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Why Do Employers Rarely Offer Explanations to Rejected Candidates?

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Re: Why Do Employers Rarely Offer Explanations to Rejected Candidates?

#151

Post by newjersey »

wildmusings wrote: post #147
newjersey wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. I guess I didn't articulate it well enough for the grand parent comment here. I guess we could make an exception for personal AND non-commercial diaries but if you make business decisions that affect me based on information you store about me, then I should have a right to see them. I'm also thinking about the rights of everyone including criminal (including terror) suspects to see (I am specifically not a…

This is a ridiculous idea to me. If I run a business, my internal evaluations of candidates and employees are no one's business but my own. They are my observations about the world, with the productive end of hiring better employees. Whether my decisions affect you or not is really not relevant; we make free decisions that affect other people all the time. I take issue with any claim that people have legally-binding…

OK, what about a compromise: you can keep your conclusions private, you only need to disclose to me the raw data you used to reach such conclusions. Is that better?

Re: Why Do Employers Rarely Offer Explanations to Rejected Candidates?

#152

Post by MillerMichael »

I once applied for company X back in 2014. I spend about 2 months on the application, conducting research, getting advice from friends, and doing my utter best to come up with a resume/motivation letter that would stand out. I didn't receive any feedback. What's more... when I called to asked about my application they pretty much got angry and sad: ''well, we receive a lot of application and don't have the time to respond to each application''. Till this day, I still can't get over it!

Re: Why Do Employers Rarely Offer Explanations to Rejected Candidates?

#153

Post by blubb-fish »

tyingq wrote: post #124
blubb-fish wrote: post #115

I am currently in the situation of playing the HR role for hiring a developer in our start-up - for which I am actually working as a Data Scientist. I not just almost always give a reason for why we decided against a candidate - I even often give advice which might be relevant for future applications. Why am I not afraid of a law suit? B/c the hiring process I designed is based on a couple of quick tests directly rel…

Do you make any attempt to interview for things are inherently subjective? At least for some positions, personality and culture fit might be important.

It might be tricky if person A is a better fit than person B - but B is at least slightly more competent than A.

In that case - if we would decide in favor of A - I guess I would skip that reason.

But if you design the testing sufficiently broad - then you not just get a very good insights of where an applicant's strength lie but also enough "reasons" to give for negative decision - which also are helpful for the applicant to improve.

Re: Why Do Employers Rarely Offer Explanations to Rejected Candidates?

#154

Post by bkovacev »

mdturnerphys wrote: post #43
bkovacev wrote: post #12

Nothing unknown was said in this article.

http://xkcd.com/1053/

While I agree about this - I never made fun out of anyone. I'm just saying it's common sense in corporate world not to reveal the info behind the rejection. It should be common sense for others. But I'm in no way making fun out of anyone.

Re: Why Do Employers Rarely Offer Explanations to Rejected Candidates?

#155

Post by tristor »

tomp wrote: post #117
tristor wrote: post #62

My experience has been the reason that I (and my peers) say nothing is because of a disconnect between knowledge and authority. I've interviewed thousands of candidates in my career and I almost always know before I finish up the interview whether or not we are going to bring that person in for another interview (at which point the team votes if we offer). More than anything else, the number one reason that an otherw…

Wouldn't that suggest that your job specs are rather lacking? I mean, instead of saying "Senior", you could just describe exactly what you expect and require in the candidate.

The issue there is because of the variability of meaning in the English language and the way job ads are written in general. Obviously my employer puts more than just "Senior" in a job ad, but it doesn't change the fact that companies everywhere put a laundry list of expected skills in their ads, so us doing the same doesn't provide any real filter mechanism. That's why we do technical phone screens.

Re: Why Do Employers Rarely Offer Explanations to Rejected Candidates?

#156

Post by PeterisP »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #90

We don't accept "paranoid about litigation" as an excuse when, say, a kid gets expelled for bringing a butter knife to school.

Don't we? If a kid gets expelled for bringing a butter knife to school and the given excuse is "paranoid about the litigation", then the general result after all the uproar is that the kid is still expelled and the policies stay in place, so de facto we do accept it and do keep doing things because of it.

Re: Why Do Employers Rarely Offer Explanations to Rejected Candidates?

#157

Post by cortesoft »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #49
cortesoft wrote: post #23

The reason is almost always "There was a better candidate"

This doesn't really describe large companies, which often aren't hiring to fill specific roles. If that was the only thing stopping them from hiring you, they'd just hire the both of you.

We had X number of openings, and there were X people who were better than you.
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