant by the company, and convinced the boss to hire him instead of me for my job.
How did I find all of this out? Over A month later, they called me back.
This was after I had been strung along by the business owner and the guy that interviewed me for over a week where they were going to make a final decision about hiring me..and then nothing. They couldn't be bothered to return my phone call or respond to any emails.
They left a message that I had to schedule an appointment with the guy that interviewed me to basically interview me again.
I, of course, never called them back, but sent both of them a nasty email telling them to fuck off in so many words.
I never thought I would be ghosted like this from a potential employer.
> I never thought I would be ghosted like this from a potential employer.
Get used to it. It sucks but if I got upset like I used to when a company ghosts me (I'm not just talking about after initial phone screens but even after lengthy on-site interviews), I'd be dead from the stress by now. It happens so often these days. Some companies behave decently but it seems that many more companies are following the lead of recruiters and behaving like jerks.
which makes it even worse - if you interview 20 people, and 1 in 20 is a media rampager - every time you provide feedback on a hiring cycle you will have a rampage.
> If a trusted engineer said he got a rejection in an interview, asked for feedback, and none was given, I’d avoid that place too.
So, your employer does give feedback to candidates on request? It must be difficult for you to find places that are acceptable to you to work, since very few companies typically give feedback. Or do your friends just not usually ask for feedback and as a result that clause on your criteria never trips (i.e. the company wouldn't have given feedback, but since your friend didn't ask, you don't strike it off your list)?
Hot take: you could hire someone who did absolutely well in the interview, and they could find a few weeks into the job that they loathe everyone, and go on a social media rampage.
Nearly every company has a policy regarding social media usage with regard to company-related content. If the negative comments get back to the company, that individual will likely face consequences. The "no interviewee feedback" is just another part of a communications policy.
In our case, it's not an iron-clad no feedback allowed policy. We're just much more careful about giving it, approval is given on a case-by-case basis.
A good typical whiteboard interview naturally includes hints, feedback, and collaboration. After several hours of it, we have a very good idea of how well they may respond to feedback from members of our organization.
Honestly, I love giving feedback. I love helping candidates be better at interviewing. Bad interviews are painful to the interviewer too. I'm out of a small market so people and word gets around.
If it really isn't their fault they didn't get the job, we try to make that very very clear. It really sucks when we have to pass up on someone who absolutely killed the interview because someone else did better.
The harsh reality is, many people that don't pass on the interview are people we do not want in the industry. The good ones we give every hint and help we can.
There's also more tactical ways of extracting feedback from companies rather than directly asking for it. We can't tell you about how you did well after rejection, but we can talk about what our expectations are during the interview; put two and two together. I've noticed the good candidates that are serious about improving their interviewing do it, and from the company side, it's a strong signal they're not trying to contest a decision.
Food for thought, when was the last time you gave a company feedback on their interview process? I've traded feedback for feedback quite successfully many times when I was interviewing.
>The harsh reality is, many people that don't pass on the interview are people we do not want in the industry. The good ones we give every hint and help we can.
It's pretty bold of you to claim your interview can accurately qualify candidates across the entire industry.
Maybe you have found an interview that works for most companies? There's chests of gold waiting for you if you have.
I can pretty boldly claim that I can filter out "definitely not". I'd say most interviews can too. There are a handful of companies that do this for you.
These are the candidates that can't FizzBuzz or even write a line of code and/or are humongous asshats.
I try to give interview feedback on every interview I go on, where I am the person being interviewed. Obviously, companies who provide me with actionable or useful feedback get actionable and useful feedback from me in return:
Interviewer: you have great interpersonal communication but I think you need a bit more knowledge in python techniques XYZ. I like being up front and transparent, and the python stuff is a big deal to us, so although you had a great set of traits, we want someone stronger in python.
Me: Thank you for giving me a clear indication on what was important, where I was strong, and most importantly, for not giving me a “we’ll call you if we want to move forward” response. I highly respect you for not wasting my time unnecessarily.
And even in places where it does, like Texas, I've never heard of it being applied to software. Like Dell doesn't require a degree for their engineer positions.
I think if I introduce myself as a lieutenant, people will think I am brave and action-oriented. But that would be silly because I am not a military/police officer. Words have meaning, just because engineer sounds cool you shouldn't call yourself an engineer unless you are and actual engineer.
Social media rampage after an interview is a bad look for anyone. Tell your friends about it sure if they're thinking about going in but no reason to burn a bridge.
I think a big part of it is also most companies hiring decisions are a lot more subjective than they’d like to admit. I suspect in many cases the interviewers aren’t able to provide specific feedback that won’t immediately sound strange.
I get what you are saying, but sometimes there may not be any useful feedback to give. Lets say you just don't like the candidate personally or think they aren't a good culture fit, feedback might be hard to give without just hurting someone's feelings.
I appreciate what you're saying, and I realize that social media is a cesspool, but isn't your stance condescending toward candidates that you do want to hire?
Surely a reasonable person with good critical thinking skills can look at one of those "rampages" and recognize it for what it is.
Does providing feedback make this effect worse, or better? How do we know? N=1 isn't exactly a significant sample size.
It used to be common knowledge that doctors should never say they're sorry, for the same reason (fear of lawsuit). Then research showed that apologizing actually reduced the number and severity of malpractice lawsuits.
I see plenty of people attacking tech company interview processes on social media already, without being provoked by honest feedback. I'm having trouble imagining how feedback could make a person more angry.
Engineers can't even go through a code review without getting butt hurt. And that's when you're on the same team with mostly the same goal.
Usually the blowback to the company hits marketing/legal/HR. Gathering and delivering feedback takes work. It's really politically expensive to explain why you're going out of your way to do work to cause other departments to do work for the sake of tech community altruism, especially right after it just burnt you. Giving career advice to strangers after an interview isn't the norm in any other field.
I don't really care if the candidate tries to sue the company. I don't work in legal, that's mostly not my problem. But if legal doesn't want to deal with it and ends up being a pain in my ass, yeah, I'm dropping the practice.
My personal data point is that I received feedback that was negative on specifically my base level of concept understanding on one out of ~7 short sections I did for a company, and it made me skeptical that it was the actually the real reason.
It was a whiteboard session on how to manage scheduling and reporting progress/success/failure information for long-running jobs to a frontend UI... which is something I had been specifically doing at my previous company for a year, and have done many times in many ways before. I took some lessons about communication and focus from it, but in my mind it showed that either that section's interviewer was not very good at evaluating candidates, or some other reason was the real reason and they chose to voluntarily tell me something else as a cover instead.
I'm assuming the former, because I never asked nor expected a specific reason for rejection - no cover was necessary. Finding out just frustrated me further - I really wanted that job, and of course you can't go back saying "Maybe someone else should give that section? I think I'm really good, trust me, the guy you just rejected!"
A more charitable (and probably likely) scenario is that the company monitors mentions of its brand name on social media and saw public posts by the candidate, or the candidate tagged/posted to their social channels.
Sympathies. On the flip, side, though, if the interview process was horrible, and the company doesn't provide some sort of mitigating feedback on what happened, I tend to assume the worst. And yeah, I don't necessarily keep it a secret.
Fear of the occasional keyboard ninja is not a rational reason for giving every single job applicant a worse experience.
Not to mention that generally they end up looking worse than you do, and you've probably done the rest of us a favour by outing them as an asshole (I'm assuming you were respectful and constructive in the feedback that you gave).
I got verbal feedback exactly one time (at Microsoft) during my attempt to land a post-1-year of university internship. I had solved the algorithm in a few minutes, but when trying to code it up, I struggled a fair amount before figuring it out. The feedback I got was "You seem like a smart person, who hasn't done very much coding. That makes you a bad risk. Go practice programming and come back next year". It was incredibly valuable advice that I got no where else, and it resulted in me coming back to MS a couple of years later once I graduated (I'm not there anymore).
I wish more people would give real, actionable feedback on interviews.
> You seem like a smart person, who hasn't done very much coding. That makes you a bad risk,
Assuming Microsoft actually measures this stuff, that's kind of surprising to me. I've never placed much weight on being able to write a program on the spot.
All my info is old on this point, but I doubt that there was company wide measurement here. This was an individual giving their own personal opinion/reasoning.
>I've never placed much weight on being able to write a program on the spot.
I don't disagree, and personally I hate in person coding exercises, but if you keep the question simple and allow the candidate to code in their native language, something fizz-buzz like will go a long way in weeding out the people who have languages on their resume but can't code.
At our company we offer two simple coderpad tasks to be done in advance with no supervision or pressure - write a linked list in CPP and solve a simple puzzle in Python. You pay attention to the candidates who use templates, destructors, smart pointers, even if they make mistakes those are the ones you probably want to hire.
> You pay attention to the candidates who use templates, destructors, smart pointers, even if they make mistakes those are the ones you probably want to hire.
Maybe I don't know enough C++ to understand this, but I don't understand why using fancier features would make you like the candidate more when they are making mistakes. Unless you ask them to write a templated linked list, why would you grade them for automatically deciding to write one (and then making a mistake while doing so)?
Trying to understand the thought process here since I have been on the receiving side of some of these "Look I used the cool feature!" candidate programs in Python, and they often make pretty bad mistakes while using said advanced features. That personally marks them down slightly in my estimation, but curious to know your view is the opposite.
Meta: Maybe the problem with hiring via takehomes/code samples is precisely exemplified by the above discussion.
>Maybe I don't know enough C++ to understand this, but I don't understand why using fancier features would make you like the candidate more when they are making mistakes.
It's not about cool features. It's about using the correct modern features which make the code safer and easier to follow.
Templates are a relatively advanced feature but trivial to write for such a case and I'm looking for a candidate who understands containers are typically generic and knows how to add the two lines. I take it as a marker of experience.
There's no excuse other than inexperience or old fashionedness to not use smart pointers.
Destructors are also a sort of minimal knowledge because they show that a candidate thinks correctly about memory management.
There isn't really a score to what we do. And in all honesty the first few times we gave the test I didn't really know what to look for, this is my first time from the other side. But it isn't too much to expect a competent cpp programmer to know these things and I'm looking for candidates who are willing to use the open ended opportunity to flex their muscles, provided their code is well structured and doesn't have severe, obvious bugs. I don't claim that this is perfect but it seems suited to screen for the basic kind of knowledge we look for. These are not entry level positions either.
It's been awhile since I last interviewed at Microsoft, but the only coding I did was on a whiteboard.
The best part about it? I was already a full time employee at Microsoft. I just wanted to switch teams. I still had to do a full interview loop with the team and well... I didn't get the job.
I interviewed several people who wanted internal transfers. People who took 30 minutes to write a function like "write a function that takes an array of ints and returns the largest value". I have no idea how they got hired in the first place.
Yeah, the space of things I can do quickly on the spot from practice, and the space of things I can get really good at after a few hours of re-calibrating, research, and trial and error are worlds apart. If I were hiring, I'd 100% look for people who can self-teach above all other technical qualifications (above and beyond whatever the basic competency level for the position is).
I only get an hour together or a bit more if I'm lucky.
In terms of people I've hired, if they can solve and code things in real time on a white board, then they can definitely do even better with more time and research.
Everyone does better with research, trial, and error. That's not unique. What's unique is problem solving on your feet in a foreign environment. I want those people.
It's possible the other guy being interviewed seemed like a smart person and had no trouble with the code. If they had to hire one, they hired the one that was less risky.
Luke Hohmann, author of The Journey of the Software Professional, advises to give such feedback. I've endeavored to do so.
FWIW, though I've been insulted and hazed and ghosted many times, I've yet to be given constructive criticism.
A few times I've been told why I didn't "pass". One guy was upset that I didn't favor aspects (a la Spring). Another was disappointed by my answer for how to resolve a hypothetical impasse ("try both").
That sort of thing.
Job interviewing is just dating. I accept that most people can't articulate why it's a "No." But I can't abide by the tortured rationalizations of poorly socialized geeks and accompanying general purpose meanness used to mask their own inadequacies.
Said more kindly, most people, and especially geeks, shouldn't be allowed to conduct interviews unsupervised. It's a teachable professional skill like any other. Asking the unprepared and unsuited is just cruel to all parties.
Same here, but from IBM--and it's burnished my impression of the company ever since. It was polite, actionable and a nice recognition that I had /also/ given up an entire day for their interview.
It’s actually kind of a bit risk for the applicant, which makes it a big risk for the interviewer if you have half a heart.
If you get fired four weeks in to your internship, because no amount of coaching from the senior employees is worth the investment by the company.... that’s a tough situation to be in. It’s pretty late at that point to start looking for another internship for the summer.
And if you’re the kid’s supervisor... that’s not a fun conversation to have.
I find I'm much more comfortable giving feedback to new college graduates. Often times there is glaring weaknesses they can work on improving to get the best job possible.
If an interviewer googled the question - why do I need to know the answer?
I recently had an interview and I spent _literally_ over an hour trying to figure out the algorithm or a mathematical function to solve it and I finally got to the point that I gave up.
I asked the person what algorithm they used to solve it and they said “brute force” and were expecting nested loops that under real world load would have been O(n^2).
I definitely don’t consider myself an algorithm expert, but my feedback was, and I shit you not, that I didn’t know ruby. I’ve been developing in ruby since 2006.
Anecdotes and all. Our industry’s interview process is flawed AF.
Oddly, I had a slightly opposite reaction to a similar experience. But, to be fair, it was mostly because of red tape.
I interviewed at Microsoft, got feedback something like, "you did pretty good, but you dont understand low level code enough for this team, you could do great somewhere else at the company."
Microsoft has a policy that you can interview only once per year. I didn't get to pick the team I interviewed for, and apparently they only interview for their own team.
So, I was basically told that I was good enough, but because of HR, I won't be hired.
That, for me, felt significantly worse than "sorry but you didn't get the job" generic feedback would have been.
Oddly, I had the exact opposite experience interviewing at Microsoft.
I blazed through all the questions the manager asked, and the manager told me I was the most talented person he'd ever interviewed and would definitely get the job, and then I didn't get the job, and got no further feedback. It was the most confusing interview process I'd ever been in.
I sent him to ask him if there was some sort of mistake, and he didn't even reply directly, just sent me back a message through the recruiter saying no, it wasn't a mistake.
Yeah, big company, lots of variation in the interview process. Ultimately, the hiring manager has final authority, but if someone came out strong against you for some reason, they might be loathe to override. But it does sound like a strange experience. Just consider it an anti-loop. (https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-goo...)
I have a handful of times. They we're quite insightful and entertaining, though mostly not helpful since most of time they were commenting on things that just weren't meant to be. "It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness; that is ~life~ interviewing."
Definitely a few times where I raised an eyebrow at obviously-not-HR-approved comments that made it through.
Only benefit these companies got from providing feedback was some word-of-mouth to my friends to interview there.
There's nothing in the company's interest to give feedback. It takes working time to compile this feedback and give it to the candidate. The candidate isn't going to interview at the company again until probably a year or more - if ever. And the company has a reputation risk if the candidate decides to revel this feedback and allege bias or ineffective interviewing.
The upside as others have mentioned is that good feedback means you may get to hire that person later (maybe not even at the same company, people remember you if you give good feedback, because it is so uncommon)
I’ve seen this and done this as a hiring manager at multiple companies.
If you are honest, clear, and direct, and your interview (key point) does a good job quantifying the candidate’s performance, and their expectations are well set before the interview, there’s little risk of a reputation hit.
I’ve had folks push back or disagree, but it’s pretty rare and I’ve never been worried about someone dragging the company into a spat.
The hiring process is a black box for a reason. The HR department's role is to protect the company first, not the employees, and certainly not prospective employees. If feedback can be interpreted as being discriminatory, or reflective of bad company culture in general, well, word gets around.
For much of the time, the reason people don't get the job is that there was someone marginally more qualified/attractive/likeable, or some combination of the three; the classic "there were many qualified candidates and we could only choose one" line in the rejection email.
That doesn't help the interviewee beyond telling them that it's a numbers game, but that's the truth.
I have done hundreds of interviews, and I used to do a very easy, basic comp sci test. The last question I would ask was, "Tell me about a book, cd or movie that you've read/listened to/watched that was interesting or excited you."
The point was to see if the person was engaging with the universe, not to judge their taste or anything else. You'd be surprised how many people get tripped up by this.
The worst answer I ever got was a guy who said the last album he bought was "Free Bird" (which is not an album), and was 40 years old at the time of that utterance. This person could honestly not think of one thing that excited him since then. He also ranted about Object Oriented Programming like it was a brand new thing.
The best answer I ever got, was a gentleman who was not the strongest candidate but was clearly intelligent. His answer was, "I know this is not a recent author, but I love Bukowski." And he spoke at length about his novels and poetry, and even was aware that our office was only a few blocks from where one of the pivotal scenes in one of his novels was set, and that after the interview he had actually scheduled some time away from his job to go there.
perfect answer
In my report to HR, I mentioned that he probably needed to study a little but was quite intelligent, but had fantastic enthusiasm for literature and that he was very engaging.
Of course, HR put an immediate stop to the thing with the reasoning that someone could say that their favorite book was the bible, and that could form the basis for a religious discrimination case.
This scenario of an interviewee answering with the name of a religious text is an interesting point; transparency in interviewing is a two-way street.
In a way, I can understand why people get tripped up on the "casual/lifestyle" question. Interviewees may not think of it as a casual question, but rather another question to weed out the desirables from the undesirables. So people may censor themselves or their honest beliefs because they want the job. Which is a position I totally understand.
The point was to see if the person was engaging with the universe, not to judge their taste or anything else. You'd be surprised how many people get tripped up by this.
Not surprised at all. You know your motivation; they don't. It probably causes lots of candidates to mildly panic as they try to decide what they can say that won't make them come across as too weird/boring/old/etc.
> Tell me about a book, cd or movie that you've read/listened to/watched that was interesting or excited you. [...] You'd be surprised how many people get tripped up by this.
Yeah, because they'd rather be shown to freeze up rather than have the conversation go like this:
Them: I actually really liked the album Mouth Moods. It's an album full of remixed songs and mash-ups, kind of like what Weird Al does.
You: Oh? I've never heard of that. Tell me about your favorite song on that album.
Them: Oh... uh.... it's a song called Bustin.
You: Bustin?
Them: Yeah it's... well, it's the song from Ghostbusters but chopped up and remixed.
You: So it's about busting ghosts?
Them: Uh... well... no. It's about how bustin... makes me feel good.
You: I'm sorry? What are you busting that makes you feel good?
Throwaway here, for obvious reasons, but I have to ask: is this a pisstake?
I've read this comment about half a dozen times over the past 12 hours or so and I just can't get over it.
Did you seriously grade whether people were "engaging with the universe" (WTF?) based on what their favourite book/CD/movie is and how much they enjoyed it?
Did you seriously dock points from a candidate who obviously didn't care about CDs, movies or books - because he couldn't remember the name of the last record he bought?
Has the thought ever crossed your mind that maybe he engaged with the world in other ways? Perhaps he would hike, or take his kids to soccer, or even play pool and darts on the pub on a Friday. Did you even bother to ask before dismissing this guy as some sort of sub-human degenerate?
Did you actually go home that night and Google Free Bird to see whether or not it was, in fact, an album, and felt a smug sense of superiority when you found out it was actually a longer-than-average single?
More importantly, did you seriously try to convince HR to hire a candidate who was, by your own admission, "not the strongest", because he had "fantastic enthusiasm for literature" and was "quite intelligent" (I'm guessing you based this assertion off of the fact that he read the poetry of Charles Bukowski, and therefore must, like you, be an intellectual).
Mate, I've got some news for you: the reason HR wanted you to stop asking that question most likely had nothing do with the possibility of a religious discrimination case - they either wanted you to stop basing your hiring decisions on batshit insane notions, or stop you making hiring decisions altogether.
I'm sorry mister or miss throwaway. You have (purposefully?) misinterpreted almost everything I've said in the weird, most twisted and evil way possible. You've made wild accusations without any knowledge of the situation and as such, this shall be our last interaction.
After the interview is done and the answer is a solid NO, as a company we have NO BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP with you. Any iota of effort we put towards you is essentially wasted effort, even if very minor.
What changes that discussion further is that there is a small, but still quite real, possibility of lawsuit, social media rant (as another comment mentioned), or even a disgruntled applicant shooting up the place.
(I believe Pres. William McKinley was shot by a disgruntled would-be bureaucrat who didn't get a job...)
A perfunctory if generic rejection is a safer choice. Short-list candidates who made it to a 3rd interview, or folks who we reached out and headhunted (but didn't choose) may be a different story, but those are rare edge cases.
> as a company we have NO BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP with you
I think this could be phrased as "we have the choice to have no business relationship with you." But it's not a good idea to straight up cut off candidates. We've had plenty of cases where we just didn't think we had the capacity to help a candidate get up to speed and thought if they worked somewhere else that could provide that to them then we could hire them 6 months to a year down the line. It's not the standard, but it's happened before.
In a vacuum that might be true, but software engineers know other software engineers, and there are plenty of forums for discussing hiring experiences, including HN. If a company systematically treats people they don't intend to go further with like crap, their reputation with other candidates will suffer. You'd like failed candidates to not talk shit about your company when their friend considers applying.
Not giving feedback though is not "treating them like crap" in fact the opposite is far more likely to be true (as interpreted by the non-hired candidate). You literally can't go wrong doing nothing.
You can do wrong - I do not reinterview with startups that do not give feedback at the end of the interview process. So, if you're a startup that's struggling to hire - good luck getting that candidate to come back in 6 months to a year when you're struggling. (Plenty of companies flip-flop on hire/no-hire as time goes on)
That's not doing wrong as far as the company is concerned, though. Harsh as it may sound, this is just another version of a customer going "I will take my business elsewhere!" and walking out of a store: the store couldn't care less, because your business is irrelevant. In the same way, "your" interviewing is entirely irrelevant, the only thing the company cares about is that they get applications from qualified folks, whether that's repeat applications or not. You not coming back in 6 months doesn't stop them from getting new applications from other folks with just as good a skill set as you.
Of course for you, personally, it sucks and you want to know how to improve, but for the company the very act of talking to you after your temporary relationship is over does come with the potential for incredible harm. It's unlikely, but a liability they have zero responsibility to take on. As far as companies are concerned, not interacting with anyone they don't have a business relationship with is solid business practice, and while applying, you're just an application; you're not someone whose education and growth path they are responsible for. You would be, if you got hired, but until then you are not their responsibility in the slightest and any unpaid, no-contract interaction between them and you is a liability to them.
Doing nothing is by far the smartest thing the company can insist on. Even if it sucks for us applicants.
Giving detailed feedback takes more time, and is inherently more risky than a timely, somewhat bland rejection letter. Candidates are much more likely to feel slighted when they are given specific criticism, which they may or may not agree with.
> After the interview is done and the answer is a solid NO, as a company we have NO BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP with you.
And plenty of companies don't even feel a candidate is owed that answer after they've made their determination. Of course it's a two way street and candidates will - and have been - doing the same thing to companies.
You have a business relationship with everyone you have a relationship with - you're a business. You're burning bridges with people in your industry - why?
You're right, but it's also not difficult for genuine, high-quality feedback to be taken poorly. You can tell someone that they're not as good at data structures or database design or scalable systems or whatever core job skill you needed them to be. That can be highly useful, actionable feedback.
It can also readily feed into a very different framing. It's rarely difficult for a candidate to decide that whatever core reason is a fig leaf and something more ego-preserving is the real reason. I think we've all had coworkers who didn't take feedback well. I've definitely known people to whom all feedback is personal attacks. It's also, unfortunately, well-known and well-documented that people share negative thoughts more often and more readily than positive thoughts.
So, you're absolutely right. The good word can get around! There may be more risk to trying than is obvious, though.
Why not formalize the process and include non-disparagement clauses that applicants must sign to receive feedback? Then risk of retaliation is reduced.
There are definitely options, but it's worth bearing in mind that contracts are for when for things go wrong. Are you willing to sue someone for saying something bad after getting post-interview feedback? Seems unlikely to help with bad PR, but I'm not an expert.
Legal might not be the right tools for this. Some industries (consulting, as mentioned by others) seem to have standardized ways to give feedback.
It would at least deter most people from acting on anger over feedback. Those who aren't dissuaded by the contract would have acted in anger even if they didn't receive feedback.
Not to be disagreeable, but have you considered that now a person would have two things to react angrily to - feedback they don't like and a contract attempting to silence them?
This seems to my rather inexpert evaluation like the sort of situation that, if possible, people and companies might consider avoiding. But obviously YMMV.
I agree. Looking back at my comment, I did phrase it in a way that made it sound like "the company has no choice but to do this"; that wasn't my intention.
Discrimination on the basis of the school you attended, your nationality/race/ethnicity, even what you choose to do in your free time, is likely to be behind more than a few rejections. "Culture fit" is a polite fig leaf to hide that.
No. most job offers are liberally padded to seek a massively overqualified candidate in the unrealistic hope of attaining one that hasnt gone to work for a much nicer competitor, or in order to give the interviewer and HR ample reasons to reject an applicant that arent pertanent to their manner or person (which would get them sued.) the latter is also effective in ensuring jobs that require an outside posting will always favor an inside candidate, or a nepotist's ringer.
I think you could tell them a little something about why you decided not to make an offer. But this is riddled with problems, sadly. For example, candidates often take it as an invitation to a debate. You can agree with the feedback or not, but you're not going to talk your way into an offer.
In sum, it's all downside with little upside. The lawsuit thing is a red herring, imo.
Got feedback, "you didn't really know anything about Ruby on Rails". I was a Rails developer at the time, but no questions were asked about Rails during the interview (asked me nothing but JavaScript). I mentioned that to the recruiter, but when a recruiter is calling you to tell you that you didn't get the job, that's not the time to lodge a protest. Since this was an internal recruiter for the company, I thanked him kindly for actually calling me instead of sending an email. That was a solid move in my opinion.
I applied and interviewed for an Angular position a few years ago. I was interviewed by a consultant doing work for the company while they built up their engineering team. He absolutely grilled me about .NET intricacies, including some of my favorites, "Where is the .NET GAC stored on the filesystem?" and "Why is n-tier better than MVC?".
Not surprising, they declined to move forward citing my inexperience working with .NET enterprise architecture. I could have told you them that from beginning and saved everyone a few hours.
.net + angular seems to be popular around here and I've been on the other side of that, knowing .net but rejected for not knowing angular (but plenty of experience with other frameworks).
The only time I've received real feedback was for a ruby job with a small project interview. Apparently I wasn't doing TDD because the tests and fixes were in the same commit. At least that kind of feedback let's you know you've dodged a bullet.
Ain't nobody got time for that. When I was hiring developers, I was conducting dozens of interviews based off of hundreds of applications. My goal is to hire people who can help me solve problems. Running an interview improvement service isn't something I have time for.
No, I'm not. They've invested their time, which is significantly more limited than yours at any company that's at a scale to be hiring, in jumping through your hoops. The least a decent person does is provide them with why it was for nothing.
And if your employer thinks you shouldn't be decent, quit.
You would probably find it easier to hire if your company gained a better reputation with prospective applicants. Having the courteous culture to give feedback is the sort of differentiator that applicants would value.
Because it would take time to write up the feedback and it would have to be reviewed by HR to ensure it is not phrased in a way that in violation of local laws. This is a large investment for a candidate that is not going to work for your company and from a business point of view, this time is better spend else where.
Meh. I've been told in a few cases that I'm "too old", which is legally actionable in my country. But suing is time-consuming and rarely productive--I suspect most of us just let it slide.
I have given it and will continue to give it. Some people do initially react badly to it. Heck, I've reacted badly to it sometimes. But that doesn't mean that it isn't helpful in the long run. My responsibility isn't just to my employers. It's also to my profession and my society, and to the extent I can help well-meaning people to improve, I'm glad to do it.
if it’s a phone screen i always tell then right at the end how i’m going to score them. in person i don’t because they have other ones to get through.
people here say no feedback because they had a bad experience once. meh. of course you’re going to get pushback some times. that’s part of it, not a thing to avoid at all costs.
Because giving good feedback is hard work, and candidates won't always take it well (even if they don't sue). If the employer has already decided not to hire you, there's just not that much in it for them.
For what it's worth, as an interviewer I'm happy to give feedback in person, at the end of the interview, if the candidate asks for it. It's much easier to do when you're both in the same room, and asking e.g. "is there anything you think I could improve on?" makes a positive impression either way.
If it's hard work, then that's a symptom of the reasoning behind a no-hire not being sound to begin with.
And there is plenty in it for them, as the candidate may want to apply a second time at a later point, having been made aware of and improved on the areas that were identified as needing improvement. They'll be more likely to re-apply to a company that gave the feedback than to a company that didn't.
It's hard work because then you'll have to explain and document the hiring proceedings, then sanitize it before sending out, with content that's actually actionable by the interviewee. What we put in internal candidate notes is very different than what should be sent out, and someone has to do that translation.
There's also plenty of reasons a candidate didn't get hired that not really immediately correctable or not even their fault. For the latter, we do provide feedback/explanations and try to keep in touch in hopes they apply again in a couple of years. But 80% of the time we really just don't want to see the candidate again. I'd say 10% of the time, we see the candidate again, but so far, even on reappearance years later, they get the same feedback from completely different interviewing committees.
I haven't read the article, but it is off-point to say no-one sues. History has no effect on what someone will do tomorrow - exposure is what companies try to limit.
The sueing angle kicks in when you do stuff like give feedback for folks who you think will take it well Vs keep it away from folks who give you a bad feeling or whatever. It is all exposure.
Almost in all the companies I have been at, there has been a big push to keep the interview experience uniform for all candidates. So you can't have hugely different loops setup for the same level for different candidates for example.
Fun fact: This is a main reason why as a company grows, you aren't able to get in with a wink and a nod anymore, even if you know 100% of the folks already there.
If noone has sued about feedback in the past 10 years, over probably millions of interviews, it’s a fairly safe bet that nobody will sue in the next 10.
That is not how expected utility works... theres a probability of being sued a d there's an impact of the event of being sued or bad mouthed in social media... even if the probability is low, the negative expected utility (expected loss) is still high because of the impact value ...
Not worth it.
I hate it when candidates put me on the spot at the end of the interview, because it feels like they're trying to get me to tell them (or at least hint to them) if they're going to get an offer or not. Even if that decision were wholly within my hands (it rarely is), I'm not ready to discuss it with them at that point. The other way it sometimes goes, if I do cave and give some feedback, is that they try to disprove me or show that they actually can do the thing I said they need to work on. It just ends up creating awkwardness, and doesn't benefit either of us.
When I interviewed at a FAANG company, I had multiple candidates do this to me after it was clear that their performance wasn't great. One person even asked me if they could interview with another team. This usually happened after it was clear that the candidate didn't perform very well. It was extremely frustrating for the reasons you mentioned. These were candidates that should have gone through multiple hiring cycles and known what the process is like, that I'm only doing the coding interview and recruiters and potentially hiring managers have final say based on my feedback.
It probably depends on the candidate pool, but I've had a few interviews where the candidate can tell they missed the bar, and genuinely just wants advice on how to work on it.
Definitely if they start trying to haggle, or pressure you into something, that's a hard pass, I'll say whatever bullshit it takes to get them out the door. I'm happy to help out the former at the expense of fielding the latter, though I can understand why not everyone is!
Why can't companies provide feedback iff the candidate agrees that the feedback is subject to NDA? Interview candidates already sign NDAs for the coding questions asked.
Granted those NDAs are always ignored (based on coding interview sites) but the NDA would at least provide the "protection" that these companies want. Then the companies benefit from having candidates actually improving and potentially coming back hirable.
Getting a 402 from an embedded https://plot.ly graph right at the top of the article. Given that article about 402 I read here a few days ago, it's cool to see 402 in the wild for the first time.
I write a form letter. If someone asks for feedback, I give it to them. Nothing's ever happened to me, but one of my colleagues once had a guy get very angry and say that he had, in fact, solved the problem and yell at him and then go write this angry Glassdoor review.
I guess I've got to thank this guy for any mild resistance to giving feedback that I have.
The sad answer for why my feedback isn't great, though, is that I can't bring myself to care about someone who is so far outside my Dunbar number. At the point where we've decided not to work with this person, they're just some rando. It's like if someone walked up on the street and asked me for feedback.
I mean, I try anyway, but I know I'm not doing the best job.
The key word in the title seems to be "engineer". I can't find a specific lawsuit relating to an engineer but there are plenty of lawsuits to be found.
When you do a google search for lawsuits related to hiring discrimination, you are far far more likely to find the cases that became publicized because they have merit. Journalists and other organizations don't tend to write headlines along the lines of "Google got sued by candidate for baseless claim of discrimination, but suit was quickly tossed out". It doesn't mean these lawsuits don't happen.
In fact, it's a huge PITA to defend youself when someone accuses you of discrimination. Imagine an engineer who isn't very bright, but doesn't think that of themselves. So you tell them that they didn't do well, but they disagree. And then they sue on grounds of discrimination. Now, you have to prove that you don't discriminate, which can be pretty hard to do.
It cuts both ways. Imagine you tell someone of a protected class "Hey, you did really well" and they don't get hired. What's worse, what if some non-minority gets hired.
You've just opened yourself to a mess proving that the reason you didn't hire one vs the other was because of experience.
I used to give feedback. Until one day when I gave feedback to a desperate alcoholic. They showed drunk up in the lobby of the office demanding a 2nd chance & I had to explain what the heck was going on.
That's not necessarily true. If the reason that the person is turned down is that they are massively over-reaching their experience then there is a good chance that they will experience the same rejection elsewhere.
If they want to take that on board, it's up to them and it might well be helpful moving forwards.
I will personally give people feedback if its tangible and reasonably objective but if someone just feels wrong, I think it is easier to say they were not a good fit and leave it at that.
I wonder if one has ever been successful in using the data access and protection laws (such as GDPR) to request access to his file and interview feedback.
I’m not sure if it’s ever been tested, but I’ve been told that the company I work for does require notes and such to be recorded in a way to make this possible and the company lawyers have said that he’s a candidate can do GDPR data requests to get their interview data and that it must be honoured. So it’s my understanding, at least if it’s a company in the EU, that they just legally comply.
Because America is a very litigious society and there will always be that ...one. Corporate protectionism will dictate to simply not say anything than take the risk.
I sometimes give feedback, but only if requested and, to be honest, only if the feedback request actually makes it through HR and to me.
What feels like a lifetime ago I went for an interview at Monzo, I think it'd recently renamed from Mondo. I thoroughly enjoyed the process - a kind yet thorough and revealing interview format. I didn't get the job - but it's not an exaggeration to say their feedback and the process changed my career. If somebody from there spots this; thanks :) (and I'm still sad I didn't get to work with you!)
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 325 ms ] threadIt if happened (and I'd bet it did many times), it wouldn't be public knowledge.
> Hey, guess what? IT’S ZERO! THIS HAS NEVER HAPPENED. EVER.
> As some of my lawyer contacts pointed out, a lot of cases get settled out of court, and that data is much harder to get.
It seems like this is the best possible methodology (Lexis Nexis + survey of labor lawyers) that one can ask for.
Even if it was settled, surely the initial complaint would be public?
It's a very natural thing for people to ask about. And answering questions is also pretty natural. The notion that it happens approximately never strikes me as something that needs a lot more evidence than your personal experience.
* 69.7% of rejected candidates receive no feedback
* Of those that did, 77.3% said the feedback wasn’t useful
That leaves 6.8% of rejected candidates receiving useful feedback, which sounds quite plausible to me. In reality “risk of getting sued” is over simplified. If you want to give feedback to candidates, you can choose between two options. Just do it (and risk getting sued), or have your feedback legally vetted. The number of people receiving useful feedback is so small that it’s entirely plausible that those cases mostly represent the employers who choose to accept such an expense when rejecting candidates. The author makes no attempt to explain why they think such risk aversive behaviour is not the cause of the lack of lawsuits, instead jumping to the conclusion that the aversion is unnecessary.
The other half of the headline claim (regardless of any debate about its technical accuracy) is spurious at best. Any plaintiff would know that the threat of filing a discrimination case is leverage in a settlement negotiation. Without knowing how many settlements of that nature take place, it’s not possible to draw such a conclusion.
Finally, the authors methodology is questionable. A survey (especially one that doesn’t report its sample, or methodology) is not sufficient to draw the conclusion “never”. Putting aside the matter of out of court settlements, you’d need to perform a rather extensive study of case law to draw such a conclusion. Certainly something more than “had a quick look, didn’t find anything”.
[0] https://www.thebalancecareers.com/must-employers-tell-applic...
It doesn't have to be useful feedback for somebody to sue over it. But even if it were, I still don't see how your point makes sense. Let's say there are a million software developers in the US. Let's assume they change jobs every 3 years and do 3 interviews when they do change. That's 68,000 things that people could sue over. Even if one in a thousand actually reaches the lawsuit stage, that's over a thousand lawsuits over the last 20 years.
I agree "never" is too strong, but I think this search puts a plausible upper bound on the rate of lawsuits.
There’s no legal definition of “sue”. You can’t go to court and file “suing documents”. If you define “sue” as to make a legal claim against somebody, then it’s immaterial whether they do that via a letter from a lawyer, or by serving them documents to appear in court.
https://lmgtfy.com/?q=legal+definition+of+sue&s=d
https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/sue - "To initiate a lawsuit or continue a legal proceeding"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sue - "to seek justice or right from (a person) by legal process" (all the letters and negotiations up and until a suit has been filed is not the legal process); "to take legal proceedings in court".
If somebody hired lawyers to negotiate with another party to pay them damages, under threat of a lawsuit, I’d say that would commonly be described as “suing” or “getting sued”.
If an employer says “I don’t provide feedback to candidates for risk of getting sued over it”, they are absolutely referring to the risk associated with providing that candidate said feedback. Which includes both lawsuits and out of court settlements. So regardless of what you think the common usage is, that’s certainly how it’s used in this situation. Otherwise you could just tell said employers “you never have to worry about getting sued, because you can just pay the settlement lol...”.
Yes, that is what that means in the English language.
i.e. No ships ever sink if all you can see are the floating ones.
As some of my lawyer contacts pointed out, a lot of cases get settled out of court, and that data is much harder to get.
Anecdotally I've heard of and worked for companies that have been sued due to bias or perceived bias in the interview process. I have not heard of anyone suing or getting sued for feedback on technical interview performance, but in most cases there would be no basis for a candidate to sue.
That said I think the feedback suggestions are really off base unless the person writing the feedback personally knows the candidate. All of the suggestions are in the vein of "you clearly don't know X, you should learn it", which is fine if a candidate is actually completely unfamiliar with a topic. But the more common case, especially with basic CS stuff like Big O notation as used in the example article, is the candidate is familiar and got it wrong due to nerves, being rusty or interview time pressure. The same goes with the suggestion to recommend or buy a book for the candidate. Unless you are completely sure the candidate does not own the book already this is a terrible idea. Imagine how demoralizing buying, or even recommending, the candidate a book that they already owned and studied pre-interview could be.
I'm pro no feedback, but if the candidate absolutely insists I think feedback should be direct and based on the candidates interview performance, not perceived judgement of their skillset or knowledge (even if this is what most employers are trying to get from interviews). For example...
"You reached a working brute-force solution but did not solve the problem optimally. Here is a link on leetcode or hackerrank and a geeks for geeks solution to help you practice the problem."
"You did not come up with complete solutions to 2 out of 5 questions, even if given more time you were on the right track. Leetcode more and come back in 6 months"
But no one is that direct with interview feedback because the same set of leetcode questions that everyone asks are "company trade secrets". The feedback suggestions I gave are also not particularly tactful, but they are more useful given the current state of most tech interview process. I've learned a lot more about becoming a good interviewee from Blind and Hackernews than from any employer feedback. Richard Geldreich also has good insight into how the process works for senior candidates, and some of the political games that happen during the interview process that make any feedback even more of a joke.
https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/newsroom/release/
Parsing out which ones specifically are about hiring is a little trickier, but they're in there.
Until then, there is no incentive for employers to spend time formalizing and providing that feedback.
If a review's only advice to management are: "Continue doing what you're doing!", "keep up the good work!" or "make sure our awesome culture isn't diluted as we grow!", then they're fake.
If a review's only cons are reframing the cons left my legitimate reviewers as sour grapes by someone who can't handle fast-paced environments, startups, or responsibilities that aren't clearly defined, they're fake.
But the biggest red flag is positive reviews left in succession over the period of a few days to a month.
Much like Amazon reviews, it seems that the only reviews you can glean worthwhile information from are the bad reviews.
When five people say that their work environment is shit, there may be something to it.
But really, if your reasoning was robust, it would work in both directions. I don’t think you’d agree with the statement “if five people say that their work environment is great, there may be something to it”. The system can be (and is) gamed in both directions, and there are people who have incentives to do so in either direction, for both “justified” and “unjustified” reasons. Any reason you come up with to be skeptical of a good review also applies to a bad one.
Perhaps you're referring to other channels of communication, but I'd much rather have a rejection call than no contact at all. Corporate ghosting is much more sadistic.
edit: I'll argue instant feedback is even more expensive and risky. It's not coordinated, potentially duplicative, may impact/contaminate later rounds, and may not be complete or representative of the interview as a whole. Engineers aren't known for being naturally HR/legal-compliant, and having multiple expensive engineers spend time doing things not in their typical skillset that's typically done by a single resource that specializes in said skillset doesn't sound cheaper at all.
...Or, you know. Don't be that guy. Candidate, candidate, candidate--depersonalizing language for depersonalized processes. How about person? These are people you're talking about. They matter more than your recruiter's cattle-call throughput, each and every one of them.
Have some empathy, my dude. Or at least some enlightened self-interest, for someday will be your day in the barrel.
I'll happily give advice, feedback, mock interviews, and other sorts of help on my own time in more appropriate environments. When it's company time, it's just business.
Be decent.
You can't expect a business to feed the hungry, cure the sick, and house the poor out of the goodness of their hearts because these are people that spent a couple hours of their day with you. There are more appropriate institutions for charity.
And why are you stanning so hard for a process whose bloodless mind would bleed you dry and kick you to the curb for a nickel? Was Steinbeck really that right?
As a hiring manager, you're unlikely to be on the clock. And even if, I am somewhat certain that you could come up with good justifications for giving feedback if anybody asks, which nobody will.
It seems to be a specific disease of middle management to feel the need to demonstrate their "professionalism" by going out of their way to deny their humanity. At Wall Street, they buy ugly but expensive clothes for this purpose. But I guess on the West Coast you only have the Gordon Gecko playbook to fall back on.
I used to work at a branding agency, and it was interesting to see how risk averse middle management was: ideas for product names tend to only be good if they evoke some sort of not entirely pure concept. Think of "Plan B", "Virgin", or "CockroachDB". These would always get shot down by middle management as "unprofessional". Go a level up and people are far more open to be human. I don't know if they are just more self-assured and therefore willing to trust their instincts, or if the selection process for higher management actually works quite well.
The answer is that they'll leave negative reviews, tell people to avoid your company or decimate any goodwill your company might have. I have in the past left scathing reviews on Glassdoor and was on some occasions the first one to drop my experience. Because after long projects or a company promising to get back in touch, they decided to instead ghost me or make me do ridiculous tricks for the application process.
If you view something as a business transaction, then you should know one of the worst things you can do in business is spurn the person you're working with.
I naturally left a scathing review for that place, but Glassdoor removed it (of course).
Either something like this is being up collected and articulated up through the decision points in the hiring process, or the decisions are being made on a fuzzy basis that can't even be explained internally, which presumably represents a risk that decisions couldn't be properly justified should a candidate suspect discrimination and pursue a claim.
(This is especially true for any kind of exercises, btw. If an employer asks me to do some, I am going to screen them on whether they have (a) complete reference solutions with (b) numbers on how long it took to complete each and why they're confident those numbers are reliable(c) a written rubric for evaluating candidate solutions that (d) they'll agree to share with me when we're done.)
The pursuit of protit over courteousness is bound to happen when positive courteousness has a negligible and potentially negative impact on profit.
In fairness I received feedback I didn't get the position because I was too chatty from a hr person who told me to act more chatty because qualified candidates on paper were failing for being too quiet. I kinda wished they didn't provide feedback because I have an opinion on the internal culture that would make me avoid them in the future.
I'd be so happy simply hearing feedback on whether I should bother with the company again.
"You were barely beat out by another candidate, we hope you apply again next time!"
"You are not a fit for this company, don't try again"
If this is true and if the company is half competent they'll be reaching out to you proactively next time, not hoping you might see the position and think to apply :)
Do companies really want that? Presumably they didn't hire the candidate because they believe better candidates exist. Why invest in someone if there are better candidates readily available?
That's one reason I hate the "just hire the best person" argument against diversity; usually "the best person" is entirely non-obvious.
Especially when interviewing for non-intro-level stuff...
I suppose if you're thinking exclusively about a short-term benefit to the company alone without considering the impact to the candidate, the wider ecosystem and culture in general then it wouldn't make sense to take the risk.
I applied to one company and got a response back which was effectively "we really like you as a candidate, but it doesn't seem like you would be the right fit for this job / it doesn't seem like the interests you expressed in your interviews [which they correctly restated] matched up well with the duties we would have you perform. We will likely have jobs opening up which would align with what you like and you will be on the shortlist of candidates if you apply for those". Was it truthful? Who knows, but it left me feeling happy about how things went and I would consider applying there again.
Similarly, earlier on in my career after taking a few CS classes I applied for a different job, and the response was effectively "You are smart but you don't have the skills we require yet which are [x, y, z]. Come back when you do". What they said was true and I appreciated the feedback.
Contrast that with the myriad companies I applied to and never heard a response back from or didn't get a response back for many months from. I will never apply to these places again because it is clear that they don't respect prospective employees enough to even send a perfunctory email. Boiler plate rejections aren't as irritating but they are definitely still irritating. If you don't provide reasons for not hiring then employees will construct their own reasons, and they may not be true and / or favorable towards your company.
They didn't hire you now, but might be able to hire you in the future because you would maybe apply again (assuming you get passed the "we already didn't hire this person" filter)?
With all the risk, that doesn't seem like much of a payoff to the company, to me.
(Though I am glad you got feedback you considered valuable, and I think it's cool that the companies did that)
Reputation matters a lot.
I'm a .Net developer. In my area there is a well known company that hires a lot of .Net devs. I heard from 2 people that .Net devs are basically treated as 2nd class citizens (after Delphi devs). So now I will not consider applying there. I don't know if they would want to hire me, but I have nothing to gain finding out.
It’s not you, it’s me
Sometimes it’s no one’s fault and it’s simply a bad fit.
And of course like you say, people aren’t taught how to evaluate feedback and they may actually contest what is a courtesy in an adversarial manner and thus make things so much worse.
Anyway, the way to avoid negative reactions and defensiveness from candidates is to practice giving feedback in a way that’s constructive. We’ll cover this next.
Edit: Just for context on the interview—they had me do a take home assignment in Django, which I had never worked in. Was desperate, so I learned Django and completed it in a week. Went onsite and their whole office was a one tiny, dated swelteringly hot room. The interview was mostly around a bunch of basic syntax stuff, and had me implement merge sort. Didn’t hear from them at all for a month so I wrote on Glassdoor about it.
That's the problem, though - you're trying to make a hiring decision on hopelessly incomplete information, and so it will come down in large part to gut feeling. And the moment you admit to using some non-quantifiable feeling as a basis for not hiring someone, you open yourself up to claims of some form of discrimination.
It's all around safest to just stay quiet.
I don’t know which way it tips, but looking at just the potential damage of providing feedback seems insufficient.
What I’m getting at is, there will always be bad apples, or people who react in a way that damages your organization. But not providing useful feedback to people who ask for it simply because one person went crazy is punishing a lot more people because of that one. Who knows if all of their negative karma ends up being worse in the grand scheme of things?
I personally avoid applying to places that other engineers tell me to avoid because I trust their opinion more than I trust a company selling me the highlight reel in an interview. If a trusted engineer said he got a rejection in an interview, asked for feedback, and none was given, I’d avoid that place too.
Most people, ESPECIALLY people who ask you for feedback, do not want feedback. They want to get in a fight with you.
Edit: I don't remember ghosting anyone personally in either setting, but it's happened to me plenty. Getting upset about it just means you're new to the experience.
> Then maybe there can be a system that provides a disclaimer where they waive all ability to sue or otherwise get into a fight with you.
This ain't gonna help though, because it's not particularly useful at preventing the damage that these companies are afraid of, so it's not really going to tilt the existing balance.
Perhaps companies are just behaving too conservatively, and there is room for interviewing platforms to improving the hiring process by giving the helpful feedback that applicants crave.
Here in Texas, at least, that sort of thing does not seem like something that would ever be a real legal risk. This is a right-to-work state; I figured it’s pretty hard to get sued here.
The advice you will get on HR side is because no binding arb. agreement is in place you are exposed to full litigation efforts including attorney fees.
These can involve disparate effect or implicit bias - which can be difficult to defend against.
I've been interviewing candidates for more than 15 years (for PhD /RA positions and then for Engineering) and every time I've given honest feedback, candidates just get into an argument on why they think the feedback does not apply to them...
It is just not worth it. If I want to know how am I at certain skills... I test myself in a less "charged" environment.
The data I've seen suggests you're totally wrong about this.
I work at a company in the recruiting space. My primary role is interviewing technical candidates, and we provide very detailed feedback to candidates of all levels, regardless of whether or not we move forward with them.
People consistently tell us they love the feedback that we provide - in fact, people say the feedback we provide is one of the best parts of their experience with us.
The application process was partially automated, with multiple human reviewers that provided detailed scoring on the applicant’s performance.
Initially, we provided a score breakdown to applicants, but we turned this off within a few weeks after a cascade of hostility.
"Based on our interview we think you would really benefit from studying up on data structures and algorithms. If you want to study this stuff on your own, many people find (link) and (link) useful. But there's also (link) or (link) books available on amazon that we've had people recommend."
Or: "We were impressed by your spoken communication skills, but sometimes you seemed to struggle to remember specific technical terms for some of the concepts and areas we discussed...."
The feedback emails themselves are assembled from a mix of interviewer notes and reused snippets for comments we give frequently. This sort of stuff has been very time consuming for us to prepare. At the volume of candidates we interact with, we think its definitely worth it. But its possible that no feedback is better than bad feedback, and most organizations might not have the time to write good feedback to candidates.
But I can say with confidence that almost everyone really appreciates the feedback we send. While its easy for senior people to find work at the moment, there's lots of junior people out there sending dozens of resumes for every call back. Receiving rejection after rejection from companies (or worse, being ghosted) without even being told what you're doing wrong is a really awful experience.
Detailed feedback can mean a lot of different things. Recruiters always think they're giving people detailed feedback. That's nothing compared to an honest code review.
Bearing in mind that code reviews often cause tension even in fully employed people, it's hard to imagine they're always well received by job seekers.
Once you've been a hiring manager and reviewer long enough, it becomes obvious that, while the intent behind giving feedback is good, the reality of it is messy, and provides no consistent upside to the company.
They want to explain themselves. There is a difference. What you consider an argument or fight is just a Hail Mary, almost an involuntary recovery attempt, for some.
Accepting feedback without trying to dig your way out of a hole or justify your actions is a sign of maturity.
> Most candidates finish the coding section in 40 minutes. You took 60 minutes.
> In the system design part of the interview, the candidates we hire talk about SLA requirements.
Facts. No interpretations.
I am not even telling the person what they should do.
How did I find all of this out? Over A month later, they called me back.
This was after I had been strung along by the business owner and the guy that interviewed me for over a week where they were going to make a final decision about hiring me..and then nothing. They couldn't be bothered to return my phone call or respond to any emails.
They left a message that I had to schedule an appointment with the guy that interviewed me to basically interview me again.
I, of course, never called them back, but sent both of them a nasty email telling them to fuck off in so many words.
I never thought I would be ghosted like this from a potential employer.
Get used to it. It sucks but if I got upset like I used to when a company ghosts me (I'm not just talking about after initial phone screens but even after lengthy on-site interviews), I'd be dead from the stress by now. It happens so often these days. Some companies behave decently but it seems that many more companies are following the lead of recruiters and behaving like jerks.
I'm sorry but that's just ridiculous: we give every applicant we speak to feedback and not once has anybody "got into a fight with us".
They don't have to provide feedback, so they don't have to take the risk if they don't want to.
Don't really think your comparison was fair.
So, your employer does give feedback to candidates on request? It must be difficult for you to find places that are acceptable to you to work, since very few companies typically give feedback. Or do your friends just not usually ask for feedback and as a result that clause on your criteria never trips (i.e. the company wouldn't have given feedback, but since your friend didn't ask, you don't strike it off your list)?
A good typical whiteboard interview naturally includes hints, feedback, and collaboration. After several hours of it, we have a very good idea of how well they may respond to feedback from members of our organization.
Honestly, I love giving feedback. I love helping candidates be better at interviewing. Bad interviews are painful to the interviewer too. I'm out of a small market so people and word gets around.
If it really isn't their fault they didn't get the job, we try to make that very very clear. It really sucks when we have to pass up on someone who absolutely killed the interview because someone else did better.
The harsh reality is, many people that don't pass on the interview are people we do not want in the industry. The good ones we give every hint and help we can.
There's also more tactical ways of extracting feedback from companies rather than directly asking for it. We can't tell you about how you did well after rejection, but we can talk about what our expectations are during the interview; put two and two together. I've noticed the good candidates that are serious about improving their interviewing do it, and from the company side, it's a strong signal they're not trying to contest a decision.
Food for thought, when was the last time you gave a company feedback on their interview process? I've traded feedback for feedback quite successfully many times when I was interviewing.
It's pretty bold of you to claim your interview can accurately qualify candidates across the entire industry.
Maybe you have found an interview that works for most companies? There's chests of gold waiting for you if you have.
These are the candidates that can't FizzBuzz or even write a line of code and/or are humongous asshats.
Interviewer: you have great interpersonal communication but I think you need a bit more knowledge in python techniques XYZ. I like being up front and transparent, and the python stuff is a big deal to us, so although you had a great set of traits, we want someone stronger in python.
Me: Thank you for giving me a clear indication on what was important, where I was strong, and most importantly, for not giving me a “we’ll call you if we want to move forward” response. I highly respect you for not wasting my time unnecessarily.
A lot of software developers call themselves engineers without even having taken physics 101!
And even in places where it does, like Texas, I've never heard of it being applied to software. Like Dell doesn't require a degree for their engineer positions.
I think if I introduce myself as a lieutenant, people will think I am brave and action-oriented. But that would be silly because I am not a military/police officer. Words have meaning, just because engineer sounds cool you shouldn't call yourself an engineer unless you are and actual engineer.
Surely a reasonable person with good critical thinking skills can look at one of those "rampages" and recognize it for what it is.
It used to be common knowledge that doctors should never say they're sorry, for the same reason (fear of lawsuit). Then research showed that apologizing actually reduced the number and severity of malpractice lawsuits.
I see plenty of people attacking tech company interview processes on social media already, without being provoked by honest feedback. I'm having trouble imagining how feedback could make a person more angry.
Usually the blowback to the company hits marketing/legal/HR. Gathering and delivering feedback takes work. It's really politically expensive to explain why you're going out of your way to do work to cause other departments to do work for the sake of tech community altruism, especially right after it just burnt you. Giving career advice to strangers after an interview isn't the norm in any other field.
I don't really care if the candidate tries to sue the company. I don't work in legal, that's mostly not my problem. But if legal doesn't want to deal with it and ends up being a pain in my ass, yeah, I'm dropping the practice.
It was a whiteboard session on how to manage scheduling and reporting progress/success/failure information for long-running jobs to a frontend UI... which is something I had been specifically doing at my previous company for a year, and have done many times in many ways before. I took some lessons about communication and focus from it, but in my mind it showed that either that section's interviewer was not very good at evaluating candidates, or some other reason was the real reason and they chose to voluntarily tell me something else as a cover instead.
I'm assuming the former, because I never asked nor expected a specific reason for rejection - no cover was necessary. Finding out just frustrated me further - I really wanted that job, and of course you can't go back saying "Maybe someone else should give that section? I think I'm really good, trust me, the guy you just rejected!"
you monitor candidates social media post interview? quite disturbing trend if so.
Fear of the occasional keyboard ninja is not a rational reason for giving every single job applicant a worse experience.
Not to mention that generally they end up looking worse than you do, and you've probably done the rest of us a favour by outing them as an asshole (I'm assuming you were respectful and constructive in the feedback that you gave).
I wish more people would give real, actionable feedback on interviews.
Assuming Microsoft actually measures this stuff, that's kind of surprising to me. I've never placed much weight on being able to write a program on the spot.
I don't disagree, and personally I hate in person coding exercises, but if you keep the question simple and allow the candidate to code in their native language, something fizz-buzz like will go a long way in weeding out the people who have languages on their resume but can't code.
At our company we offer two simple coderpad tasks to be done in advance with no supervision or pressure - write a linked list in CPP and solve a simple puzzle in Python. You pay attention to the candidates who use templates, destructors, smart pointers, even if they make mistakes those are the ones you probably want to hire.
Maybe I don't know enough C++ to understand this, but I don't understand why using fancier features would make you like the candidate more when they are making mistakes. Unless you ask them to write a templated linked list, why would you grade them for automatically deciding to write one (and then making a mistake while doing so)?
Trying to understand the thought process here since I have been on the receiving side of some of these "Look I used the cool feature!" candidate programs in Python, and they often make pretty bad mistakes while using said advanced features. That personally marks them down slightly in my estimation, but curious to know your view is the opposite.
Meta: Maybe the problem with hiring via takehomes/code samples is precisely exemplified by the above discussion.
It's not about cool features. It's about using the correct modern features which make the code safer and easier to follow.
Templates are a relatively advanced feature but trivial to write for such a case and I'm looking for a candidate who understands containers are typically generic and knows how to add the two lines. I take it as a marker of experience.
There's no excuse other than inexperience or old fashionedness to not use smart pointers.
Destructors are also a sort of minimal knowledge because they show that a candidate thinks correctly about memory management.
There isn't really a score to what we do. And in all honesty the first few times we gave the test I didn't really know what to look for, this is my first time from the other side. But it isn't too much to expect a competent cpp programmer to know these things and I'm looking for candidates who are willing to use the open ended opportunity to flex their muscles, provided their code is well structured and doesn't have severe, obvious bugs. I don't claim that this is perfect but it seems suited to screen for the basic kind of knowledge we look for. These are not entry level positions either.
The best part about it? I was already a full time employee at Microsoft. I just wanted to switch teams. I still had to do a full interview loop with the team and well... I didn't get the job.
In terms of people I've hired, if they can solve and code things in real time on a white board, then they can definitely do even better with more time and research.
Everyone does better with research, trial, and error. That's not unique. What's unique is problem solving on your feet in a foreign environment. I want those people.
Better? Sure. Not everyone can go from 0 to competent in a new area within a reasonable time frame.
Luke Hohmann, author of The Journey of the Software Professional, advises to give such feedback. I've endeavored to do so.
FWIW, though I've been insulted and hazed and ghosted many times, I've yet to be given constructive criticism.
A few times I've been told why I didn't "pass". One guy was upset that I didn't favor aspects (a la Spring). Another was disappointed by my answer for how to resolve a hypothetical impasse ("try both").
That sort of thing.
Job interviewing is just dating. I accept that most people can't articulate why it's a "No." But I can't abide by the tortured rationalizations of poorly socialized geeks and accompanying general purpose meanness used to mask their own inadequacies.
Said more kindly, most people, and especially geeks, shouldn't be allowed to conduct interviews unsupervised. It's a teachable professional skill like any other. Asking the unprepared and unsuited is just cruel to all parties.
If you get fired four weeks in to your internship, because no amount of coaching from the senior employees is worth the investment by the company.... that’s a tough situation to be in. It’s pretty late at that point to start looking for another internship for the summer.
And if you’re the kid’s supervisor... that’s not a fun conversation to have.
The gotchas are ridiculous.
If an interviewer googled the question - why do I need to know the answer?
I recently had an interview and I spent _literally_ over an hour trying to figure out the algorithm or a mathematical function to solve it and I finally got to the point that I gave up.
I asked the person what algorithm they used to solve it and they said “brute force” and were expecting nested loops that under real world load would have been O(n^2).
I definitely don’t consider myself an algorithm expert, but my feedback was, and I shit you not, that I didn’t know ruby. I’ve been developing in ruby since 2006.
Anecdotes and all. Our industry’s interview process is flawed AF.
Wonder how long ago this policy was in place because when I interviewed last year I was able to interview with multiple teams.
I blazed through all the questions the manager asked, and the manager told me I was the most talented person he'd ever interviewed and would definitely get the job, and then I didn't get the job, and got no further feedback. It was the most confusing interview process I'd ever been in.
I sent him to ask him if there was some sort of mistake, and he didn't even reply directly, just sent me back a message through the recruiter saying no, it wasn't a mistake.
Definitely a few times where I raised an eyebrow at obviously-not-HR-approved comments that made it through.
Only benefit these companies got from providing feedback was some word-of-mouth to my friends to interview there.
On accepts never because people worry about awkward future colleague relationships.
I’ve seen this and done this as a hiring manager at multiple companies.
If you are honest, clear, and direct, and your interview (key point) does a good job quantifying the candidate’s performance, and their expectations are well set before the interview, there’s little risk of a reputation hit.
I’ve had folks push back or disagree, but it’s pretty rare and I’ve never been worried about someone dragging the company into a spat.
For much of the time, the reason people don't get the job is that there was someone marginally more qualified/attractive/likeable, or some combination of the three; the classic "there were many qualified candidates and we could only choose one" line in the rejection email.
That doesn't help the interviewee beyond telling them that it's a numbers game, but that's the truth.
I have done hundreds of interviews, and I used to do a very easy, basic comp sci test. The last question I would ask was, "Tell me about a book, cd or movie that you've read/listened to/watched that was interesting or excited you."
The point was to see if the person was engaging with the universe, not to judge their taste or anything else. You'd be surprised how many people get tripped up by this.
The worst answer I ever got was a guy who said the last album he bought was "Free Bird" (which is not an album), and was 40 years old at the time of that utterance. This person could honestly not think of one thing that excited him since then. He also ranted about Object Oriented Programming like it was a brand new thing.
The best answer I ever got, was a gentleman who was not the strongest candidate but was clearly intelligent. His answer was, "I know this is not a recent author, but I love Bukowski." And he spoke at length about his novels and poetry, and even was aware that our office was only a few blocks from where one of the pivotal scenes in one of his novels was set, and that after the interview he had actually scheduled some time away from his job to go there.
perfect answer
In my report to HR, I mentioned that he probably needed to study a little but was quite intelligent, but had fantastic enthusiasm for literature and that he was very engaging.
Of course, HR put an immediate stop to the thing with the reasoning that someone could say that their favorite book was the bible, and that could form the basis for a religious discrimination case.
After that, I declined to do interviews anymore.
In a way, I can understand why people get tripped up on the "casual/lifestyle" question. Interviewees may not think of it as a casual question, but rather another question to weed out the desirables from the undesirables. So people may censor themselves or their honest beliefs because they want the job. Which is a position I totally understand.
Also, why did you even mention the enthusiasm for literature bit to HR?
Not surprised at all. You know your motivation; they don't. It probably causes lots of candidates to mildly panic as they try to decide what they can say that won't make them come across as too weird/boring/old/etc.
Yeah, because they'd rather be shown to freeze up rather than have the conversation go like this:
Them: I actually really liked the album Mouth Moods. It's an album full of remixed songs and mash-ups, kind of like what Weird Al does.
You: Oh? I've never heard of that. Tell me about your favorite song on that album.
Them: Oh... uh.... it's a song called Bustin.
You: Bustin?
Them: Yeah it's... well, it's the song from Ghostbusters but chopped up and remixed.
You: So it's about busting ghosts?
Them: Uh... well... no. It's about how bustin... makes me feel good.
You: I'm sorry? What are you busting that makes you feel good?
Them: Never mind, forget I said anything.
Did you seriously grade whether people were "engaging with the universe" (WTF?) based on what their favourite book/CD/movie is and how much they enjoyed it?
Did you seriously dock points from a candidate who obviously didn't care about CDs, movies or books - because he couldn't remember the name of the last record he bought?
Has the thought ever crossed your mind that maybe he engaged with the world in other ways? Perhaps he would hike, or take his kids to soccer, or even play pool and darts on the pub on a Friday. Did you even bother to ask before dismissing this guy as some sort of sub-human degenerate?
Did you actually go home that night and Google Free Bird to see whether or not it was, in fact, an album, and felt a smug sense of superiority when you found out it was actually a longer-than-average single?
More importantly, did you seriously try to convince HR to hire a candidate who was, by your own admission, "not the strongest", because he had "fantastic enthusiasm for literature" and was "quite intelligent" (I'm guessing you based this assertion off of the fact that he read the poetry of Charles Bukowski, and therefore must, like you, be an intellectual).
Mate, I've got some news for you: the reason HR wanted you to stop asking that question most likely had nothing do with the possibility of a religious discrimination case - they either wanted you to stop basing your hiring decisions on batshit insane notions, or stop you making hiring decisions altogether.
After the interview is done and the answer is a solid NO, as a company we have NO BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP with you. Any iota of effort we put towards you is essentially wasted effort, even if very minor.
What changes that discussion further is that there is a small, but still quite real, possibility of lawsuit, social media rant (as another comment mentioned), or even a disgruntled applicant shooting up the place.
(I believe Pres. William McKinley was shot by a disgruntled would-be bureaucrat who didn't get a job...)
A perfunctory if generic rejection is a safer choice. Short-list candidates who made it to a 3rd interview, or folks who we reached out and headhunted (but didn't choose) may be a different story, but those are rare edge cases.
I think this could be phrased as "we have the choice to have no business relationship with you." But it's not a good idea to straight up cut off candidates. We've had plenty of cases where we just didn't think we had the capacity to help a candidate get up to speed and thought if they worked somewhere else that could provide that to them then we could hire them 6 months to a year down the line. It's not the standard, but it's happened before.
Of course for you, personally, it sucks and you want to know how to improve, but for the company the very act of talking to you after your temporary relationship is over does come with the potential for incredible harm. It's unlikely, but a liability they have zero responsibility to take on. As far as companies are concerned, not interacting with anyone they don't have a business relationship with is solid business practice, and while applying, you're just an application; you're not someone whose education and growth path they are responsible for. You would be, if you got hired, but until then you are not their responsibility in the slightest and any unpaid, no-contract interaction between them and you is a liability to them.
Doing nothing is by far the smartest thing the company can insist on. Even if it sucks for us applicants.
Giving detailed feedback takes more time, and is inherently more risky than a timely, somewhat bland rejection letter. Candidates are much more likely to feel slighted when they are given specific criticism, which they may or may not agree with.
And plenty of companies don't even feel a candidate is owed that answer after they've made their determination. Of course it's a two way street and candidates will - and have been - doing the same thing to companies.
Yeah, but that also true if you give good constructive feedback with your rejections.
The "word" doesn't have to be bad, you know :)
It can also readily feed into a very different framing. It's rarely difficult for a candidate to decide that whatever core reason is a fig leaf and something more ego-preserving is the real reason. I think we've all had coworkers who didn't take feedback well. I've definitely known people to whom all feedback is personal attacks. It's also, unfortunately, well-known and well-documented that people share negative thoughts more often and more readily than positive thoughts.
So, you're absolutely right. The good word can get around! There may be more risk to trying than is obvious, though.
Legal might not be the right tools for this. Some industries (consulting, as mentioned by others) seem to have standardized ways to give feedback.
This seems to my rather inexpert evaluation like the sort of situation that, if possible, people and companies might consider avoiding. But obviously YMMV.
If the feedback can be interpreted in such a way ....
then the rejection is discriminatory.
Pure and simple.
"Culture fit" reasons are code for bias.
"Culture":
* national origin
* age
* religion
* gender
* sexual orientation....
... all protected classes, yet covered with the "culture fit" excuse to protect a company from being accused (correctly) of discrimination.
Discrimination on the basis of the school you attended, your nationality/race/ethnicity, even what you choose to do in your free time, is likely to be behind more than a few rejections. "Culture fit" is a polite fig leaf to hide that.
No. most job offers are liberally padded to seek a massively overqualified candidate in the unrealistic hope of attaining one that hasnt gone to work for a much nicer competitor, or in order to give the interviewer and HR ample reasons to reject an applicant that arent pertanent to their manner or person (which would get them sued.) the latter is also effective in ensuring jobs that require an outside posting will always favor an inside candidate, or a nepotist's ringer.
In sum, it's all downside with little upside. The lawsuit thing is a red herring, imo.
Even as a perm, I always got it if I wasn’t hired.
Not surprising, they declined to move forward citing my inexperience working with .NET enterprise architecture. I could have told you them that from beginning and saved everyone a few hours.
The only time I've received real feedback was for a ruby job with a small project interview. Apparently I wasn't doing TDD because the tests and fixes were in the same commit. At least that kind of feedback let's you know you've dodged a bullet.
Being decent is important.
And if your employer thinks you shouldn't be decent, quit.
If a company doesn't have the time to treat human beings like human beings, it's not a good company for which to work.
people here say no feedback because they had a bad experience once. meh. of course you’re going to get pushback some times. that’s part of it, not a thing to avoid at all costs.
For what it's worth, as an interviewer I'm happy to give feedback in person, at the end of the interview, if the candidate asks for it. It's much easier to do when you're both in the same room, and asking e.g. "is there anything you think I could improve on?" makes a positive impression either way.
And there is plenty in it for them, as the candidate may want to apply a second time at a later point, having been made aware of and improved on the areas that were identified as needing improvement. They'll be more likely to re-apply to a company that gave the feedback than to a company that didn't.
There's also plenty of reasons a candidate didn't get hired that not really immediately correctable or not even their fault. For the latter, we do provide feedback/explanations and try to keep in touch in hopes they apply again in a couple of years. But 80% of the time we really just don't want to see the candidate again. I'd say 10% of the time, we see the candidate again, but so far, even on reappearance years later, they get the same feedback from completely different interviewing committees.
The sueing angle kicks in when you do stuff like give feedback for folks who you think will take it well Vs keep it away from folks who give you a bad feeling or whatever. It is all exposure.
Almost in all the companies I have been at, there has been a big push to keep the interview experience uniform for all candidates. So you can't have hugely different loops setup for the same level for different candidates for example.
Fun fact: This is a main reason why as a company grows, you aren't able to get in with a wink and a nod anymore, even if you know 100% of the folks already there.
The impact would have to be astronomical. It's not.
> bad mouthed in social media
Which could happen anyway. And feedback might actually reduce the chances.
Definitely if they start trying to haggle, or pressure you into something, that's a hard pass, I'll say whatever bullshit it takes to get them out the door. I'm happy to help out the former at the expense of fielding the latter, though I can understand why not everyone is!
Granted those NDAs are always ignored (based on coding interview sites) but the NDA would at least provide the "protection" that these companies want. Then the companies benefit from having candidates actually improving and potentially coming back hirable.
social media and shame culture makes this silly to attempt.
Strangely, I've always gotten feedback, or at least "we decided not to continue", which is better than nothing.
I guess I've got to thank this guy for any mild resistance to giving feedback that I have.
The sad answer for why my feedback isn't great, though, is that I can't bring myself to care about someone who is so far outside my Dunbar number. At the point where we've decided not to work with this person, they're just some rando. It's like if someone walked up on the street and asked me for feedback.
I mean, I try anyway, but I know I'm not doing the best job.
For example, https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/newsroom/release/10-26-17.cfm
When you do a google search for lawsuits related to hiring discrimination, you are far far more likely to find the cases that became publicized because they have merit. Journalists and other organizations don't tend to write headlines along the lines of "Google got sued by candidate for baseless claim of discrimination, but suit was quickly tossed out". It doesn't mean these lawsuits don't happen.
In fact, it's a huge PITA to defend youself when someone accuses you of discrimination. Imagine an engineer who isn't very bright, but doesn't think that of themselves. So you tell them that they didn't do well, but they disagree. And then they sue on grounds of discrimination. Now, you have to prove that you don't discriminate, which can be pretty hard to do.
You've just opened yourself to a mess proving that the reason you didn't hire one vs the other was because of experience.
A company didn't think you are a good fit. That's it.
The criteria they used to evaluate that is totally different than the criteria other companies will use.
What is the point of providing feedback for a data point that does not correlate with other interviews?
If they want to take that on board, it's up to them and it might well be helpful moving forwards.
I will personally give people feedback if its tangible and reasonably objective but if someone just feels wrong, I think it is easier to say they were not a good fit and leave it at that.
What feels like a lifetime ago I went for an interview at Monzo, I think it'd recently renamed from Mondo. I thoroughly enjoyed the process - a kind yet thorough and revealing interview format. I didn't get the job - but it's not an exaggeration to say their feedback and the process changed my career. If somebody from there spots this; thanks :) (and I'm still sad I didn't get to work with you!)