Most ghost at that point with zero response, some have explicitly replied by saying they will not give feedback at all. Only one organization gave any feedback at all, and they really took it to another level by scheduling a 30-minute call with an HR rep to have an entire feedback session.
I’m currently pivoting from a decade+ long career in government, albeit technical and involving development, and the feedback would be immensely valuable to me. It’s difficult for many of these organizations to find a person to actually request feedback from, but even when you can, seems unwilling to offer it.
Is there a liability reason here, or is it just a sheer volume problem at this point in the market?
Forbid Feedback - this is a one-liner in our procedures manual. For internal Training, I might add a 3-minute "here's a real-world example, where well-intended feedback turned into a disaster" story to any 3+ hour training. That'll be a different case every time, to keep it fresh and drive home the point.
Allow Feedback - now I'm letting my front-line troops, who don't have much training for it, spend time wandering in legal minefields. The time is on my dime. Any additional training is on my dime. The liability (which could easily be $millions) is on my dime. And 99% of the (modest) upsides are for some declined candidate who we'll probably never see again.
Not very - though the experienced prospects don't need to be told.
And people who are inclined to sympathy and politeness tend not to stick around in a role which requires lots of saying "no", to people who really wanted to hear "yes".
Finally, the sooner you close the door on further communication, the less time you waste with candidates who fall short of "calm and professional" in accepting their "no".
Feedback on interviews can happen, but in my experience as an interviewer, when I've given feedback, candidates want to rebut it. That doesn't feel like a good use of my time, so I won't entertain requests for feedback anymore. For a very few candidates, I have reached out to the candidate to provide unsolicited feedback, like if they did pretty well on my interview but were missing some fundamentals and did poorly with the rest of the panel, and some guidance on things to study for future interviews would help them on future interviews; or they weren't a good candidate for the open position(s), but they seemed like they could do well in a different type of position.
If you build a bit of rapport with your HR contact / recruiter / interviewers and mention that you'd appreciate feedback either way during the process, realize that maybe it might not end up being a fit now but maybe down the track or that you might have other referrals for them, etc., then in my experience you can actually get some reasonable informal/verbal feedback a lot of the time.
If you treat it as an entitlement and don't demonstrate that you understand their concerns, less so.
2. If I don’t want to hire you, it’s very likely that I have 0 interest in wanting to interact with you further. You don’t have a job and you want a job where I work. When I give you feedback are you going to take it or are you going to argue with it? “Oh, I’m actually ________, just let me talk to you again…” Not happening so why even pretend like I care?
I tell people we’re moving on with other candidates and thank them for their interest. If they write back and the first two words in the email aren’t “Thank you”, it’s an insta-delete.
And it’s not just liability. The minute you start providing feedback, the candidate is going to start arguing why you are wrong and it’s a waste of time.
I certainly do apply for remote-only positions as well if I match the requirements really well, but everything in the intermediate to mid-level range is getting 800-1,000 apps per week.
When I was looking for jobs both in 2023 and again last year, my backup plan was working as a plain old C#/Javascript/Python backend developer with AWS experience. I was only looking for remote roles since now my wife and I live in a tourist heavy. But not software developer heavy metropolitan area.
I made it a habit of applying for at least 20 jobs a day while spending the rest of the time doing interview prep.
This is all while actually going through the interview process (and ultimately getting offers) for my more targeted opportunities based on my network, recruiters reaching out to me and my reaching out to companies where I had very specialized niche experience with AWS as well as more broad based AWS experience.
I never had to trigger my plan C. That was sucking it up and being willing to relocate to one of a few cities on my own dime and work in an office or hybrid.
Yes I realize Plan C isn’t as easily done for most people. We are just in a situation where we can easily and relatively cheaply relocate anywhere and rent and keep our condo where we live now.
But you have to get out of your “most comfortable stack” mentality. If you have other stacks that you have experience with, tailor a different resume to those and extend your search criteria.
There are also companies that don’t care about what technologies you know as long as you can pass a coding interview.
It’s time to “grind leetCode”. I’ve never had to do that myself. But it is reality today
Many of us readers are in similar fields in the same job market all wondering why we can’t get even a bit of advice. I think we owe it to TRY to give each other to give feedback.
We also have to try not to get mad when we get feedback we don’t like, unless it’s illegal. Then shouldn’t we all be happier that the feedback was aired and the truth came out?
It may not scale and I may not have a solution but it seems like people give up very quickly on this topic.
One additional issue on this topic is power imbalance. These poor companies have so many applicants, however will they reject them all AND say why, maybe even in writing? The last statement is meant tongue in cheek, of course.
There’s other silly worries that lead to chalking things up to legality and scale:
What if we get caught for doing something illegal?
What if all of these unemployed people spend their savings on lawyers and sue us for giving useful advice because they’re (angry, unstable, unprofessional, arrogant, other generality about online applicants)?
What if our hypothetical solution for a better candidate experience isn’t perfect tanks our company?
I don’t think the issue is legality or scale but that it’s perpetually “someone else’s problem”. We can do better.
This happens. There are people who work together with lawyers to send in applications knowing they are not looking for a job but looking for the ability to sue in any part of the application process. Sadly, this is also a reality of the world and unfortunately cannot be chalked up to a silly worry.
Best of luck, but the best tip I can give you to be hired anywhere, is to absolutely avoid the HR team. Think about it, you don’t meet the real hiring manager until the last interview, too late already if you start with HR....
Go around, contact team managers directly, be creative, so that the HR team stays in their place...they are glorified invitation senders and should stay as such.
On top of that, most of the feedback will reflect what state the company is in or what kind of people they are looking for, and not necessarily you or your skills. Eg. they want a deeply technical person, or a good communicator. In one year, for the same position, they will want a different set of skills.
If you know a lot of prospective companies, experiment with your CV / introduction and try to A/B test what is working. This is totally under your control.
Of course if we worked together before and you impressed me, I’ll go through the standard internal referral process.
Starting with the class action lawyers who'd love to argue that HR was interviewing & rejecting long-odd candidates for the purpose of boosting their Feedback Fee income.
I think that no information is better than wrong information so I never ask for feedback.
That person doesn't work for your company?
There must be some reason a candidate is rejected. Putting the reason down in writing makes you accountable to the role, to the company, to the ideal candidate, and to the candidate currently evaluated.
Posting a job and not hiring until 6 months later doesn't make the hiring manager accountable.
To protect from legal liability, require candidates to sign something that clears the company from legal liability. Companies make candidates and employees sign all sorts of NDA/non-compete/etc documents anyway.
The reason is almost always "they did not appear to be good enough," usually around coding or problem solving. Very rarely is it something else.
I do prefer to give feedback, and so does our recruiter, so a lot of our candidates get feedback. But honestly I'm not sure how useful it is, being mostly "we have a high bar and they didn't reach it." The truly valuable feedback is how to get better, but that's hours and hours of help.
Plus, one time I did give feedback directly to the candidate over email, and they continued to badger me about it. I'm fine with shutting that kind of thing down, so I still give feedback, but it did sour me a bit.
I'd be willing to bet they at least think there is some metric being improved there. Possibly assuming it might garner more interest as a desirable workplace during an staffer's market.
