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Comment by temp667 | Hacker News Reader

Same applies to giving candidates you don't hire feedback. It's 100% a disaster. Most folks trying that learn pretty quickly!

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I've given feedback to dozens of candidates over the last 3 years, only when the candidate has specifically asked for it. In all cases people appreciated that another human gave them an honest impression of the interview.

Perhaps "quickly enough" is over 3 years. Regardless even when it does go poorly with one candidate, I've had 3 years of people I've at least been a normal person to, instead of acting like a drone who is constantly afraid of the proverbial lawsuits from candidates.

I strongly disagree. My experience with that has been positive, _especially_ when candidates request detailed feedback and I provide it.

Caveats: this is in Australia, and I believe we've had legal advice a few times encouraging us to stop, because it could expose us to litigation.

Caveats: this is in Australia, and I believe we've had legal advice a few times encouraging us to stop, because it could expose us to litigation

The situation in the EU is the exact opposite. As any company can be compelled to disclose electronic records, and all recruitment is done that way now, good companies get ahead of GDPR requests by proactively providing feedback.

Source: recent experience on both sides of the table. Location: South Wales.

The EU situation sounds much better. To be super clear, we ignored the legal advice, because we considered that it was much fairer to provide the best feedback possible to clients who asked.

I have a candidate feedback once, and they showed up at our office drunk & demanding a second chance. I gave a lot less feedback after that.

I feel this says more about the mental stability of that specific person and has very little to do with giving feedback, no?

The feedback was the trigger. Basically the point is it’s worth asking whether the downside of giving feedback and having it go poorly is worth it. A much more common experience is to give feedback, and have the job candidate challenge your feedback and/or share a sob story about how they really needed the job. Trade offs and all that.

Wow, okay, never experienced that myself.

OTOH, sounds like you made the right call on hiring :)

Depends on how you provide feedback. If you get it back from the recruiter, there will be information loss. If it's written by engineers, or given you by engineer (or eng manager, who understand the feedback) personally, it end up much better -- because it's easier to mitigate any misunderstanding.

To give a counter-example, Riot Games does a pretty good job of giving that feedback though.

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