Rejection Letters for a faculty position

(1) conveying the fact of it politely and unequivocally, (2) ensuring that the process halts immediately, and (3) leaving an impression such that the candidate's likelihood of thinking & speaking ill of us in future is minimised.

The fact is, rejection usually amounts to disappointment and in some people that means they're about to pass through the stages of grief, often quite quickly. As the rejector you have a chance of being on the receiving end of the anger & bargaining stages from a rejectee.

This creates an incentive to give away as little as possible. If one states that the candidate was weak in a specific area, there are a few - just a few but it's enough to be a major deterrent - that will treat this as an invitation to negotiation over that and/or related points. In the worst case this led to a large volume of unsolicited communication that proved challenging to curtail.

Thus goals (1) and (2) had not been achieved and goal (3) was abandoned in the interests of time.

From another dimension, IANAL but I have also been advised by Ms.IAAL that being specific also opens the door to a risk of being wrong (or even being simply perceived to be wrong), and thus a liability concern.

I appreciate your reply. (Yeah, I upvoted it.) If someone had found a newer quotation on the same issue, I'd refer to that whenever this frequently asked question comes up. To the main point, there is no rule here either in the explicit guidelines

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

or in the established custom of the site that a downvote mandatorily must be accompanied by a reply, nor is there any rule or custom that downvotes are solely to be applied to the kind of comments that pg has described

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696

as "comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted." The question is a question of line-drawing. I try on my part to make my upvotes far outnumber my downvotes, and I try actively to upvote any comment that made me think of an aspect of a problem I haven't thought about before or that cites information I haven't learned before. I lurk in a lot of threads just to upvote good stuff. But some comments mostly just try to express poorly thought out opinions with little factual basis or to make lame jokes, and there is no particular reason to explain downvoting those comments. I don't always claim that comments that I downvote are from "trolls/rude people"; sometimes they are just comments that don't meet the usual high standards of regular participants here.

Once an interview occurs then I would hope a far more personal approach gets used. The benchmark for this was McKinsey (I was there 10 years ago). I went through the recruitment process there from both sides, and we had a simple policy to call the person back within 24 hours, letting let them know immediately whether they were in the next step or not. We would also offer to give constructive feedback (and have it to give) to both successful and unsuccessful candidates.