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Comment by gkop | Hacker News Reader

This is merely a convenient excuse for companies behaving inconsiderately. Since many companies in the U.S. do send rejection emails, it's clearly one of any number of other reasons why some companies neglect this basic courtesy. The silver lining is, you probably don't want to work for these companies anyway :)

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>Since many companies in the U.S. do send rejection emails

Are you able to provide any kind of data backing up that claim?

I am strongly in the "don't hate the player, hate the game" camp on this issue.

This is NOT a basic courtesy but a business process that requires a lot of resources to be at least somewhat meaningful. How long do you think it takes to write a rejection letter that provides useful, actionable data for the potential candidate? Multiply that by 10-100 for every position.

Oh, and I've seen much more nasty replies and general insults than thank yous in response to rejection letters.

I would be in support of rejection letters if the process would be mandated by the hiring platform / shared culture / etc.

Facebook gives candidate feedback.

Try applying for a position at a large company with a reputation for a highly-engineered hiring process, eg. Google [0]. Rarely will you get specific feedback, but you can expect to get a notification when you are no longer under consideration.

[0] At Google's scale, some candidates fall through the cracks. But their recruiting process does mandate rejection notifications. It'd be great if a Google recruiter would back me up here :)

I interviewed at Google; they said they would give me a decision at some (soon) future point, and they did. They called me during work hours to do it... but they definitely did give me an explicit rejection.

My impression is that rejection letters are fairly common but they're almost universally in the form letter "no fit at this time. Will keep on file" vein.

Maybe some companies do more personalized responses but I've never seen it and I would think it would often be difficult. As with many other things, say picking talks for conferences, you're usually not so much rejecting as you're picking some other person or thing. And, yes, there are a lot of reasons the typical HR department would have issues with brutal honesty even aside from the effort it would take.

At least that is some form of response. My experience with big tech firms is either a request for a phone screen or tumbleweeds. I'd prefer the courtesy of a one line email rejection instead of the application disappearing into a black hole.

As for me, I'm still waiting for a response from the SouthWest Research Institute. I know, I know, most people would have given up by now, since it's been 25 years, but the initial interview went so well....

[Edit] Holy shit, I'm old.

> How long do you think it takes to write a rejection letter that provides useful, actionable data for the potential candidate?

I see nothing in the post nor this thread that indicates that's what people are looking for. An obvious form letter would be just fine. The point is that a candidate wants to know that the process is over, instead of being left hanging.

"I am strongly in the "don't hate the player, hate the game" camp on this issue."

I am strongly in the "that is a shitty excuse perpetuated by people to excuse their crappy behavior on a wide number of things" camp.

I have often found myself working _for_ people who had the same negative experiences at other companies, so not only do all bad hiring practices create negative reputation, they create an entire class of people who would be perfectly happy if you didn't exist at all. :)

On "Who is hiring", you can abstain from upvoting those companies where you had a negative experience (or even downvote them, if you feel that's justified).

I stated on the update about "Who is hiring" that there needs to be a way to track and review the interactions with these companies. Glassdoor doesn't really have a "these guys never bothered to reply to my job application" section. I just went and "reviewed" companies on "Who is hiring" as this community should try to promote those we'd recommend others try to apply and those we don't believe others should waste their time with. Eventually, we'd be left with only quality job postings.

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