This has to do with how law is structured here: giving feedback gives an attack surface to candidates that could sue you for the feedback you gave (because they do not agree with it).
So this is it, companies do not do this because they're evil, they do this because nobody wants legal consequences.
The trick is to ask legal "I'm doing this, how can I minimize our legal exposure". Not to ask "can we do this". The second question will invariably get you a "no" (if you thought to ask, there must be _some_ risk). The first question will get a lot of grumbling, but if you're in a high-enough position, will eventually lead to useful advice.
(1) The basic idea is that in the early stages, you need to prove traction/market interest for your idea. As such, it needs to show no signs that it's backed by Adobe - it's trivially easy to get a BizzFeudNews article about "Adobe launches ShitDraw Pro" or whatnot; it's very easy to get thousands of people curious & signing up. All this is much harder when you're a John Doe, and don't lean on the brand recognition, but on the intrinsic value of your idea/product. However, this all means is that by design in the early stages you will have company employees, paying with company money, to "launch" services & get people to subscribe while hiding the true entity behind those services. No nefarious motivation behind it, but surely you can see the potential legal challenges.
I can't imagine that this makes any sense.
Let's say you give every interviewee feedback:
- 90% of candidates will be grateful
- 10% of candidates will not like the feedback and start to argue (at this point ignoring emails might make sense to avoid wasting time)
- 0.01% of candidates will actually sue you over it
The lawsuit will probably go nowhere, and in the worst case cost €10.000 in legal fees.
But all the good will from the other people must be worth something! Maybe one of all those people who you gave good feedback refers a friend, and they apply to your company. If you hire that person, you just saved 10.000€ that you don't have to pay a recruiter!
So either all these lawyers are giving bad advise, or maybe my numbers are wrong? I've never heard of a lawsuit where a candidate sued a company as a consequence of interview feedback that they got, so I assume that must be a very rare occurrence.
If you make a conclusion on made up data you get bogus conclusion.
It may be a good conclusion, but not for real life where facts don't match made up data.
No. You work with made up numbers to understand the problem. Then you can make conclusions even without knowing the precise numbers.
For example, my analysis doesn't change much wheter the rate of lawsuits is 0.1% or 0.01% or 0.001%. It would change if the rate of lawsuits is 1%.
But I am pretty sure that the rate of lawsuits after interview rejection is much less than 1%. So I can make a conclusion without knowing precise numbers.
Calculations based on estimates come up all the time, and they are very valuable. They make it clear what assumptions your decisions are based on.
What's the alternative? You have to make a decision. If you don't want to use estimates, what are you going to base your decision on? Whatever feels right?
Your (guess) data is probably right but it discounts too much the downsides. When you present your hypothesis to them (e.g. me) they will tell you (rightly so) to try it yourself first.
Or maybe they don't like assuming risks based on other's bogus data when they already have their version of bogus data that is probably closer to reality?
This is a healthier way of looking at online discourse than constantly asking people to provide sources and citations. If they didn’t mention them, you can safely assume it’s a guess. It’s implicit. Don’t like the guess, great: help us improve. We’re all in this together. It’s not a battle of “who has the best opinion”.
Maybe that’s what you were trying to do, in which case I’m sorry for misunderstanding. I genuinely didn’t understand your comment, please forgive me :)
I was on the receiving end of no-reply and didn't like it. But if I were to switch sides to a company, then after a couple of honest attempts at feedback I will most likely say fuck-off and send a stock letter instead.
The lawyer isn't likely to get upside of giving feedback, they will likely get the downside of the company gets involved in legal stuff.
A good lawyer should also tell you how big the risk is that you are avoiding, otherwise their advise is worthless.
But at the same time they're sponsoring meetups and conferences, hosting coding contests, sending people to career fairs, buying huge ads on job platforms to advertise company culture, just to get people to apply?
I can't talk about all of Europe, but here in Linz a lot of companies struggle to get candidates, and they spend a lot of money and effort to get a good reputation as an employer.
A prospective job seeker goes on Glassdoor. 100 companies. 99 with only positive and neutral reviews, maybe some negative saying "rejected without feedback". 1 with a rant about how they're disrespectful dicks who are just assholes. "It wasn't the feedback. They weren't even correct and they just told me I wasn't up to their so-called 'standards'. Completely rude in their email correspondence.".
Go on, you read that, you have 99 other places to apply to. What do you actually do?
I feel you overestimate the amount of fucks managers and HR give about Glasdoor feedback from rejected candidates in Germany. No company I interviewed at gave any meaningful feedback(for legal reasons) or seemed to care about opinions of rejected candidates knowing recruiters are constantly flooding them with resumes from new potential candidates on a daily basis and also most rejected candidates won't bother writing feedback on Glassdoor because once you've been around the block a few times you realize it's the norm and you're basically preaching to the choir.
The hell they don't. The root post of this very thread could easily have been a "ranting screed" on Glassdoor if the poster was of a different mindset.
Is it possible that there may be a distinction to be made between all the good will from the other people being worth something and all the good will being worth more than the legal headaches, PR headaches, and other potential consequences of someone reacting badly to feedback?
This is the kind of question that demands a quantitative analysis, but I hardly know where to begin beyond that it's an expected value question. Where do you go about putting a number to the value of something that "must be worth something"?
As one example: it is illegal to say anything negative in a letter of reference. See https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/74438/recommen...
Normally, in Germany, in your resume you should have a photo and specify your birthday/age and nationality, especially important when applying at traditional engineering companies. This opens you up for a lot of silent discrimination.
So, if they reject you for being the wrong age, nationality or skin color (yes that happens, a former German manager explicitly told HR he doesn't want Indian candidates on his team) or for speaking German with a strange accent, they definitely don't want this information getting back to you as you can sue them for that so the only feedback you're gonna get is the legally safe copy-paste "unfortunately, we're looking for a candidate that better suits our needs".
Why anyone would anyone take a risk? To make someone feel better?
Straight out of college I got rejected by failing miserably at a technical interview almost to the point of tears when I realized how little I knew. Maybe my interviewer saw this but I got very practical feedback, and knew exactly what to do with myself that summer to get hired.
Can you name one case where this actually happened?
The only practical way someone could sue you is through "Allgemeines Gleichbehandlungsgesetz (AGG)" if they can prove that you discriminated them based on their age, gender or ethnicity.