+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.
I applied to one company and got a response back which was effectively "we really like you as a candidate, but it doesn't seem like you would be the right fit for this job / it doesn't seem like the interests you expressed in your interviews [which they correctly restated] matched up well with the duties we would have you perform. We will likely have jobs opening up which would align with what you like and you will be on the shortlist of candidates if you apply for those". Was it truthful? Who knows, but it left me feeling happy about how things went and I would consider applying there again.
Similarly, earlier on in my career after taking a few CS classes I applied for a different job, and the response was effectively "You are smart but you don't have the skills we require yet which are [x, y, z]. Come back when you do". What they said was true and I appreciated the feedback.
Contrast that with the myriad companies I applied to and never heard a response back from or didn't get a response back for many months from. I will never apply to these places again because it is clear that they don't respect prospective employees enough to even send a perfunctory email. Boiler plate rejections aren't as irritating but they are definitely still irritating. If you don't provide reasons for not hiring then employees will construct their own reasons, and they may not be true and / or favorable towards your company.
They didn't hire you now, but might be able to hire you in the future because you would maybe apply again (assuming you get passed the "we already didn't hire this person" filter)?
With all the risk, that doesn't seem like much of a payoff to the company, to me.
(Though I am glad you got feedback you considered valuable, and I think it's cool that the companies did that)
Reputation matters a lot.
I'm a .Net developer. In my area there is a well known company that hires a lot of .Net devs. I heard from 2 people that .Net devs are basically treated as 2nd class citizens (after Delphi devs). So now I will not consider applying there. I don't know if they would want to hire me, but I have nothing to gain finding out.
It’s not you, it’s me
I suppose if you're thinking exclusively about a short-term benefit to the company alone without considering the impact to the candidate, the wider ecosystem and culture in general then it wouldn't make sense to take the risk.
In fairness I received feedback I didn't get the position because I was too chatty from a hr person who told me to act more chatty because qualified candidates on paper were failing for being too quiet. I kinda wished they didn't provide feedback because I have an opinion on the internal culture that would make me avoid them in the future.
I'd be so happy simply hearing feedback on whether I should bother with the company again.
"You were barely beat out by another candidate, we hope you apply again next time!"
"You are not a fit for this company, don't try again"
If this is true and if the company is half competent they'll be reaching out to you proactively next time, not hoping you might see the position and think to apply :)
Do companies really want that? Presumably they didn't hire the candidate because they believe better candidates exist. Why invest in someone if there are better candidates readily available?
That's one reason I hate the "just hire the best person" argument against diversity; usually "the best person" is entirely non-obvious.
Especially when interviewing for non-intro-level stuff...
The pursuit of protit over courteousness is bound to happen when positive courteousness has a negligible and potentially negative impact on profit.
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 complete or representative of the interview as a whole. Engineers aren't known for being naturally HR/legal-compliant, and having multiple expensive engineers spend time doing things not in their typical skillset that's typically done by a single resource that specializes in said skillset doesn't sound cheaper at all.
Either something like this is being up collected and articulated up through the decision points in the hiring process, or the decisions are being made on a fuzzy basis that can't even be explained internally, which presumably represents a risk that decisions couldn't be properly justified should a candidate suspect discrimination and pursue a claim.
(This is especially true for any kind of exercises, btw. If an employer asks me to do some, I am going to screen them on whether they have (a) complete reference solutions with (b) numbers on how long it took to complete each and why they're confident those numbers are reliable(c) a written rubric for evaluating candidate solutions that (d) they'll agree to share with me when we're done.)
...Or, you know. Don't be that guy. Candidate, candidate, candidate--depersonalizing language for depersonalized processes. How about person? These are people you're talking about. They matter more than your recruiter's cattle-call throughput, each and every one of them.
Have some empathy, my dude. Or at least some enlightened self-interest, for someday will be your day in the barrel.
I'll happily give advice, feedback, mock interviews, and other sorts of help on my own time in more appropriate environments. When it's company time, it's just business.
As a hiring manager, you're unlikely to be on the clock. And even if, I am somewhat certain that you could come up with good justifications for giving feedback if anybody asks, which nobody will.
It seems to be a specific disease of middle management to feel the need to demonstrate their "professionalism" by going out of their way to deny their humanity. At Wall Street, they buy ugly but expensive clothes for this purpose. But I guess on the West Coast you only have the Gordon Gecko playbook to fall back on.
I used to work at a branding agency, and it was interesting to see how risk averse middle management was: ideas for product names tend to only be good if they evoke some sort of not entirely pure concept. Think of "Plan B", "Virgin", or "CockroachDB". These would always get shot down by middle management as "unprofessional". Go a level up and people are far more open to be human. I don't know if they are just more self-assured and therefore willing to trust their instincts, or if the selection process for higher management actually works quite well.
Be decent.
You can't expect a business to feed the hungry, cure the sick, and house the poor out of the goodness of their hearts because these are people that spent a couple hours of their day with you. There are more appropriate institutions for charity.
And why are you stanning so hard for a process whose bloodless mind would bleed you dry and kick you to the curb for a nickel? Was Steinbeck really that right?
The answer is that they'll leave negative reviews, tell people to avoid your company or decimate any goodwill your company might have. I have in the past left scathing reviews on Glassdoor and was on some occasions the first one to drop my experience. Because after long projects or a company promising to get back in touch, they decided to instead ghost me or make me do ridiculous tricks for the application process.
If you view something as a business transaction, then you should know one of the worst things you can do in business is spurn the person you're working with.
I naturally left a scathing review for that place, but Glassdoor removed it (of course).