I know why rejection emails suck – I write them
triplebyte.com
I know why rejection emails suck – I write them
1–10 of 426 posts
Re: I know why rejection emails suck – I write them
#2Article author - I'm on the writing team at Triplebyte. Most of what we do is summarize candidates' technical performance for their introduction to companies, but we also send feedback to everyone who takes our two-hour interview. I took this responsibility over from our first engineer, who built a bunch of software to make the process faster - it lets me quickly autogenerate emails by clicking all the resources I want to include, and then highlights the things that require more careful review. (So the people who accuse me of being a robot are half-right, I guess.)
Re: I know why rejection emails suck – I write them
#3At least you get a response even if it is a rejection letter. I have heard - not experienced - that sometimes you just don't hear back from the company at all, which seems worse to me.
Re: I know why rejection emails suck – I write them
#4Article author - I'm on the writing team at Triplebyte. Most of what we do is summarize candidates' technical performance for their introduction to companies, but we also send feedback to everyone who takes our two-hour interview. I took this responsibility over from our first engineer, who built a bunch of software to make the process faster - it lets me quickly autogenerate emails by clicking all the resources I wa…
Isn't giving detailed feedback a liability nightmare? Everything I've ever heard on this is to say as little as possible.
It's certainly great as a candidate to get detailed feedback (would have really appreciated it back in the day as a co-op student), but I just wonder if the concerns over it have any merit or are overblown.
Re: I know why rejection emails suck – I write them
#5At least you get a response even if it is a rejection letter. I have heard - not experienced - that sometimes you just don't hear back from the company at all, which seems worse to me.
I get why companies don't do honest rejection letters, but this there's no excuse for whatsoever.
Re: I know why rejection emails suck – I write them
#6Article author - I'm on the writing team at Triplebyte. Most of what we do is summarize candidates' technical performance for their introduction to companies, but we also send feedback to everyone who takes our two-hour interview. I took this responsibility over from our first engineer, who built a bunch of software to make the process faster - it lets me quickly autogenerate emails by clicking all the resources I wa…
Isn't giving detailed feedback a liability nightmare? Everything I've ever heard on this is to say as little as possible. It's certainly great as a candidate to get detailed feedback (would have really appreciated it back in the day as a co-op student), but I just wonder if the concerns over it have any merit or are overblown.
This is dealt with at length in the article.
Re: I know why rejection emails suck – I write them
#7Article author - I'm on the writing team at Triplebyte. Most of what we do is summarize candidates' technical performance for their introduction to companies, but we also send feedback to everyone who takes our two-hour interview. I took this responsibility over from our first engineer, who built a bunch of software to make the process faster - it lets me quickly autogenerate emails by clicking all the resources I wa…
Isn't giving detailed feedback a liability nightmare? Everything I've ever heard on this is to say as little as possible. It's certainly great as a candidate to get detailed feedback (would have really appreciated it back in the day as a co-op student), but I just wonder if the concerns over it have any merit or are overblown.
This is called out early in the post:
> The number one reason companies cite for not sending feedback is legal risk. Interestingly, I don’t think this is true. Companies put themselves at legal risk if they are rejecting candidates for illegitimate reasons, like race, gender, or a disability. If they send feedback which tells candidates, truthfully, that they were rejected because they didn’t get very far on the coding project, then if anything a company reduces their legal risk: they have a transparent track record of evaluating candidates based only on their skills. I recently talked with an employment lawyer about this, and he didn’t think that specific feedback on technical performance put companies at risk. So legal risk, despite being frequently cited, seems unlikely to be the real driver of policies here.
Then, an explanation that legal risk isn't the same thing as lawsuit risk:
> Even if your process isn’t biased, if you send feedback that creates the perception you’re biased, that’s enough for a costly lawsuit. So while legal risk isn’t a reason not to send detailed, honest technical feedback (as long as you’re not discriminating), it’s a very good reason not to send carelessly compiled feedback through a haphazard process (even if you’re not discriminating).
Re: I know why rejection emails suck – I write them
#8Article author - I'm on the writing team at Triplebyte. Most of what we do is summarize candidates' technical performance for their introduction to companies, but we also send feedback to everyone who takes our two-hour interview. I took this responsibility over from our first engineer, who built a bunch of software to make the process faster - it lets me quickly autogenerate emails by clicking all the resources I wa…
Isn't giving detailed feedback a liability nightmare? Everything I've ever heard on this is to say as little as possible. It's certainly great as a candidate to get detailed feedback (would have really appreciated it back in the day as a co-op student), but I just wonder if the concerns over it have any merit or are overblown.
The article addresses the "liability nightmare" and they mentioned they reached out to an employment lawyer.
Re: I know why rejection emails suck – I write them
#9Article author - I'm on the writing team at Triplebyte. Most of what we do is summarize candidates' technical performance for their introduction to companies, but we also send feedback to everyone who takes our two-hour interview. I took this responsibility over from our first engineer, who built a bunch of software to make the process faster - it lets me quickly autogenerate emails by clicking all the resources I wa…
Isn't giving detailed feedback a liability nightmare? Everything I've ever heard on this is to say as little as possible. It's certainly great as a candidate to get detailed feedback (would have really appreciated it back in the day as a co-op student), but I just wonder if the concerns over it have any merit or are overblown.
My understanding is that as long as you're not discriminating against candidates on the basis of race, gender or some other protected category membership, and as long as your feedback reflects that by being focused on the technical abilities the candidate demonstrated during the interview, you're not actually at all that much risk. Of course, if you are illegally discriminating, or if your feedback suggests that you are by giving feedback on candidate appearance or something (never do that), then you're absolutely better off not sending it.
Re: I know why rejection emails suck – I write them
#10At least you get a response even if it is a rejection letter. I have heard - not experienced - that sometimes you just don't hear back from the company at all, which seems worse to me.
It absolutely is worse to not hear back at all. As someone who has dealt with this recently, the one positive thing I can tell myself about the experience is that I would not work for a company that cannot be bothered to write a rejection letter.
It reminds me of a restaurant I worked at in my youth - because the owner and her daughter were so conflict averse - rather than fire someone, they would just slowly write them off the schedule. Sad.