Ask HN: When did corporate America become so flaky?

1) Any feedback is viewed with the fear, real or imagined, that it could lead to some sort of hiring discrimination claim.

2) There are too many people involved in the modern tech hiring interview process and they are perennially confused about their role in the process. Maybe the hiring manager thought their internal recruiter would send feedback. The recruiter thought the “talent acquisition specialist”would send the feedback. The talent acquisition specialist thought the recruiting software would do it.

3) Any technical position posted attracts a huge number of candidates, most of them completely unqualified. (I don’t mean “Go backend dev applies for Swift frontend job”, I mean person with no education or obvious relevant experience with a background in various MLM endeavors applies for a sr-level architect/engineering manager position. Sometimes there are hundreds of unqualified applicants for a single position.)

4) Candidates are ghosting companies just as much, and the recruiters/hiring managers get jaded.

5) The hiring manager — the person with, arguably, the most to lose from a poor candidate experience — probably does hiring the least of their major job responsibilities and just isn’t very good at it.

* Bonus #6 I forgot — if your LinkedIn profile sucks, and by “sucks” I mean doesn’t stand alone as a portrait of your skillset, fix that. Put a summary under each job you’ve held, have a paragraph in there about your strengths, goals, etc. I cannot count the number of times I’ve interviewed someone and been given the candidates “resume” only to find out it was a screenscrape of their linkedin profile that was completely useless, but that the candidate did upload a detailed, well-thought-out resume which our talent management software discarded for no discernible reason. Now, those are just the candidates I’m aware of - I imagine the number discarded by the recruiter based on a faulty assessment driven by the same data is much higher. *

Just my personal opinion, based on my experience as a hiring manager at a medium-sized tech company.

> 1) Any feedback is viewed with the fear, real or imagined, that it could lead to some sort of hiring discrimination claim.

My favorite is getting ghosted by the recruiter when asking for feedback after an onsite only to get an automated email a few days later asking to fill out a survey about their hiring process.

IMO, here's 4 partial explanations, that I may or may not be right about.

1) Companies fear being sued for discriminatory hiring practices. There is zero risk of being sued if you keep your mouth shut and don't communicate with candidates. There is a minor risk of being sued if you give any feedback, even if you don't intend any offense. Sadly, the legal culture means that the safest thing to do is ignore candidates.

2) I don't mean offense to anybody and this is obviously not true in anywhere near 100% of cases. But as a generality, the people who tend to gravitate towards a career in HR departments in today's world are useless and often petty people who have often never held a real productive job.

3) This is more noticeable, particularly in CURRENT_YEAR, but society has broken down in some ways due to current events as well as the media's business model of fear-mongering. Regardless of political stance, a lot of people are feeling scared and hopeless about the future and that has an impact on normal interactions.

4) This may be controversial on HN, but Corporate America learned during Occupy Wall Street that they can take heat off of the 1% by bending the knee and taking certain stances on certain social issues. Keeping the attention off themselves by having the correct politics and flying the correct colorful ribbons is about the only "ethical" issue they care about.

And I (and half of my company at this point) am the opposite. Except for the one day a week I'm in the office I'm permanently on do not disturb on teams chat except for my boss and the CEO, and teams calls are forwarded to voicemail with an "if you need to ask me a question, send me an email or request a meetingand send me an agenda. In an emergency call me on my real phone." Asynchronous communication for the win! Also set email rules. My favourite is any email I am just cc'd in to is automatically moved into my ignore folder (unless it's from boss or CEO). I have a job that requires being able to concentrate on a task for long periods and instant messaging and calls are absolute productivity killers.

Send him a slack/{insert app here} message instead, you are in no position to demand a response "in time" from anyone really. Many people prefer using real-time collab tools for a reason, and only check their email once or twice a day.