Why Do Employers Rarely Offer Explanations to Rejected Candidates?
linkedin.com
linkedin.com
If you get rejected and don't know why, take heart: a year from now the company also won't know why. You can apply again as if it were Groundhog Day.
From the other side of the desk, wouldn't you be impressed if you had a candidate come in for another interview, and they explicitly tell you that you had interviewed them previously and they understood their weaknesses at that time. And they're looking forward to show you just how much their chops have improved in the meantime, and then proceed to do just that?
Sure, the recruiter might be sane, but that is possibly only a small part of what gets me hired or rejected.
Most people get bonged and move on. If you weren't a fit 12 months ago, the odds (and personal bias, let's be honest) are really against you.
I used to worry about blanket rejections. Not any more. They're not actionable, so I ignore them.
I wish we took notes during interviews. On well. We still remember candidates who apply multiple times.
To get this out of the way, here's my implementation for this year:
int main() {
return 1;
}
If you had the acting skills to convincingly give off the impression that you're a novice programmer, you've also got the skills to convincingly give off a more directly useful impression.
Although, the actual interviews and results are kept secret from the rest of the company—apart from higher-ups—I got insight into them because I was asked to filter out through some final candidates by interviewing them. I realised that they kept notes from past interviews, and based on the fact that one of the interviewees progressed a lot in a 2 year period, I was inclined to put him on top of the list of my recommendation.
I feel like the ability to change is more important than just plain knowledge. More importantly, be mature and accept you "sucked" because {reasons} and work on yourself to improve, rather than be immature and "pridefully" (for a lack of better word) refuse critique.
I don't get this mentality.
A) I seem to be unaware of the rash of lawsuits befalling companies that provide feedback. I admit I just may be ignorant of them.
B) It seems that not recording reasons actually makes the company more vulnerable. When you combine a "preponderance of evidence" legal standard with "Lies, damn lies, and statistics" it seems like it would be easy for a litigious candidate and a good lawyer to force a settlement or get a favorable jury ruling if the company cannot present hard evidence that said candidate was not hired because of X, Y, and Z non-protected reasons. In fact, that is the reason given in discussions about why it is so hard to fire people for going though the PIP process instead of just cutting them loose.
Then, jurors are free to infer that the real reason why intentional bias and the justification was just a cover story.
This is not theoretical. This is the playbook.
> that is the reason given in discussions about why it is so hard to fire people for going though the PIP process instead of just cutting them loose
That is a different case though. In the event of a firing, you have their work performance leading up to that event to take into account. If you have a black woman who has worked at a place for many years with favorable job reviews who is then suddenly let go after a new white manager is hired, they can present their work history at that company as an argument that they were let go for less than legitimate reasons.
In this case, the usual practice for proving innocence is to show that the statistical distribution of hires is similar to the statistical distribution of applicants. For example, if I had 50% latino applicants, 50% of my hires should be latinos.
That being said, the sort of publicity these issues get mean that companies try really hard to steer clear of any discrimination accusations. It's a delicate problem to handle.
Specifically, a talent acquisition manager/executive would have to make a business case about how exposing the company to liability from outsiders would somehow pay for itself.
The only plausible argument that I can think of is that you could market your recruiting process as transparent and then get some additional candidates based on that. But.. can you really postulate that some candidate that is reading about your recruiting process in depth would be highly enticed by this to actually apply, as opposed to verbiage about other perks? Can you guarantee that having a free "recruiter feedback on your application" service available to anyone out there won't create a great incentive for random candidates to apply just for that? What if there is a data leak and all this prejudicial, personally identifiable information ends up on the web?
That's just what came to mind in 5 seconds. If the argument for creafting, storing and providing the rejection information sounds like a stretch, it's because it's a tough sell.
About the actual legal requirement, OFCCP compliant companies have to record disposition reasons for candidates that they don't hire when some conditions are met (candidates have expressed interest in a position and they were evaluated based on "substantial information"). In my experience, these disposition reasons try deliberately to be vague. Regular companies don't, and most likely won't because of the liability issues mentioned above. For reference, here's the go-to FAQ on OFCCP requirements: http://www.dol.gov/ofccp/regs/compliance/faqs/offaqs.htm
Regardless it's just seems like there's so many opportunities to create legal trouble by giving a reason, and almost no reason against saying nothing.
You have to keep in mind that if a candidate is rejected and comes back and says it was illegal discrimination, those forms are valuable evidence to show why the candidate was not selected. Get rid of the forms and it's basically your word against theirs in court.
That said, I've also been told that no one every goes to the trouble to dig those up later on. Even for current employees. You could get a letter of reprimand put in your file and nobody would probably see it again (this comment came from HR).
I was thinking for example: I can request a copy from my employer of HR docs specific to me. Does this only apply because I'm employed, or does it extend to interview notes?
Think multi device ad retargeting. How cool would it be to get back information on what the ad exchange thinks I am like...
I'm also thinking about the rights of everyone including criminal (including terror) suspects to see (I am specifically not asking permission to alter or delete, that's another conversation) all the information the government (and their agents in the private sector) stores about them.
I know it sounds onerous specially because of the issue of authentication (how does the CIA know that it is me who is asking for information about me and not someone impersonating me?) and I don't have a good solution for these questions.
"We're not banning thoughts, just those that are inside books."
Scanning paper HR records was the single most painful job we had to do. The entire file became a complete legal nightmare purely because it stopped being paper and became covered by Data Protection.
Usually the HR department had to go through every single employee file and shred any documents that might be grounds for legal action before they got scanned.
The process before scanning was: - employee is annoyed - employee requests their HR file - HR sanitise file and sends it to employee
after scanning, every single page was indexed. So they couldn't react to a request by destroying pages (because there'd be holes in the index). So they had to sanitise every single file before scanning.
I understand the point of Data Protection law, but in this case it was really counter-productive. Evidence was destroyed wholesale.
Not our HR process, our customer's. What was actually destroyed depended on their interpretation of the law.
One common one was the Data Protection requirement to not keep inaccurate data meant that all but the latest employee change of address forms had to be destroyed. Easy to implement post-scanning, pain in the arse to do pre-scanning.
When a candidate is rejected there is period of to months they can sue for discrimination. After that one additional month is considered to be justifiable. So everything has to be destroyed three months after the rejection letter if there is no discrimination case.
Isn't that the ideal situation to be in, if you're the defendant? The burden of proof rests on the employee to prove discrimination. From the company's point of view, surely, the fewer forms, the less proof.
Some jurisdictions also shift the burden of proof under some circumstances so it is actually worse for the defendant.
The process worked something like this:
1) Get approval from HR to start the hiring process. Your department needs to have the money to hire someone, and a need to fill a position. I'm not sure how either is decided.
2) Define the position. Several people are involved here, basically you define the role and the areas of expertise that you want and need.
3) Information from 2 gets sent back to all involved parties, and everyone ranks the skills by necessity and comments on things.
4) HR takes the information and creates job listings, and collects candidates.
5) Interviews take place, and you grade applications according to what you decided in 3.
6) Hire someone who satisfies the requirements and did well in the interviews.
There's some leeway in the system because the interview and the judgment of the interviewers matters, but you can't just accept somebody because you like them, and you can't reject someone because you don't.
As for what happens with an applicant's information after they're rejected... I'm not sure where it goes or whether it gets called up again if they re-apply. Our department was pretty small though, if we didn't hire you the first time, we won't have forgotten you by the second time around.
The recruiting and hiring process as presently practiced by most firms is an enormous waste of everyone's time. We are inefficient in how we gather information from applicants and how we communicate it to them.
This is partially because it's hard to standardize the information needed for each job and available from each candidate. By the time you meet the minimum requirements of gathering information about an applicant, sharing it with your team and getting them to make a decision, much time has passed. Time when you should have been doing other things.
Then you face the question: How much more time can I spare sharing with the candidate the reasons why they were rejected? A recruiter may get the decision from the VP Engineering, but not know the reasons. If you do know the reasons, some of them will make the candidate upset, and they aren't always fixable. (What if all you can say is: The hiring manager didn't like you. Wasn't impressed. You don't seem smart enough for this role...?) That is: sharing all the reasons for rejection will lead to a huge waste of time and emotional energy with someone who you may never speak with again. Except in the rare cases where you see potential, there's almost no incentive to go into detail.
I've written more here, for those who are interested:
I like her saying - chew the meat, spit out the bones and thank them for the feedback.
A candidate who didn't get hired and came back stronger is EXACTLY who I want working with me, and its shortsighted of companies to burn off a candidate as soon as they stumble on fizzbuzz or something equally bullshitty.
Of course, it was a startup. No company with more than 20 employees would probably even consider doing something like this, and unfortunately I doubt that will change anytime soon. However - if you're ever in a position to safely communicate with a rejected candidate, I would suggest you at least consider it. They may not be suitable now, but things do change.
At the other end of the spectrum are companies or teams that don't even bother notifying candidates they've been rejected. I'm sure they have good reasons, but to me that sends a negative signal.
As someone who's done that before, it's because my plate is too full (my own fault), which is why I'm looking for candidates, and I'm busy dealing with everybody who is still in the pipeline or getting used to working with the person who got through the pipeline.
Then I tell myself "Fuck, I really should send those people an email explaining my decision. But I don't know what to say or how to not sound like a dick. Fuck it, I'll do it tomorrow".
Then this repeats for a week. Then two weeks. Then three weeks.
Then I tell myself "Fuck, if I do it now, I'm just going to look like an even bigger dick for not having done it yet. Best never contact this person ever again and if they happen to bump into me in real life, pretend I didn't see them and hope they don't recognise me."
That said, big companies have professionals whose job it is to make sure this doesn't happen.
Big companies are supposed to have professionals whose job it is to make sure this doesn't happen. Some (Amazon) seem to just not give a shit.
I'm sure you know the stock phrases. If you don't, "Thanks for taking the time to speak with us, but we've decided to move on with another candidate. Good luck with your job search" is perfectly adequate. If it's been a few weeks, and you feel you need to apologize for the delay -- then of course do so. Really, it does help.
About the only "dick move" is sending no response at all. People don't need lengthy explanations and reinforcement of their positive traits. They just need an answer (yes or no) and, perchance, some acknowledgement of the fact that they're human beings, and have made a significant investment of their time and energy in talking with you.
It still amazes me how many companies don't get this.
That said, big companies have professionals whose job it is to make sure this doesn't happen.
I think what happens in big companies is that everyone assumes someone has the responsibility to do this, but no one ever does.
I think it has more to do with feeling like a dick and not wanting to say No explicitly because it causes emotional discomfort. So you procrastinate to avoid that discomfort.
I'm sure you've heard of the concept of "fade out" in dating. Same thing.
I know on a logical level that this makes me a dick and that I shouldn't do it. But on an emotional level, it's so much easier to avoid making an implicit decision explicit.
That said, I hold everyone who's ever followed up of their own accord in very high regard. If I don't say anything for two weeks send me an email.
>In a litigious society, and particularly in the aftermath of many of the class action and civil lawsuits of the late 90s and early 00s, companies became hypersensitive in order to protect their interests. As such, many companies adopted a blanket approach to dealing with things like interview feedback for candidates by simply declining to give any details.
When we spoke to a labor attorney about this awhile back, their first reaction was basically that we would be insane to do it, because of the legal liability.
We got comfortable with the idea of feedback because we think that we have a clear, documented process that stands up to scrutiny. However, I think for many employers, recruiting decisions ARE arbitrary and unfair. Honest feedback would merely expose the decisions for what they are - reliant on personal affinity with candidates, vague notions of "culture fit", and gut decisions. There's very little quality training for how to ask good questions, evaluate those responses, and render a hiring decision. If candidates could actually hear the hiring manager and recruiter's thoughts, they'd rightfully be pretty angry.
Here's the thing, though: that doesn't mean your labor attorney is wrong. One employee says something to a rejected candidate that could be interpreted as labor discrimination, and it doesn't matter how rigorous your process is, you're still in for the cost and time of a lawsuit to prove it.
How do you build the 0.1% risk of a company-ending lawsuit into your business case?
I'm a very "right to work" (bullshit term I know) oriented person, in that I think neither companies nor their employees should be obligated to each other at all. Firing/quitting should be frictionless and easy. Instead, firing is wraught with legal problems such that you can't even fire an employee unless you can monetarily justify the cost of a lawsuit against their impact of being a negative influence, or they're part of some indiscriminate layoff procedure.
If I'm quitting or changing jobs, I'm harangued about it left and right by managers as to why or how this could happen.
Let's not pretend we owe each other anything and just move on like any other business transaction.
I not just almost always give a reason for why we decided against a candidate - I even often give advice which might be relevant for future applications.
Why am I not afraid of a law suit? B/c the hiring process I designed is based on a couple of quick tests directly relevant to the position - so it's pretty clear and objective why we decide how we decide.
Most companies though actually base those decision on unsound and subjective information ... of course, those are worried about being blamed for that.
At least for some positions, personality and culture fit might be important.
In that case - if we would decide in favor of A - I guess I would skip that reason.
But if you design the testing sufficiently broad - then you not just get a very good insights of where an applicant's strength lie but also enough "reasons" to give for negative decision - which also are helpful for the applicant to improve.
More than anything else, the number one reason that an otherwise good candidate doesn't get to continue is because of a disconnect around what the word "Senior" means. Every company has a different bar set for what qualifies as "Senior", but in most places I've been that bar is relatively high, so if we advertise for that position externally it means we don't have someone internal who's met the bar for promotion yet. We can't in good conscious hire someone in as a "Senior" that is not at least as qualified as the people we already have who didn't make the cut for promotion. Title inflation hurts because what happens is you might have been "Senior" at your last three employers but you don't make the bar for "Senior" or sometimes even "Mid" where you're applying.
As the interviewer there's very little I can actionably provide you that addresses the above without getting into a conversation about the possibility of hire at a lower level, which I don't have the authority to offer since I'm not the hiring manager. Additionally, I try to do everything I can to respect the candidate and preserve their dignity during the interview process. If they're bombing it, I don't want them to feel like they're bombing it. It's not possible to both do that and tell them at the end that they aren't good enough to cross the threshold for the role. This is especially difficult for me and many of my peers because we're engineers and not really "people persons", so we err on the side of saying nothing vs risk saying something that crushes someone.
see also: friendship, dating, sales, party invitations
Some of the situations you identify (dating, friendship, sales, as well as interviews) have the attribute of "found nothing compelling". There was no single problem, but nothing emerged in the package or the interview that stood out.
In this case, the lack-of-match is not obviously the candidate's fault, and trying to provide feedback is forcing a conclusion ("that's your problem right there") that isn't justified by the information gathered.
And the best thing in such a case may be to say nothing, because you know nothing. ("Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.")
Some candidates have other offers to fall back on and just don't care that much, and some just don't want to discuss technical details with someone in a non technical role, which is understandable.
This sort of thing (and hundreds of other similar phenomena) doesn't show up in unemployment metrics, but in a healthier economy, it doesn't happen as much, because people dislike working for assholes.
It's a bit like how an Australian 5% unemployment (at $12.30 minimum wage) is very different from an American 5% unemployment (at $7.25 minimum wage) or a North Korean 5% unemployment (making $0.40 at Kaesong); The supply demand curve on employment is real, but it extends beyond tangible quantities like wages and into ways the employer behaves towards its employees & potential employees, because for workers, civil treatment is to some extent fungible with wages. In the US, we have much less labor regulation and more lawsuits, and this is the equilibrium we have arrived at in the current economic climate; In a different economic climate, we would arrive at a different equilibrium.
The official understanding of the problem is plagued by Goodhart's Law - you can measure wages, but not being an asshole, so we will favor policies which push on one but ignore the other, and we can expect assinine behavior wherever there is even a little bit of profit to be gained; We sample and optimize "Unemployment", "Inflation", and corporate revenue growth as indicators of the economy's health, and a lot of other things have fallen by the wayside as we have reassured ourselves or worried ourselves with those numbers.
These teams tend to grow fast and hire of a lot of junior people - that lack of experience combined with pressure and a huge volume of interviews(at a fast growing firm) results in a lot of inconsistent communication. When a sourcer/recruiter is dealing with 5-10 interviews a day with 80% of them not making the cut, sometimes they make the decision to prioritize building pipeline over closing the loop properly with people. And sometimes people just have poor time management abilities and let things get lost in the shuffle.
The reason that companies need to worry about lawsuits is that the hiring process is usually not very strenuous. When people make arbitrary and capricious decisions, bias tends to be a thing.
Better to use testing, either by psychometrics or assessment days (group tasks, short notice presentations etc.). [2]
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140606071003-7589947-no-cor...
I've interviewed and hired hundreds of people and the real reasons are usually pretty banal, e.g. not a good match between skills and requirements, wants too much money, etc. so in cases where somebody does hear something and they hear "not a good fit" that honestly is usually the case. It's hard to provide more specifics because interviews don't really uncover deep specifics about candidates.
On occasion I've rejected people for less common reasons also, e.g. behavior problems during the interview, poor attitude, etc. and we have to keep those things pretty confidential from the candidate because it would be used in a lawsuit even if it's not an example of discrimination. All the "culture fit" notions in startup-land would be other examples of this kind of rejection.
There's of course all kinds of discrimination in hiring and companies hide behind these practices all too often. I've never been part of this kind of thing thankfully, but I can imagine.
tptacek's old company has more rigid hiring practices that produce what I would guess are strong metrics that help them find good candidates but also might protect them in the case of a lawsuit.
I've also been on the receiving end of rejections of course. Before the second dot-com boom/bust companies used to actually contact you back with a "not a good fit". After that you usually just don't hear anything unless you really press the recruiters.
On occasion, when the recruiting department isn't as well put together as might be expected, real reasons will leak out and those are also surprisingly interesting:
- salary demands are too high and exceed even senior execs. I don't make all that much out of the ordinary for my experience level and position, so that brought a lot of insight into how they function as a company
- bad culture fit - depending on the company I actually felt relieved by some of these rejections and perturbed by others.
- the weirdest one was where the company's internal hr processes were so broken, and they had some sort of internal clock on candidates, that they were not able to process me through the interview rounds in a timely fashion, so they rejected me because it was taking too long to process me. I can say that the interview and hiring process was a real shit show so it didn't surprise me at all, but I found it impressively annoying. I did think about suing them, but then I thought about what I wanted out of the lawsuit and decided not to bother.
One guy showed up hung over after walking a few miles to the interview after he wrecked his car the night before while out binge drinking and drunk driving.
I had one large guy block the exit from the interview room and demand that we hire him to do GPU programming, even though he clearly knew nothing about the subject. We said "sure" and then once he got out of the way had security come and remove him.
You really never know what you'll encounter when you call people in for a chat.
One guy had to ask to leave the interview multiple times to go wash his hands.
That sort of thing.
After you choose one (and you can choose only one), do the other companies have reason to get all mopey and feel offended to hear no reason for the rejection?
Of course they don't. Why should candidates feel any differently when a company chooses someone else?
If you don't think I'm a good fit then it's fine, let's just move on with life. We in tech are lucky enough that there is always another job around the corner.
This article nails it by saying judgments are often subjective or open to argument - in my case, it was always either down to experience or personality, and with the latter one, you're not going anywhere good by telling a candidate they weren't proactive enough, keen enough, friendly enough, or whatever.
and so is finding the right candidate. if you rush, it can lead to a huge, costly mistake.
All in all be thoughtful of the person in front of you and try not to be a jerk. Be prepared despite that some people will not want to hear what you have to say.
Usually recruiters made their decision when walking out of the room on whether the candidate is suitable or not. This timeout process is a bit wasteful.
I think it came down to the interview. I went into it expecting the questions to focus around one thing and ran into another, so I wasn't as smooth with the answers as I think was necessary. That was ultimately my fault, but I'd have felt more comfortable with some confirmation of it so I knew where to focus my improvement efforts.
For example, give them a coding test (not fizzbuzz bs mind you), it might be just a multiple choice test, hence if they don't get approved this is an objective criteria used to turn them down
We got a string of really bad candidates, it really didn't make sense as a policy and was shot down.
It's a problem, though. I once did a 7 hour take home exam, didn't hear back for a month, and finally got the one line rejection listed in this article "we've decided not to move forward…" A month is too long to make someone wait regardless, but I really would have appreciated some technical feedback, because all I could do is wonder. The test was in Java, and I did use what I believe is a somewhat outdated way of using threads, but that's just a guess… I also interviewed at Google, and I understand that this "exam" (I think we should start calling it an entrance exam rather than an interviews) does result in actual, numerical scores that are currently sitting in a database somewhere at google, but I'm not allowed to know what they are. Again, I'd really like to know. Was I way off, or close? No idea.
I think this becomes especially toxic in the context of tech interviews, because they really do often amount to exams. I've spent some time reflecting on this, and I believe that exams usually come with a bill of rights for the examinee (or student). It's very unusual to take an entrance exam with no idea who will evaluate it, how it will evaluated, how you did, and why you did (or didn't) pass.
This "bill or rights" isn't an accident, it evolved, I believe, to counter balance what we demand of a student, and to provide safeguards against abusive and capricious behavior from institutions that act as gatekeepers, whether it's the bar, the medical or nursing boards, a committee deciding whether to award a masters degree, and so forth.
I understand why liability terrifies employers, and that there is no real benefit for them. But unfortunately, you do need to look at this from the perspective of the people who take the exam. We get all the negatives of high stakes and stressful exams, but without the considerations that offset the stress and safeguard against abuse. There may be reasons for it, but developers are the ones who don't really know why their performance at the whiteboard wasn't acceptable enough for a job offer, or what happened after they sent their take home exam to a recruiter where supposedly it was evaluated by a tech team.
In short, just because there are good reasons an employer wouldn't want to do this doesn't make it acceptable from the perspective of an applicant who has to essentially sit for these exams.
I consider this a very serious problem in the high tech industry, and is certainly something that deters talented people from entering or remaining in the field.
Google recommended I did, then phoned me a little over a year after that rejection. Presumably I didn't do too badly on their tests up to that point.
All I got was a 2 line email with "not a good fit" in it.
Interviewer might have quizzed the candidate.