Other than the risk of opening an appeals process, not necessarily legal but verbal via email tennis
No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback
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Re: No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback
#72Accurate time-sensitive communication is very hard in my experience. I've heard thru the grapevine on a few interviews over the years, that often the interviewer gets the wrong impression on some subject. Due to the fact there are say ten+ candidates for a position, one wrong impression is often enough to torpedo your chances.
For example, I'm good at what I do, but not the kind of person to brag about it (hah). In fact I instinctively tend to downplay things I've done as no big deal. In some sense true, but in an interview it's enough to lose the offer. Trying to correct this but it is not easy.
Once I was referred to a position by a colleague, but didn't get it. Weeks later I heard, "not enough db experience." What? While I don't write SQL every day, I've used dbs consistently over decades, know the theories, etc. Sure, I might need to hit the manual for a week to get up to speed, but that is incredibly common and no hurdle whatsoever.
So, post-interview feedback is good, but asking questions/feedback during the interview itself would have been a lot better. I wonder if (when there are so many candidates), interviewers don't want to revisit past assumptions and prefer to just get on to "the next one."
Re: No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are they losing in this case? I don't see how a company is actually harmed by someone complaining about an interview. Unless you're trying to attract people who subscribe to cancel culture, I don't see a problem.
Employee hours. Someone has to collect, document, sanitize, and explain the feedback. Then respond to the response to the feedback. In the time it takes our recruiter to provide feedback to a candidate, they could have sourced 20 more candidates. edit: I'll argue instant feedback is even more expensive and risky. It's not coordinated, potentially duplicative, may impact/contaminate later rounds, and may not be comple…
The article recommends instant feedback, presumably much less costly.
Re: No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback
#74Earlier 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.
What are they losing in this case? I don't see how a company is actually harmed by someone complaining about an interview. Unless you're trying to attract people who subscribe to cancel culture, I don't see a problem.
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Re: No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback
#75One time we gave feedback on request and the candidate contested the feedback, then went out on a social media rampage. So yeah, we stopped after that. It only takes one bad candidate to make it not worth the effort.
FTFA
Anyway, the way to avoid negative reactions and defensiveness from candidates is to practice giving feedback in a way that’s constructive. We’ll cover this next.
Re: No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback
#76I think the article generalizes the author's experience with first line interviews of wholly unqualified people to all post-interview feedback, and definitely shouldn't. People who literally can't Fizz Buzz are not going to argue with you about how no they are actually great devs. People who are borderline candidates who didn't quite get there in a final interview on fuzzier attributes (too slow, spaghetti code, etc.) are a lot more likely to take feedback poorly.
I tried giving post-full interview feedback for a while, but I stopped based on low cost/benefit.
Re: No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback
#77It is funny for companies to expect candidates to spend time to give feedback about their hiring process, but to spend an iota of time to give candidates feedback about performance: Risky! Lawsuit! Rant! You've more chance of damage by rogue employees than a candidate that's looking at multiple companies.
Re: No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback
#78I 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.
All my info is old on this point, but I doubt that there was company wide measurement here. This was an individual giving their own personal opinion/reasoning.
Re: No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback
#79One time we gave feedback on request and the candidate contested the feedback, then went out on a social media rampage. So yeah, we stopped after that. It only takes one bad candidate to make it not worth the effort.
+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.
In my experience, they often like to give feedback on subsequent interviews about the past interviews. Google has some pretty detailed feedback on a interview I did years ago, which they were happy to reveal over the phone on a subsequent onsite invitation.
Re: No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback
#80The hiring process is a black box for a reason. The HR department's role is to protect the company first, not the employees, and certainly not prospective employees. If feedback can be interpreted as being discriminatory, or reflective of bad company culture in general, well, word gets around. For much of the time, the reason people don't get the job is that there was someone marginally more qualified/attractive/like…
Bingo.
After the interview is done and the answer is a solid NO, as a company we have NO BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP with you. Any iota of effort we put towards you is essentially wasted effort, even if very minor.
What changes that discussion further is that there is a small, but still quite real, possibility of lawsuit, social media rant (as another comment mentioned), or even a disgruntled applicant shooting up the place.
(I believe Pres. William McKinley was shot by a disgruntled would-be bureaucrat who didn't get a job...)
A perfunctory if generic rejection is a safer choice. Short-list candidates who made it to a 3rd interview, or folks who we reached out and headhunted (but didn't choose) may be a different story, but those are rare edge cases.