I'm so disappointed to read comments on this thread to the effect of "There's nothing in it for the company but risk".<p>I once put in about 8 hours on a take home project at a company (well known in these parts) that I had tremendous respect for, only to get an email back with "sorry, not up to par. We need someone with more experience".<p>I asked them for a couple quick points on what I could have done better. I had zero intention of fighting them on it. No response<p>The whole experience made me feel very ill, especially after putting in as much effort as I did, and obviously I feel quite differently about that company now.<p>On the other hand, 5 years ago when looking for my first tech job, a virtually unknown startup that rejected me after a take home project and day long onsite gave me very thorough and specific feedback, encouragement, and even a bunch of reading suggestions. Even though I didn't get hired, I have very fond memories of that interview and reached out to them when I did land my first job to thank them again.<p>Did it have any tangible implications for their bottom line to give me that feedback? Not really. But they treated me with compassion rather than like garbage. I have never named and shamed the first company and never intend to, but I personally think there's more risk involved in habitually treating people like garbage than like human beings.
One time we gave feedback on request and the candidate contested the feedback, then went out on a social media rampage. So yeah, we stopped after that. It only takes one bad candidate to make it not worth the effort.
I got verbal feedback exactly one time (at Microsoft) during my attempt to land a post-1-year of university internship. I had solved the algorithm in a few minutes, but when trying to code it up, I struggled a fair amount before figuring it out. The feedback I got was "You seem like a smart person, who hasn't done very much coding. That makes you a bad risk. Go practice programming and come back next year". It was incredibly valuable advice that I got no where else, and it resulted in me coming back to MS a couple of years later once I graduated (I'm not there anymore).<p>I wish more people would give real, actionable feedback on interviews.
So many comments in the vein of "who has time to waste on candidates we aren't going to make an offer to?" - You are damaging your companies brand thinking this way. You want people who you reject to say to themselves "I can't wait to study up and interview here again, they said no, but I still want to work here!"
The hiring process is a black box for a reason. The HR department's role is to protect the company first, not the employees, and certainly not prospective employees. If feedback can be interpreted as being discriminatory, or reflective of bad company culture in general, well, word gets around.<p>For much of the time, the reason people don't get the job is that there was someone marginally more qualified/attractive/likeable, or some combination of the three; the classic "there were many qualified candidates and we could only choose one" line in the rejection email.<p>That doesn't help the interviewee beyond telling them that it's a numbers game, but that's the truth.
Because giving good feedback is hard work, and candidates won't always take it well (even if they don't sue). If the employer has already decided not to hire you, there's just not that much in it for them.<p>For what it's worth, as an interviewer I'm happy to give feedback in person, at the end of the interview, if the candidate asks for it. It's much easier to do when you're both in the same room, and asking e.g. "is there anything you think I could improve on?" makes a positive impression either way.
As an anecdote, the major consulting firms (McKinsey, BCG, Bain), all provide constructive interview feedback after interviews. They do this regardless of if the candidate is moving on to the next level of not.<p>It's strange that other industries haven't followed suit.
You generally don't get technical interview performance feedback because technical interviews are constrained by the interviewer to put themselves in a technically confident light against the candidate. The interview is as much a crapshoot for the interviewer, because they might be less/more/similarly skilled to the candidate, but they absolutely cannot reveal themselves to be less skilled because they would undermine their status if the candidate gets hired. So interviewers stick to the same random technical question that they feel very confident of, answers to it are studied. The myth is that this posed problem is a general test of skill for the candidate, but the primary motivation is for the interviewer to maintain the appearance of professional dominance. Hence the technical discussion is kept to a narrow problem domain. Obviously there is a spectrum here, and it's more true when the interviewer feels insecure. Only when the interviewer is very skilled/confident relative to the candidate do people go off script and give advice. I confess this is how I have seen it from both sides of the interview, I'm no saint either.
I have given it and will continue to give it. Some people do initially react badly to it. Heck, I've reacted badly to it sometimes. But that doesn't mean that it isn't helpful in the long run. My responsibility isn't just to my employers. It's also to my profession and my society, and to the extent I can help well-meaning people to improve, I'm glad to do it.
> While researching this piece, I spoke to a few labor lawyers and ran some Lexis Nexis searches to see just how often a company’s constructive feedback (i.e. not “durrrr we didn’t hire you because you’re a woman”) to a rejected eng candidate has resulted in litigation.<p>This is confirmation bias at its finest.<p>1. "speaking to a few labor lawyers and ran some Lexis Nexis searches" is hardly what I would call conclusive.<p>2. Companies have been generally instructed not to give feedback in the last few decades, so yes the chances of it happening are now quite low.<p>3. People don't sue for "they gave me constructive feedback", they use constructive feedback as evidence for some other more legitimate legal reason.<p>4. Many of these cases get settled (no employer wants to fight them), so you won't find them in public records.<p>The point isn't that people get sued for providing feedback, it's that the feedback can be used as evidence to build a case.<p>Look, NO ONE in an org wants to be the person that brought on a lawsuit to the company, so even if orgs don't want to do it, an individual person doesn't want to be <i>that</i> person even if the risk is technically low.
The key word in the title seems to be "engineer". I can't find a specific lawsuit relating to an <i>engineer</i> but there are plenty of lawsuits to be found.<p>For example, <a href="https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/newsroom/release/10-26-17.cfm" rel="nofollow">https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/newsroom/release/10-26-17.cfm</a><p>When you do a google search for lawsuits related to hiring discrimination, you are far far more likely to find the cases that became publicized because they have merit. Journalists and other organizations don't tend to write headlines along the lines of "Google got sued by candidate for baseless claim of discrimination, but suit was quickly tossed out". It doesn't mean these lawsuits don't happen.<p>In fact, it's a huge PITA to defend youself when someone accuses you of discrimination. Imagine an engineer who isn't very bright, but doesn't think that of themselves. So you tell them that they didn't do well, but they disagree. And then they sue on grounds of discrimination. Now, <i>you</i> have to prove that you don't discriminate, which can be pretty hard to do.
Ain't nobody got time for that. When I was hiring developers, I was conducting dozens of interviews based off of hundreds of applications. My goal is to hire people who can help me solve problems. Running an interview improvement service isn't something I have time for.
I think the comments that feedback is hard to write are very surprising. Do you not have to write notes about why you are rejecting or approving a candidate? I have never been in a role where interviews are ended with a simple boolean of whether the candidate passed or not. Every company should be keeping detailed notes on the reasons a candidate did well or poorly, even just to be able to compare if the candidate applies again in the future (or makes a claim that they were treated unfairly). Candidates should be rejected or hired for documented, justifiable reasons.<p>Additionally, in a medium to large org, it's impossible to evaluate the efficacy of interviewers if there are no notes. If the recruiting team can't look at the output of an interview and say "Huh, X keeps rejecting candidates because they use tabs instead of spaces in their Python code," how is the company supposed to maintain any hiring bar?<p>The effort to write comments in a way that can be shared externally should not be a huge amount of extra effort. Even if feedback is only shared on request, it should not take a monumental effort to distill some high-level bullet points from interview notes.
There's nothing in the company's interest to give feedback. It takes working time to compile this feedback and give it to the candidate. The candidate isn't going to interview at the company again until probably a year or more - if ever. And the company has a reputation risk if the candidate decides to revel this feedback and allege bias or ineffective interviewing.
Because it would take time to write up the feedback and it would have to be reviewed by HR to ensure it is not phrased in a way that in violation of local laws. This is a large investment for a candidate that is not going to work for your company and from a business point of view, this time is better spend else where.
I used to give feedback. Until one day when I gave feedback to a desperate alcoholic. They showed drunk up in the lobby of the office demanding a 2nd chance & I had to explain what the heck was going on.
Got feedback, "you didn't really know anything about Ruby on Rails". I was a Rails developer at the time, but no questions were asked about Rails during the interview (asked me nothing but JavaScript). I mentioned that to the recruiter, but when a recruiter is calling you to tell you that you didn't get the job, that's not the time to lodge a protest. Since this was an internal recruiter for the company, I thanked him kindly for actually calling me instead of sending an email. That was a solid move in my opinion.
To be honest, reading all the interviewing.io feedback makes it clear that I would never want to use it. It’s literally leetcode with interviews.<p>I don’t think I could do anything with the feedback if it was something like:<p>> ‘you didn’t say that the alghorithm you were using here was using the bayesian-green notation, and you should have used n+1 instead of n++’
I just went through interviews with several companies, and a few of the rejections I got was that I was either too senior or too junior for what they were looking for! I think they may have just been letting me down politely though. They must have known how much experience I had ahead of time!
I think the article generalizes the author's experience with first line interviews of wholly unqualified people to all post-interview feedback, and definitely shouldn't. People who literally can't Fizz Buzz are not going to argue with you about how no they are actually great devs. People who are borderline candidates who didn't quite get there in a final interview on fuzzier attributes (too slow, spaghetti code, etc.) are a lot more likely to take feedback poorly.<p>I tried giving post-full interview feedback for a while, but I stopped based on low cost/benefit.
I interviewed recently and didn’t get the job. I thought I did well enough so I wasn’t sure what went wrong. The recruiter told me exact detailed results for each interview including the hire / no hire outcome and why no hire for the no hire ones.<p>While I was disappointed to not get the job, it really gave me a sense of peace to know what went wrong and what I can do to improve.<p>I wish this was more common.
I think it's common courtesy to offer some feedback in exchange for the amount of time that these interviews often take. It's the consolation prize that helps you have a better chance of winning the real prize next time.<p>I've only been turned down once after interviewing so I don't have a lot of data on who does and who does not provide feedback. The time that I was turned down, I spent a day working on a programming assessment and 6 hours on-site interviewing with 4-5 different groups of people. I felt like everything went really well. I left and heard in a week or so that they were "pursuing other candidates". I asked about feedback, they said they don't give it.<p>Cool, then where's the ~$600 for my time? It's a Fortune 500 company (in the top 50). I'll never interview there again and I'll recommend to everyone that I know to vote with their talent and stay away from big, soulless companies that have forgone basic respect.
I am in a somewhat unique position of interviewing and hiring for two completely different industries. Whether it’s true or not that no engineer has sued for constructive post-interview feedback, it’s unfortunately absolutely not possible to make the same claim for teachers/adjunct faculty.<p>That said and for both industries, it’s <i>usually</i> pretty clear who’s the litigious type (heck, they oftentimes go out of their way to make sure you know) and who’s not, and I feel like if someone came to interview in earnest and put an honest effort, they at least deserve some return of the gesture. But my time is worth something too, so I only bother if the person is within an order of magnitude of the skill set we are looking for (or clearly has the potential to be). If they can’t write a proper conditional statement, they’re not going to benefit from an explanation of how their code will also run into a pathological edge case in the GC.
It is funny for companies to expect candidates to spend time to give feedback about their hiring process, but to spend an iota of time to give candidates feedback about performance: Risky! Lawsuit! Rant! You've more chance of damage by rogue employees than a candidate that's looking at multiple companies.
I interviewed at a startup here in NYC. It was one of my very first interviews as I interviewed for my first job.<p>In the final thank you email thread I asked:<p>Hi [redacted],<p>I really appreciated the speed of this entire process. I must admit, I'm bummed but understand; I also really do appreciate the feedback, both positive and negative. If you have any specifics on where I was specifically lacking, I would appreciate knowing but if Tempest's policy limits you from going much deeper, I understand that too.<p>I wish you the best at building your team; You'll find the person you're looking for. :)<p>Till next time!<p>Best,
lgregg<p>So, I then got direct actionable feedback. They’re not long explanations (I.e. on X you should have considered Y) but we’re very specific and super helpful.<p>I now have told this story many times and pointed people to try that company.<p>I think startups are more inclined to do this than companies after their Series C.
I write a form letter. If someone asks for feedback, I give it to them. Nothing's ever happened to me, but one of my colleagues once had a guy get very angry and say that he <i>had</i>, in fact, solved the problem and yell at him and then go write this angry Glassdoor review.<p>I guess I've got to thank this guy for any mild resistance to giving feedback that I have.<p>The sad answer for why my feedback isn't great, though, is that I can't bring myself to care about someone who is so far outside my Dunbar number. At the point where we've decided not to work with this person, they're just some rando. It's like if someone walked up on the street and asked me for feedback.<p>I mean, I try anyway, but I know I'm not doing the best job.
Because it's pointless.<p>A company didn't think you are a good fit. That's it.<p>The criteria they used to evaluate that is totally different than the criteria other companies will use.<p>What is the point of providing feedback for a data point that does not correlate with other interviews?
My wife used to work with students to help them get through interviews, and one of her pieces of advice when interviewing is to ask near the end of the interview is if they have any concerns about them as a candidate. It gives the interviewer a chance to address the concerns and gives them a chance to get feedback to make future changes. I’m not sure how well this would work for a technical interview loop, since my wife was working with law students, and the interviews aren’t the same kind of technical, but it might sidestep/short circuit typical lack of feedback technical people complain about.
Real, genuine, useful feedback takes time and effort to think about, summarize, and deliver in the right way. It takes thinking about what you observed about the person, when you observed it, and what you would like them to change to improve. Think about how long that takes to do correctly.<p>We take the time and effort to do this for people we care about, and not those we're never going to see again (unless you're just letting off steam yelling at someone in traffic). That's why at work, if someone gives you feedback, you should value it as they see you as someone worth correcting / giving feedback to. If you're getting no feedback, you might start to worry that you're not someone worth taking the time to give feedback to.<p>That's why companies and people don't bother giving feedback. Until you turn into someone they care about, what benefit would there be to them to spend resources to do this? And with uncertain reaction from the person (as pointed out by many stories here)?<p>So that's why, if you really want meaningful feedback it's a challenge to find -- you have to pay someone to do it (which is hard, because casual acquaintances don't know your deeper job-related behavior or performance), someone close to you (which is hard, because it's not easy to give friends honesty), or someone who has the time and interest to do it (rare to find). Or you have to be in a company where this is part of the culture (rare).
On the topic of form letter rejections:<p>I WISH I even got those... durring my last job hunt most of the time the company just goes dark and stops contacting me or doesn't respond.<p>I say this and other recruiers tell me they're shocked and yet getting ghosted seemed to be the rule rather than exception durring that time.<p>Maybe I'm such a bad canidae that they don't even want to bother with a form letter.<p>Strangely one company who ghosted me contacted me recently about some opportunities. I told them I wasn't interested and about being ghosted previously.<p>They didn't respond...
>Does the fear of getting sued even make sense?<p>No. most job offers are liberally padded to seek a massively overqualified candidate in the unrealistic hope of attaining one that hasnt gone to work for a much nicer competitor, or in order to give the interviewer and HR ample reasons to reject an applicant that arent pertanent to their manner or person (which would get them sued.) the latter is also effective in ensuring jobs that require an outside posting will always favor an inside candidate, or a nepotist's ringer.
Accurate time-sensitive communication is very hard in my experience. I've heard thru the grapevine on a few interviews over the years, that often the interviewer gets the wrong impression on some subject. Due to the fact there are say ten+ candidates for a position, one wrong impression is often enough to torpedo your chances.<p>For example, I'm good at what I do, but not the kind of person to brag about it (hah). In fact I instinctively tend to downplay things I've done as no big deal. In some sense true, but in an interview it's enough to lose the offer. Trying to correct this but it is not easy.<p>Once I was referred to a position by a colleague, but didn't get it. Weeks later I heard, "not enough db experience." What? While I don't write SQL every day, I've used dbs consistently over decades, know the theories, etc. Sure, I might need to hit the manual for a week to get up to speed, but that is incredibly common and no hurdle whatsoever.<p>So, post-interview feedback is good, but asking questions/feedback during the interview itself would have been a lot better. I wonder if (when there are so many candidates), interviewers don't want to revisit past assumptions and prefer to just get on to "the next one."
There's no <i>real</i> affordance for engineers to sue or censure the process.<p>I once did some interviewing with a broken wrist that dragged on me two ways:<p>1) I basically couldn't speed-code at all. Typing was inhibited for sure, but the friction point threw off my whole thought process.<p>2) Whiteboard coding was easier, but due to swelling, I usually had to have my arm atop my head or hold it in weird positions.<p>So by law companies are supposed to provide an accommodation, and what I often asked for was to minimize or skip keyboard-based coding since the injury clearly prejudiced my completion time.<p>Did companies oblige? A couple did, but several, including one who you could say was doing a "hiring spree" did not. At said company, I was shoved a laptop to code upon, which I told them I couldn't use without hurting my wrist, but the recruiter was like "IDK." After that interviewer I had a lot of swelling and the next guy was outright mean and made fun of me for having to raise my hand. At the end of that interview, I asked him "what are you looking for in candidates?" and he said "people who can complete their jobs on time" and gestured towards my arm.<p>So, what could one do here, file an EEOC complaint? Write bad reviews? EEOC complaints get basically zero consideration without tons of documented evidence, and if you lose your initial complaint then lawyers usually will decline to take up your case. I did write the recruiters and agency who connected me with this company and guess what? Nothing happened; the agency continues to make money feeding this company candidates.<p>So to be clear, candidates have in reality zero leverage individually. Even in egregious cases like these.
I bet ones view on this really depends on personal experiences both as an interviewee and an interviewer.<p>I work for a small start-up and recently went through hiring another developer to our team. I know how awful it is as a candidate to get little or no feedback of what is happening, so my goal was for our process to be more humane.<p>At first I answered all rejected submissions with a reason why that happened. There was rarely just one, but I would pick those were they clearly did not meet one of few inflexible requirements.<p>Because of a huge volume applications, vast majority of which poorly matching our requirements, that was almost all I was doing for the first few days, having difficulties finding time to move successful ones further, let alone do any other kind of work. I also quickly learned that many applicants see these feedbacks as an invitation to argue with often the only way to end it is by just not responding any longer.<p>So, I stopped doing this and resigned myself to sending generic rejection promptly unless I was asked for feedback explicitly. In my opinion candidates still quickly learn where they are at and have opportunity to learn more which is better than with most companies.<p>Few asked and I send feedback to all of them, but since I am not paid to persuade candidates that my decision is the right one for my company, these feedbacks admittedly were not as detailed as they would have been without that previous experience.<p>I am not happy with how the whole thing transpired, but I am comfortable with my decisions even though many here are telling "me" how I failed as a human being because I did not spend more of my off-clock time providing detailed feedback to people who mostly seemed to have keyword match our job ad and skipped reading it.
I wonder if a good middle ground between the two opinions expressed here would be to have an interview rubric with clear descriptions of each metric. So that receiving the feedback is more like getting results of a test back. Less prone to individual nuances of specific wording and still gives some directional guidance to the candidate for improvement.
A lot of the time hiring decisions are more or less arbitrary. It makes me sad how unsystematic the approach to hiring is, but it often comes down to one person that you talk to liking you enough after an hour of talking that they're willing to go to bat for you. The fact is there often is not any good feedback to give.
I was once asked in a web development interview how to asynchronously fetch a resource. I answered something to the effect of "you just add a `true` parameter in the xhr.open() call somewhere, probably the second or third parameter" without being too specific about it since I did not have it memorized.<p>The interviewer did not accept this response and after every rebuttal of mine he just responded with "no" each time without elaboration or clarification. He eventually gave up trying to coax me toward his accepted answer, apparently thinking he had outwitted me, and revealed to me that the correct answer he was looking for was to use "dollar q". I asked for a clarification on what he meant by "dollar q" but he was unable to clarify.<p>It was only after the interview was over that I realized he was referencing angularjs and its built-in "$q" service that handles asynchronous fetching. I had not used angularjs before this interview (still haven't) and nowhere during the interview was angularjs mentioned by name. The question was also in no way leading to an answer assuming usage of angularjs either.<p>I'm left to conclude that he thought angularjs was synonymous with web development and that "dollar q" was the one and only way to fetch resources asynchronously.<p>TL;DR: how confident are we in these interviewer evaluation scores? Do we always presume superior competency of interviewers over interviewees?
Getting a 402 from an embedded <a href="https://plot.ly" rel="nofollow">https://plot.ly</a> graph right at the top of the article. Given that article about 402 I read here a few days ago, it's cool to see 402 in the wild for the first time.
At my current company we do a full Pull Request review of the take-home assignment. After the interview, the review comments are shared with the candidate. We're based in Europe, so that might make a difference in terms of expectations around litigation.
To be fair to Google, I once got some decent feedback from one of the recruiters. I did fairly well, and made it through to the hiring committee. The recruiter told me that although I did well, my scores weren't home runs and that he's seen people with my scores have about a 50/50 chance of getting in. If I had other offers on the table, he suggested I take those instead and maybe reconsider Google in the future. I took that to heart and took the other job.<p>Of course, the next time I interviewed at Google a few years later, I absolutely bombed it so badly, I talked to the recruiter midway and told them I wanted to end things early and left after 3 interviews.
Sounds like managers are risk averse because they'll get the blame if something goes wrong but not the credit if it goes right.<p>But I don't think the risk has to be so big. By the end of an interview process, candidates I talk to already know where I think they should improve because that's part of the back and forth discussion in the interview itself. I also like to actually get to know the person a little bit which helps me judge how they'll respond. I'm also not afraid to make an offer on the low side instead of rejecting outright, etc.
I <i>sometimes</i> give feedback, but only if requested and, to be honest, only if the feedback request actually makes it through HR and to me.<p>What feels like a lifetime ago I went for an interview at Monzo, I think it'd recently renamed from Mondo. I thoroughly enjoyed the process - a kind yet thorough and revealing interview format. I didn't get the job - but it's not an exaggeration to say their feedback and the process changed my career. If somebody from there spots this; thanks :) (and I'm still sad I didn't get to work with you!)
It really seems like there needs to be a widely adopted social protocol for engineers to basically say "Hey, if you're expecting this much from me, I expect a reciprocal amount from you at stages 1,2,3,4 etc.."<p>I interviewed last year at a company that had me do some homework first, then a first long interview where they went through that work—refreshing because almost no companies do—which went well, then a 2nd and 3rd interview. Felt pretty locked in, didn't get it. Ton of time wasted no doubt, but at least it felt balanced.
At a former job we ended technical interviews with the question: "So, how do you think you did?". It allowed candidates to raise points and what they'd want to do different. Some candidates used the chance to ask for feedback at which point I could choose to agree with the candidate or elaborate on solutions.<p>It avoids some of the defensive stances candidates may take when given feedback (because they go first) although it doesn't tell a candidate how they did badly if they weren't already slightly aware.
The article and many of these comments assume that hiring decisions are made entirely based on talent. But hiring decisions are equally if not more influenced on the vague and often problematic "culture-fit".<p>If the company is being completely honest, half the time, the feedback would sound like "You're a talented engineer but you're not a great culture fit", which can open the company up to litigation. Especially if the culture-fit reasons are specifically based on demographics.
Giving feedback is bad for the companies initially as a lot of biases are exposed when the feedback is reviewed. As in some engineer thinks something a candidate doesnt know makes him dumb. Just because the engineer has worked a lot on that problem and the candidate never saw it. In the longer term, I think its good as even constructing the feedback makes you look at your biases in an objective way and evaluate candidates better. I wish every company I interviewed for would give me feedback.
When people ask me how they did, I try to frame it more general, like instead of here's what you should do better, here's what I would do if I were interviewing that would allow me to be more impactful. I've always got good responses. And I've been told I'm in the clear legally.<p>The industry is too small to treat people like you will never run into them again. There are many reasons why someone might not be right for the role today, but will be a rockstar tomorrow.
> No engineer has ever sued a company because of constructive post-interview feedback. So why don’t employers do it?<p>Because there's only risk and zero benefit in it for the employer.<p>Note: the risk isn't mythical 'lawsuits', the risk is in bad PR that disgruntled rejected candidates generate. Even if one in 10 get offended and start spreading shit-talk on the Internet, that 10% is still too much.<p>Without a post-interview explanation, there is no ammunition for internet discussion.
The only company I've ever receive constructive post-interview feedback from was a company in California that ships out patterns and materials for people to make their own clothes. They said my code wasn't something they could drop into their product. Of course, it wasn't! I intentionally wrote it so they couldn't use my interview for free labor. I've worked at two companies that did that and I find it highly unethical.
Why can't companies provide feedback iff the candidate agrees that the feedback is subject to NDA? Interview candidates already sign NDAs for the coding questions asked.<p>Granted those NDAs are always ignored (based on coding interview sites) but the NDA would at least provide the "protection" that these companies want. Then the companies benefit from having candidates actually improving and potentially coming back hirable.
Companies who don't give feedback because they believe there is no upside are building a team that lacks empathy, with all that implies regarding technical debt and final product. If the company is successful, it is despite the team, not because of it. This is tantamount to a mathematical certainty.<p>I will always reject an offer from any company that I know does not give feedback to their rejected candidates, and have done.
If the interview task is objective (come up with an algorithm for this problem and derive its big-O complexity), then feedback is less required, because the candidate knows exactly what skills they should improve. Unfortunately, many people today think objective interview tasks are "brain teasers", "toy problems", "instead ask me how I can add value to business" and so on.
Interestingly the only time I've had any meaningful feedback is when I've gone thru an agency and the feedback was given to me post interview by the recruiter.<p>The feedback was fair and accurate and extremely unlikely to be made up by the recruiter given the content.<p>I suppose that at once removed they could be more willing to provide feedback as they can always claim that it was the recruiter
<i>they’re rarely told why they got the outcome that they did.</i><p>Well then it makes sense that no one has been sued or otherwise retaliated against for something that rarely happens.<p>My company once gave honest feedback to a candidate that kept asking for it - he used glassdoor to detail everything that was wrong with our evaluation of him and the entire interview process.
Using a throwaway for obvious reasons. I just got rejected by Netlify after a coding assignment, but the last thing in the rejection email was an offer to set up a call to discuss feedback on the assignment and interviews. Other startups, take note. (The rest of their hiring process was equally impressive--no hard feelings at all.)
One company in particular, gave me fairly useful feedback. For a design question, I was going all over the place not taking hints from the interviewer. I did not realize that I was trying to cram everything into one hour. Anyways, I will consider them in the future. Usually other companies do not bother.
Remember to thank your Lawmaker friends as to why we can't do this.<p>In other parts of life, all of us would gladly do this to benefit a person when it doesn't directly benefit us. But threatened with civil fines and ultimately jail time, most of us choose the sensible 'ghost em' route.
Personally I'd rather not know, unless I do. Process of receiving feedback can be awful. In a hiring role (done that too) I'd rather save people the embarrassment of a dressing-down. I wouldn't want for them to bear more resentment towards the company than necessary.
I had the most amusing realization at work the other day: most software engineers “hate” how their coworkers write software. I took it a step further and realized I hate software I wrote a year ago. Giving objective feedback should be a cherished skill.
For better or worse people don’t give feedback because they don’t want candidates arguing with them. Picking candidates is very subjective in the end.<p>I’ve become professional contacts with many folks I’ve interviewed and dinged. Doesn’t need to be negative.
It's not in their best interest time-wise, unless they seek to employ you afterwords.<p>Strangely, I've always gotten feedback, or at least "we decided not to continue", which is better than nothing.
One hour coding test. Two one hour phone interviews. 5 hour interview with EA Tiburon. Generic rejection two weeks later. Never again.<p>Are we cool on naming and shaming or should I save that for reddit?
This reminds of restaurants throwing out food because the risk of giving it away is too great, but as far as I know no one has ever gotten in trouble because of it.
Honestly, I'd even take a rejection letter at this point. A lot of places have gotten into the business of not letting you know if you got rejected.
I wonder if one has ever been successful in using the data access and protection laws (such as GDPR) to request access to his file and interview feedback.
I think I've taken around 50 interviews in the last year or so. I always end the interview with "do you have any questions for me?" No one asks what they could have done better, but if they did I'd tell them.
Perhaps if more people utilized glassdoor and talent steered clear, then we might see a positive change here.<p>Until then, there is no incentive for employers to spend time formalizing and providing that feedback.
People are not very good at giving critical feedback. People are not very good at receiving critical feedback. In the middle you have lawyers who must protect the company from liability.
In the UK I've heard it said you can make a subject access request (SAR) for any information a company holds on you. This would include interview notes for example.<p>I assume something similar applies in the rest of europe due to GDPR?
I think you could tell them a little something about why you decided not to make an offer. But this is riddled with problems, sadly. For example, candidates often take it as an invitation to a debate. You can agree with the feedback or not, but you're not going to talk your way into an offer.<p>In sum, it's all downside with little upside. The lawsuit thing is a red herring, imo.
> While researching this piece, I spoke to a few labor lawyers and ran some Lexis Nexis searches to see just how often a company’s constructive feedback (i.e. not “durrrr we didn’t hire you because you’re a woman”) to a rejected eng candidate has resulted in litigation.<p>It's not "durrrr" and this is why feedback is not given, this immaturity is why people get sued.<p>Many non obvious statements can have implications about illegal discrimination.<p>It is probably very rare, this is a quite valid point people get wrong. But benefits are also probably rare, so it equals out.
About ~10 years ago, before the Facebook IPO, Facebook was famous for recruiting alumni from other AANG companies, who re-did their old projects at Facebook. For a few years, everyone from industry who interviewed at Facebook got a vibe of "wow, this is like my old company but you fixed the crap that annoyed me!"<p>One of those things they fixed was that they gave feedback on interviews.<p>The tale of the tape says that this strategy worked very well for Facebook hiring and business growth.
Because America is a very litigious society and there will always be that ...one. Corporate protectionism will dictate to simply not say anything than take the risk.
This is caused simply and merely by the absurd infringement of freedom of association that prevails nowadays.<p>The fact is, you're never ever ever going to stop racists and sexists from not hiring people outside their race and sex because of your laws. All that will happen is precisely this: absurd levels of secrecy, which hurt those weakest in society: those just trying to get a job so they can afford to eat and not sleep under a bridge.<p>Even if they literally say "we don't want to hire you because you're white, and we want to hire an asian", at least you now <i>know</i> it wasn't because of your skills, so you don't lose confidence, and instead know it was just because they were racist assholes. Under the current regime, they're still racist assholes, but you'll never know.<p>What we need is a bonfire of 90% of the statutes on the books, which will never happen, so this treatment of candidates will continue, while our respective countries wait for others to overtake them.<p>What we need is a massive renovation, resurgence, and uptake of unions, across the board, not only to remove these matters from statutes and move them into contracts (forced fair by force of numbers), but to enforce an organic defence of workers, everything from a war against noncompetes and similar oppression, through to clauses like "you'll tell our members <i>specifically</i> why you rejected them on interviews, or else you'll <i>really really</i> regret it...".