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If you failed a white board, you’d know it. If you aced the white board someone can ace it better.
We interviewed a lot of hiring managers/etc. while we were working on a previous business in the hiring space. As part of that, we asked them this very question. The fear of litigation was by far the biggest reason we heard, but there were some other popular reasons (mostly relating around conflict avoidance): * Notably, giving feedback feels like an opening for the candidate to submit a rebuttal instead of ending th…
While that's all very understandable, at the very least give some kind of generic rejection. This was many years ago, but one time I did an all-day onsite interview (~6 hours long) and I was ghosted and never heard from the company again. That infuriates me even to this day. At least give me some kind of news that it was a no.
I'm a software developer turned temporary recruiter for a startup (just hired last position yay!). The number one reason why I don't give feedback anymore is the candidate's response. It is almost universally negative. Candidates want to get into an argument about their skills or performance. Now, everyone gets a form letter, and I don't deviate from that.
Thank you for sending out a form letter. A form letter, email, whatever would be better than what I experienced in my last job hunt. It was silence after silence. Was the rec closed/filled? Am I even in the running or was I rejected early on and now I am just waiting for no reason? A lot of the companies used automated submission systems, which confirmed they received the resume, but they never sent out a notificatio…
Even 2-5 person companies will sometimes receive ~20-30 resumes a day for an open job, and 90% of them will be obviously inappropriate for the job even just from glancing at their resume.
It's a positive feedback loop: People have learned to "shotgun" their resume everywhere, and as a result even small companies have learned to process resumes as "efficiently" as possible (which often includes not sending responses to rejected candidates at that stage). This leads to more shotgunning, etc. etc.
Having said all that, The other angle that always nags me is the fact that our (in all the three companies I've been part of) interview process isn't a perfect measure. In theory, you may be able to crack it if you prepare for it and are well versed in full-stack engineering. In practice, this is just 5 hours of 5 different people trying to look for good signs and feelings and converge after. There just isn't enough information, so most of the time we work towards avoiding a false positive (which have been disastrous in the past). We have tried other mechanics around building a test project etc., but nothing stuck. Those just added a not more non-determinism compared to this model where we know what to expect. I've done more than a 1000 of these, so there are patterns I can fallback on.
If I were to start a company, I know how I'd want to hire: It will be just like finding co-founders. But that doesn't scale and probably becomes illegal when it goes beyond the founding members. I do like the doctor group models where everyone joining graduates to a full partner eventually and take a share of yearly profits until they work there: But our current world of software development that's highly leveraged on future performance (stocks), doesn't seem amenable to the same :(. But yes - It would be awesome to see if somehow we can replicate that model.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While that's all very understandable, at the very least give some kind of generic rejection. This was many years ago, but one time I did an all-day onsite interview (~6 hours long) and I was ghosted and never heard from the company again. That infuriates me even to this day. At least give me some kind of news that it was a no.
Not too many places will straight up ghost candidates that have done on-sites, that's pretty unusual. Sometimes they'll dangle candidates if they're waiting to hear whether their first choice accepts, but even then it's rare not to communicate at all once you've done an on-site.
If I've taken the time to do an in-person (or even a lengthy set of calls), then there really has to be something in it for me after they decline, or I won't apply with them again.
Also, if everything else seems like a match, my potential new mates and I hit it off, and they clearly need to fill the position, the vacuum left by a lack of explanation with the decline often leaves me wondering whether it didn't involve irrelevant (and often illegal) demographic bias. No way to really know, of course, but like everyone else, I play the probabilities.
Experienced this at a local tech company that will remain nameless. They're in the logistics space. They enable fast shipping for merchants. Did 10+ hours of a challenge project - something I would have charged $5,000+ for, including a channel-specific attribution model (with defense of my choice), a complete onboarding campaign flow with timing, and sample email creative, lead scoring model, and a bunch of pedantic…
Those things are a hard "no" for me.
10 hours of interviews... I might not like it, but at least it's symmetric. People at the company are putting their time in to the process as much as I am.
But with a job, kids, hobbies, volunteer work and so on, I just pass on companies that have day+ long 'coding challenges'.
I had an interview with Facebook and was eventually turned down. I asked for feedback at least twice, and even from a person on the inside that I know personally if they could get any from the recruiter. Nothing. Then a few days later they sent me an email asking for my feedback! I n/a'd everything and made sure to list all of my interviewers names.
prbly inconsequential .
fact is that you cannot do anything but move on after a rejection.
Experienced this at a local tech company that will remain nameless. They're in the logistics space. They enable fast shipping for merchants. Did 10+ hours of a challenge project - something I would have charged $5,000+ for, including a channel-specific attribution model (with defense of my choice), a complete onboarding campaign flow with timing, and sample email creative, lead scoring model, and a bunch of pedantic…
This company had me do an initial technical screen (2-hours of work) and expressed great interest in the work I did. They asked me to complete a follow on "work sample" which I promptly completed with extras (error handling, specs, etc).
After completing the work sample (a non-trivial amount of effort), they suddenly decided they weren't interested in me. I hadn't even talked with a person and they went from being "extremely excited" to "uninterested" after getting me deep into their process.
Apparently, the recruiter was pushing me through the steps and the technical team hadn't even looked at my resume - or even considered it worthwhile to schedule a call with me.
I wish I only had to apply for dozens of jobs.