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No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback

blog.interviewing.io

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Re: No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback

#131

Post by ggggtez »

_cairn wrote: post #120

So many comments in the vein of "who has time to waste on candidates we aren't going to make an offer to?" - You are damaging your companies brand thinking this way. You want people who you reject to say to themselves "I can't wait to study up and interview here again, they said no, but I still want to work here!"

If you don't why you didn't get an offer, then you aren't worth the time to explain it.

95% of the time, you didn't give as strong answers as other candidates. The other 5% of the time, you came across as a jerk.

Re: No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback

#132

Post by allovernow »

criddell wrote: post #32
Afton wrote: post #7

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 in…

> 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.

>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.

Re: No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback

#133

Post by Apocryphon »

justforyou wrote: post #127
Apocryphon wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Companies that are that concerned about PR spin their situation with actual PR.

Word of mouth is also a thing.

Re: No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback

#134

Post by LordFast »

_cairn wrote: post #120

So many comments in the vein of "who has time to waste on candidates we aren't going to make an offer to?" - You are damaging your companies brand thinking this way. You want people who you reject to say to themselves "I can't wait to study up and interview here again, they said no, but I still want to work here!"

Ahh, refreshing to see that someone still remembers how to do company-building.

Re: No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback

#135

Post by eropple »

Apocryphon wrote: post #116
kenhwang wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback

#136

Post by mbreedlove »

nobleach wrote: post #18

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 hi…

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.

Re: No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback

#138

Post by tmpz22 »

LordFast wrote: post #134
_cairn wrote: post #120

So many comments in the vein of "who has time to waste on candidates we aren't going to make an offer to?" - You are damaging your companies brand thinking this way. You want people who you reject to say to themselves "I can't wait to study up and interview here again, they said no, but I still want to work here!"

Ahh, refreshing to see that someone still remembers how to do company-building.

Most companies lack the resources/willpower to train/code-review/mentor their own employees, expecting them to do it for candidates is kind of naive.

So do it at your company and have a competitive advantage.

Re: No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback

#139

Post by LordFast »

duxup wrote: post #121

On the topic of form letter rejections: I WISH I even got those... durring my last job hunt most of the time the company just goes dark and stops contacting me or doesn't respond. I say this and other recruiers tell me they're shocked and yet getting ghosted seemed to be the rule rather than exception durring that time. Maybe I'm such a bad canidae that they don't even want to bother with a form letter. Strangely one…

Don't take it personally. As someone who's hired a lot of people, the unfortunate times when I "ghosted" people were mostly due to internal company problems, not candidate problems.

Anecdotally, these were always situations when I wanted to pass someone but received weird resistance from other stakeholders and it ended up being a situation of stalemate. So, you could have faced similar things.

Re: No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback

#140

Post by chrisweekly »

benjaminjosephw wrote: post #130
leothekim wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 on this. The company has nothing to gain in delivering more feedback other than a thumbs up/down, and a lot more to lose.

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 mean…

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.
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