Many recruiters don't do this for legal reasons. Anti-discrimination laws make it very risky for companies to explain their hiring rationale, even if it's perfectly reasonable. It would be too expensive to have the lawyers check over every rejection.
I feel really strongly about trying to help people improve, and it's really challenging to do that if you can't bring up the reasons for rejection. If you're being dicky about it "You're not good enough in memory management", that instantly makes people defensive.
If you're trying to help them forward and give them useful tips for improving their portfolio and skillset, the conversation is almost exclusively positive and 9/10 times I get a thank you very much in the end.
No doubt, and I know a lot of US recruiters wish very strongly that they could have these kind of interactions with potential hires.
However, the difficulty of friendly, open interviewer-interviewee discussions like this is one of those unintentional side effects of otherwise well-intentioned anti-discrimination laws. It's a good example of why trying to legislate a problem away can sometimes make other problems pop up in its place.
Bill S. Preston told you everything you need to know. People are not out to get you. Acting as if they are is toxic and inhumane.
Do what's right, not what's safe.
It can and does happen. People sue over hiring decisions all the time.
It's unfortunate, but the way I figure, if you try to make laws that dictate morality (a la anti-discrimination laws), people are less likely to have and follow their own moral code in that area. "Why do I need to decide what's right or reasonable when the law does it for me?"
Also, most people are nice, but the small minority of people who are assholes can cause huge damage, amplified by the legal system. It's those people whom lawyers are (reasonably) worried about.
It happens often enough that the conventional wisdom (and "conventional" generally means "wrong", so excuse my skepticism) is that people sue all the time, and so liability-paranoid corporate entities concoct policies that institutionalize fear of the people who could go work for them. To go along with the fear of the people who do work for them.
But I have yet to see data that suggests that it's on the top thousand things any corporation big enough to hire people should worry about.
> It's those people whom lawyers are (reasonably) worried about.
Fight them. I have long ago decided that I will quit if my job interferes with doing right by people.
It hasn't happened yet, but I'm careful about my employer.
In both cases, human mind keeps circling on what went wrong. Is there any misunderstanding or wrong perception? So providing reasons is humane in any such life altering transaction.
Related to law, is following possible?
Before interview, there will be an agreement needs to be signed by interviewee, recruiter, company involved, so that, after interview, recruiters can provide reasons for rejections and as long as the reason is with in the laws of the country or appears reasonable, then involved parties will not proceed legally. If it is against the law, then interviewee may proceed legally. It may be expensive but we are not robots, right?
Different cultures have different opinions on work/job/career...etc. Since Americans are advanced in technology as of now, many countries are adopting similar policies and during that process, workforce management related laws also getting copied. These laws may be new to that society and difficult to understand by society/family. This makes lot difficult to effected employee to explain the rationale, which he/she also do not know. People won't even believe that reasons are not provided.
In conclusion, providing reasons or at least honest effort in that direction is needed, since we are dealing with other human beings rather than robots.
You don't need to sign an agreement: this is the status quo. The meat of the problem is when the candidate and the company disagree about what happened. It's a rare company that actually furnishes candidates with illegal reasons for rejection, so it's up to candidates if they believe they were illegally rejected.
I agree, signing a document is really stupid and unnecessary.
What I mean, if you give someone a reason, it can lead to it looking bad on paper. Unintentionally. If you don't give them a reason, you protect yourself.
Unfortunately, the government puts strict limits on the purview of contract law, so an agreement like this would likely not hold up in court.