I have one, and only one, expectation from companies after an interview:
Please respond by the time you say you will, more or less.
It is amazing how many companies seem to be "unable" to come through on this very modest expectation.
Please respond by the time you say you will, more or less.
It is amazing how many companies seem to be "unable" to come through on this very modest expectation.
(Good) recruiters at Google strive to get their candidates answers as soon as possible, but the most they can do, at times, is hound the person that is holding up the process.
The problem is that they continually bait candidates with promised turnaround times that very seldom have anything to do with reality.
A more recent interview with Google got me a "no" in about 4 business days. Whatever else I could say about the process, at least they stuck to their promised window.
Nowadays, I think it may be a breakdown of the hiring or communication process. If there is a recruiter (outside) involved, the recruiter will likely not get communications about the ongoing hiring process since they involve candidates that the outside recruiter does not handle. If it is an inside recruiter, the inside recruiter might not even get communications if there are other inside recruiters competing to fill a position (silos, darwinism, bonus pools).
It would be nice if the hiring software platforms automatically sent a workflow-based notification based on where you were in the pipeline (e.g. 'did not pass go, did not collect $200'). However, I think that transparency into hiring processes advantages the candidates over the hiring company. The hiring company's advantage is that it (usually) has the power and controls information asymmetrically. There are most likely exceptions for exceptional candidates (think Google/Facebook AI team candidates) in which they don't play the hiring game but are simply trying to smooth the process.
This is why having an internal advocate is essential for getting into a company's hiring pipeline and knowing where you are in that pipeline (did the pipeline break for you, were you discharged into an outflow pipe after the on-sites etc).
Hiring is optimized for the employer's yield of quality employees, not for the non-accepted ("rejected") employees. Even though there are legal issues involved with specific reasons for non-hiring (e.g. worst case - discrimination lawsuits), it still benefits the company to be cautiously turtle slow with even black/white binary responses (no, yes - you are hired).
Since some of the most egregious companies (e.g. Google) have some of the most talented software engineers, you can imagine it is more a function of the culture (e.g. false positives are bad - it is acceptable to have false negatives) than the software/communication platforms underlying the hiring process.
But when they ghost you even after an internal referral? From someone you worked with previously?
That's when you really have to wonder what is going through these people's heads.
The real problems is that most companies just don't seem to care about candidate experience, period.