121–130 of 348 posts
But - for god's sake - give a 'yes or no' in reasonable terms.
So many 'good companies' have ridiculous hiring processes without any information to the candidates.
As a candidate, I've always preferred polite "thanks, but no thanks" responses in a timely manner. The other kind of feedback that I like is things like, "we need people with a different background / experience than you have." IMO, judgement feedback (you screwed up how you handle your yak shaving, or I don't think we'll get along with each other) is too subjective to be constructive. And, I get it. As someone who's…
I feel that most of the time candidates just want to hear something that puts the situation out of their control, and therefore wasn't merit based. It's always easier to hear "I'm breaking up with you because I'm moving for a new job and want to concentrate on my career" than "I'm breaking up with you because you're awkward around my friends and aren't interesting".
Perhaps it's not the rejection, but the energy in creating the next steps I need to take (more resumes, taking classes, new career, therapy, etc).
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I feel that most of the time candidates just want to hear something that puts the situation out of their control, and therefore wasn't merit based. It's always easier to hear "I'm breaking up with you because I'm moving for a new job and want to concentrate on my career" than "I'm breaking up with you because you're awkward around my friends and aren't interesting".
You really want to go through life thinking you’re competent at something? Honest feedback hurts but it’s how you grow. And if people cared at all about interviewees they’d give some semblance of honest feedback rather than “no thanks.”
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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.
The asymmetry is actually pretty funny if you think about what happens when a candidate declines an offer or ghosts a company. If you ghost, they’re likely going to continue to contact over multiple channels. Because they want an answer so that they can take next steps. Same as a candidate. If you say thanks but no thanks, they’re going to want to know why, is there anything they could have done differently, or try t…
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It's sort of complicated. I did a boot camp, 100 applications 3 interviews 0 offers, went back to school (Harvard, the real one not the extension school) and am currently doing the summer internship grind (30 applications 3 interviews 0 offers). But I'm CS.
Ugh. I hear that first step can be rough. I took a non-traditional path so it wasn't an issue for me. I didn't realize internships were so hard to get, though.
I think a lot of folks tend to only focus on the large, well known companies when applying to internships, which I think exacerbates the first problem. I've told some friends who are still in college to try and apply for places beyond the major Silicon Valley companies and that pretty much any company that they can think of 1) Leverages software engineering heavily 2) Has an internship program.
I think it'd be interesting to see a "wage-distribution" style chart of who gets internships in Fortune 500 companies. When I say that, I don't mean actual wage, but moreso "what percentage of engineering students are getting what percentage of internships" and similar questions.
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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.
This is a societal problem and not just employer/jobseeker. "Friends" and aquaintances do it now. Vendors/contractors/trades people do it. Only a matter of time before our pets ghost us too.
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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.
Yeah, that's the worst. Going through 5+ interviews and then not getting any communication afterwards. Just send a simple 'No', is that so hard?
When I did hiring, I had several top candidates take a different position, so I had to go to a second or even third choice.
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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.
"Not too many places will straight up ghost candidates that have done on-sites, that's pretty unusual." It's probably at least 50% of my interviews. Roughly 1/4 of my interviews have any kind of follow up at all. It doesn't hurt to tell people that someone else was hired. Closure is important to job seekers.
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…
How about the fact that there's absolutely no upside for a hiring company/manager to give feedback? It's all potential downside...
This really explains why the last time I did job hunting it was such a stab in the dark for 6 months. Job hunting in general is terrible.
I applied to HackerOne to do the exact same job I'd already been doing for a year. They rejected me with the feedback "we asked you why you wanted to work for us, and you didn't seem enthusiastic about the company". (My answer to "why did you apply?" was "it's a good match to the work I was already doing".)