The reason many places don't do this is not so much to avoid feeling like an a-hole but to avoid accidental liability.
There are so many things you can't say or ask in an interview, that a lot of companies that are big enough to have an HR person or department will require a very generic rejection letter just to be sure they don't provide grounds for a lawsuit.
Unfortunately, the accidental liability problem needs to be taken seriously -- mostly because of risk/reward. I try to write as nice and appreciative letter as possible.
1. I don't reject candidates -- I choose a different candidate.
2. The more they went through the process, the longer (and better) the letter. Rejected application, short thank you for applying. If you came for two interviews, but then we went with someone else -- I write a longer letter with references to the meetings.
3. Good candidates that we didn't hire (because another was better) are invited into my personal network. I recommend them to others, I invite them to dev events, etc. I give non-specific-to-our-interview job hunting advice. We'll have openings at some point.
4. I do the same for candidates that are just not a fit (they do X, we need Y). I might never hire them, but I have a personal goal to know every good developer within commute distance of my company (we live in a low population area).
I think 3 is a really great idea. Do you find that, in doing so, you get additional benefits yourself? I imagine you've already got places to look for new hires ect.
Avoiding a lawsuit is as easy as not citing illegal reasons for not hiring someone. E.g. “You’re a woman,” “you’re Indian,” “we’re uncertain how your disability will effect our workplace,” or “you’re too old.” (Or their codeword equivalents.) I think the author is just being civil and I commend him for it.
Point well made. Here is how I would weave in the legal concerns.
Back in the days of unrestrained freedom of association, employers could afford to be direct about their reasons for hiring decisions. A rejection (or any other employment-related decision) could be based on race, sex, age, ethnicity, disability, or even just disliking someone for no good reason. This changed with the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made it illegal to make employment decisions based on any one of several prohibited bases, including race and sex. The effect of that Act and its progeny throughout the United States was to curtail freedom of association by declaring that public policy made it repugnant to allow individuals to engage in invidious discrimination against discrete and insular minorities who needed special protection to prevent their being abused. While this curtailed a form of unrestricted freedom that had theretofore prevailed in society, only a very few opposed it or saw it as anything other than a great social advancement.
Once the law began to govern such relations, however, formality inevitably took hold and never let go. Without formality, (a) people could say the wrong things, (b) people could say innocent things that could be twisted into seemingly wrong things, (c) people (following casual exchanges) could make things up about what was said, even if employer representatives had in fact acquitted themselves properly, (d) people could compile statistics and find discrimination in any form of pattern or practice used by an employer even in the absence of overt discriminatory intent by the employer's agents, making it perilous to document explicit reasons too explicitly as a matter of routine practice (e) and people could do wrong things in spite of company policies to the contrary and against the wishes of company management just because, people being people, they can do unpredictable things.
In addition to discrimination, the law expanded to further curtail the grounds upon which an employer could choose not to associate with any prospective employee. If an employer adopted policies that were deemed "against public policy" for any reason, or if an employer permitted its employees to sexually harass others, or to retaliate against a person who had complained of company wrongdoing, liability lay in wait for the unsuspecting employer.
Now take all this and throw it into a mix that depends on a standard of proof that something was "more likely than not" to have occurred, and leave it to a jury to weigh conflicting testimony and other evidence - a jury that may well have it out for big company defendants - and you are left with an existential mess for any employers who don't immediately and completely take serious control over employment procedures in their company. Throw in liability exposure arising out of class action as a vehicle for redress (also new to the mix since the 1960s), and you liability risks become paramount over all else. And so everything gets assigned over to HR, leaving it entirely impersonal and sanitized: all in writing, all vague or non-committal, all positively de-humanizing.
But what is a modern employer to do? Or at least a big company employer that cannot rely on the discretion of many hundreds or even thousands of individuals to know all the rules, to apply them consistently and correctly, and to avoid being set up legally by some who would attempt to ensnare them?
Society has gained greatly from its laws against invidious discrimination but such laws have come at a cost, and the cost is precisely that identified by the author of this piece. People no longer can just be themselves in relating to one another in many parts of the workplace but need instead to be hyper-cautious and impersonal. Whatever good may have come from the positive side of these laws (and this has been considerable), this is a real price to pay on the downside.
Fortunately, in most small company situations, people can afford to exercise much more discretion than they can in large corporations. I think this is where the author is coming from and I too commend him for it. Directness and transparency are outstanding qualities. If the situation is small and controlled, and the people involved have the wits and discretion to avoid obvious legal wrongs and traps, there is much to be gained in building the sort of goodwill that you do by treating people decently even as you might be rejecting them as part of the interview process.
No. All you have to do is interview someone in a protected hiring class, and then say something in the rejection that contradicts or is in any way inconsistent with anything you have said or the candidate can claim you have said. Litigious candidates don't have to play to win the lawsuit, either; they can play to settle.
Litigious candidates can sue regardless of what you do. I refuse to let shysters, either opposing or my own counsel, determine how I interact with people.
Sure, those reasons are pretty obvious. If you want to familiarize yourself with the main reasons, check out the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's Q&A/FAQ page at http://www.eeoc.gov/facts/qanda.html
If you haven't read it, I really recommend spending a few minutes reading it. It doesn't just apply to the hiring process and there are cases for drug use, religious accommodations, acting on genetic information (really), etc.
I can certainly understand why people would prefer to send a generic rejection letter rather than list reasons, any of which may or may not trigger some clause in one of the relevant laws.
Because the default tends to be to say nothing, frequently if you just ask directly for feedback may get it. Its a bit of a back door to the policy.
When I worked for "MegaCorp" we didn't give any feedback voluntarily but if a candidate asked me directly I would let them know. I frequently hired junior engineers* and felt almost a responsibility to give them some input, particularly if their issue was technical. If they were just an ass, I'd likely stick to the company line and not say anything.
* I found most senior engineers are pretty well aware of their deficiencies and almost never would ask for feedback.
This is indeed true, and I'll never fault anyone for it. Though rarely have I encountered a rejection in which I didn't feel the same way -- actually, if I have a sense that something is amiss I prod around for it rather deliberately to see what sort of answers I can get out of folks. Sometimes you get the obvious red flags you were looking for, complete with obvious body language and visible frustration.
Recently I quit my job and put myself out there again. One company employs headhunters and has a very well-known developer in their employ. So at the time I was pretty chuffed to line up an interview, figuring I had no risk of "slamming into the ceiling" at all. I already had two offers in front of me, but I figured it was worth pursuing.
The best way I could describe the interview is if you were walking about as a child and saw an action movie hero that your admired -- and watched him punch out a six year old that happened to be in his way. Before he interviewed me the group manager asked what blogs I read, and I rifled them off with my thoughts on them. One I had mentioned that I didn't read, but that I was aware that he was attempting to make a name for himself by making more complex topics accessible to Joe average. Before the manager left he sternly warned me that if I were to mention that name in front of this individual, the interview would end immediately.
The fellow himself was abrupt, intimidating, and rather smug. I've interviewed hundreds of people, so I can sympathize to an extent regarding the monotony of asking the same questions over and over, but I was able to gauge from other team members that he simply wasn't having a bad day, but that's how he is to folks outside of his circle.
The recruiter had me come back in person to say that I was considered brilliant technically, but they would pass. She couldn't figure out why, so I mentioned that he gave pretty clear feedback on twitter, and it's not the first time he's done it. I pulled out my phone to prove it.
The recruiter was a superbly nice person, the type that worries about and tries to take care of everyone. She was shocked to the verge of tears -- an opportunity she sells as manna from heaven, and those were the kinds of comments he'd pass on to thousands of people as opposed to delivering directly to the individual. I didn't consider his criticism harsh, as it was valid to pass on someone who wasn't a very assertive and confident Type A personality when your organization has invested decades in building up that specific culture. Not to mention it's difficult to seem eager when considering the prospect of working with an outright bully. She was upset enough that she had to leave the room, and the account manager and I spent the next hour dissecting the organization's culture.
I think that's the only time I can ever really consider a rejection to not be kosher. Fortunately, the universe has a way of balancing these things out. His group is now one of my clients. I can't wait to see the look on his face when I pop into the room.
A very interesting and useful post. It sounds like this guy wanted to keep some sort of reputation since he was so famous.
But it was confusing to read because it took me a long time and a lot of puzzling to figure out all the antecedents. It might be more accessible if you made up names for people instead of saying "this individual" and so on. Also, I would be interested in quotes or paraphrases from this guy's Twitter comments about you - do you remember any of them?
I wanted to simply bring up the story for anecdotal purposes, not publicly out someone. Everyone else I work with is an non-fan of the behavior, but this week I said that we should stop slamming his actions and instead try to find a way to get the message across in a positive way so he can be a better person and have impact without having to intimidate everyone.
I hope that eventually he'll learn that sort of behavior is counterproductive and simply not kosher. He's brilliant, just needs to go about sharing his knowledge in a more constructive manner. He'd benefit greatly in the long run.
The bargain being made here though is reduced liability in exchange for missing out on a chance to make a really positive impression with someone who has had a pretty serious and beyond-the-surface experience with your company. I think this is the primary point the blog author is trying to make.
One time I got a rejection letter from a company that included a list of reasons that people are usually rejected. One of the reasons was spelling or grammar errors in their cover letter or resume.
As it happened, this letter that they sent out contained both a spelling error and a grammatical error. In retrospect, this was perhaps a little too snarky, but I wrote back to them and pointed this out. They contacted me again, asking if I would be interested in another position they had available.
Most companies in the land of the lawyer don't even send rejection letters, just in case the candidate decides that it contains some grounds to sue you over.
It doesn't even have to be good grounds - they just need a sleazy enough lawyer. The more info you give them the more ammo they have.
Yes it sucks to simply not hear from a company, and it leads to negative recomendations about them to friends /colleagues /potential other recruits. You can still be friendly in the letter but I would be careful about telling someone why they aren't hired.
>Most companies in the land of the lawyer don't even send rejection letters, just in case the candidate decides that it contains some grounds to sue you over.
There are so many reasons I am glad I don't live in the usa anymore.
I interviewed at a bunch of places and only got two offers. One of the places I interviewed and failed was Microsoft. They had the interviews throughout the day (about 4 of them), and then after that they had an HR person give you the good or bad news.
(It's worth saying that the developers I interviewed with were really outstanding. They were in the Dev Tools group (CLR, Visual Studio, etc.) and were really sharp).
Anyway, I got pulled out, and the woman gave me "the bad news," and the typical HR lines about "not a good fit at this time," and, "we encourage you to apply again later." And then, out of nowhere, she throws out "And you should definitely take a close look at yourself to figure out how you could be better."
The reason I tell this story is to point out that "helpful feedback" is absolutely useless when not actually helpful. Having an HR person (who had, up to that point, been totally disconnected from the whole process), come and give me some "helpful tips" wasted her time and mine.
I also interviewed with Meebo (which was actually a pretty interesting interview, and the people there were pretty cool). I met with the HR guy at the end of the day, and he tried to talk me into doing an internship instead, because I'd be competing with people with "years of experience." I told him I already had some offers and I wasn't interested in an internship. Later, when he emailed to "give me the bad news," he said "we're going with another candidate, but enjoy your summer at Company X!" I'd say this loosely qualifies as rejecting me like an asshole.
I ended up with offers from Facebook and Google though, so life goes on :)
> he emailed to "give me the bad news," he said "we're going with another candidate, but enjoy your summer at Company X!" I'd say this loosely qualifies as rejecting me like an asshole.
Really? Wow. I'd have interpreted that as an attempt at being "friendly", showing at least some personal interest and wishing you well.
I guess that goes to show it's difficult to predict how other people will interpret things. :)
The implication is either that the candidate is actually going to end up as an intern (rather than full-time position) at Company X, or is only going to last a few months at Company X, or possibly that only Company X would accept such a candidate (depending on whether or not the candidate told him which companies had offered).
All the implications seem insulting to me, based on the story as told (that the guy wasn't interested in an internship).
I've got rejected a couple of times with good, useful feedback, and a couple of times with "We can't afford to hire anyone else for a while". In both cases, I end up happy for the feedback, not pissed I didn't get the position. I want to work for the company more than I did before. I follow the companies with interest, and feel a vague sense of attachment to them. If I saw the people who rejected me at some kind of conference, I would go up and say hi. I would recommend them to my friends.
So - please do this. Unless you don't care about my opinion of you. You may not.
I think the most frequent complaint of mine is unprofessionalism on the end of the company in getting back to the candidates. It's pretty much being an asshole to not get back to the candidate who takes the time to come and interview with them. I understand that they may have many a people applying for positions and this and that but there are some common courtesies. And I'm not even talking about a hyper competitive job where hundreds apply for a few positions. This has happened when I was one of the 2 people considered for the position and what not. This one time I got an email from HR after a couple of months of interviewing asking me if I was still interested in the position etc.
Completely agree - take the time, even if it's a standard no thank you email, to get back to the candidate. There are plenty of companies that do this, and while I can take the rejection without any hard feelings if that is the outcome, I will lose respect for the company when no response is given.
Unfortunately, I think that this is all too common, especially in other (non-software) fields. There's almost no excuse for it (short of "the company went bankrupt the day of the interview and all hands were laid off")
For all the people claiming that this is likely to end in a lawsuit where is your evidence? Do you have any actual cases where a company was sued because they gave legitimate feedback? How much money did the company lose because of this suit? How many lawsuits are there per rejected candidate? Do you know the text of the laws that specifically address this?
If 1 in 1000 candidates would sue you, causing $100k in costs for a drawn-out legal battle, then your practice has a very expensive expected value, but in a way you won't notice until shit hits the proverbial fan.
Of course there is a flip side, if you interview 100 programmers in a small high tech town and piss off 99 of them by not even sending a 'no thanks' letter.
And each of them tell all their friends that you are an a-hole, then when every potential hire in Cambridge/ NYC/ Stanford etc has heard that XYZ software are a-holes you are going to have one hell of a job hiring.
I think this is largely an imagined scenario. Even in "small towns" the developer network is not so tight that you're going to have people trying to blacklist your company on the grounds of not getting a formal rejection notice.
Plus, if the 1 developer you DO hire continuously tells people it's a great company working on cool stuff, that would outweigh the negative comments from the other 99.
Depends who you are.
If you're MSFT, IBM, etc then you don't even send a no thanks letter, you have nobody who isn't a certified HR person talk to a candidate and you don't allow any off the cuff remarks. The lawyer target cross section is too high.
If you are a small startup in a high tech hub trying to attract people, and especially if you are in a market where the programers you reject might be future customers then you're risk is different.
Companies often forget that the people they reject don't disappear. It used to be a big thing in merchant banks in the last boom to really grind and humiliate candidates - you aren't smart enough to work here etc. What they forgot is that those people went to work for companies that might need a merchant bank and that the victim is suddenly the customer.
Point taken, but with the given numbers it wouldn't actually be that bad. If you interview thousands of candidates, then paying an amortized $100 per candidate is not too much. If that is what it costs to give people a good impression of your company, it might well be worth it.
Oh god, that's the worst deal of all time. A hundred bucks for the possibility that a rejected job candidate will say something nice about the rejection process? Put that hundred bucks into making your product better so people will talk about that, or improving working conditions for your existing staff so they'll talk about that, or hiring a PR company, or any of a million things before a lawsuit.
That's reasonably targeted advertising though. If you're hiring a C developer in SF -- there's a good chance that the person you reject has a whole bunch of friends/colleagues/acquantences that are C Devs in SF.
And if you've got 1000 ex-applicants telling their colleagues - "don't interview with them" you're shooting yourself in the foot.
That math doesn't work. If you hire 1% and retain people for three years, you'll be sued once a year ($100 000/year) and spend e.g. 30 x $100 000 = $3 000 000 / year on salaries, before considering hiring costs. It's still expensive, but is it that ridiculous?
One of the things I hate most about the current interview process is that I take time off from work to do phone screens, maybe a whole day to do an onsite, and in the end I get these empty letters.
I'm always trying to improve myself, so having no feedback leaves me feeling bewildered. To be honest I don't know if I bombed the coding question. I came to an answer, maybe I had a couple hints - but was that it?
Many of the comments below talk about potential legal liability from rejecting a candidate in an inappropriate way. Would someone care to clarify the sort of problems that can arise?
For instance if you complain about hygiene and the person has a medical condition that causes them to stink (don't laugh, this happens), you can be sued for discrimination. If the person had a thick accent and you didn't want to hire because of the communication issue (I've seen candidates rejected for this reason), they could decide that you're racist and sue you. If the candidate is older and you say a wide variety of things (that they are over-qualified, their skillset is dated, poor cultural fit, etc), you can be sued for ageism.
The upshot is that it is virtually impossible to figure out what comment will hit a hot button. And there are a lot of legitimate reasons to reject someone, which aren't illegal, that they can take as evidence of discrimination.
Even if it is an open and shut case that you're going to win, they can still make it cost a substantial amount of lawyer's fees. And you, personally, don't benefit from telling them this, so there is no percentage in going there.
Or so every HR department in the USA will tell you. And every lawyer they get advice from.
The other problem is that, if you tell Candidate X that you are not hiring her because of e.g. insufficiently experience with SQL, and it develops that you have previously hired a non-Q developer who didn't do SQL either, you now get to answer a lawsuit alleging discrimination against Q candidates. (We all know people are package deals, but if you put in writing that you hung your hat on a particular detail, then you're going to look like you're lying to cover your antiQist biases.)
I like this philosophy. In general, people should learn how to give and take feedback. I've been in the position where I wish I had known why I didn't get a certain job or opportunity. Knowing the reason not only softens the disappointment but lets one learn and improve for next time.
On the flip side, is it considered okay to simply stop contacting a candidate after three or four interviews, never send a rejection notice, and refuse to answer an email or phone call about the situation?
I've had this happen to me three times in the last five years -- mostly for positions within a marketing department, where you would think communication would matter.
Unfortunately, fear of retaliation or blacklisting keeps applicants like myself from disclosing specific company or hiring manager names...I feel it's disrespectful to not at least send an FOD note of 10 words or less if you've spent hours with them.
The only time when I had a bad feeling about such an email was when I felt that I got positive feedback during the interview, got no "warning" signs during it and so on, yet on the other day, I was told almost exactly this.
Otherwise, it's quite ok. Make it short, who wants to read ton of shit just to hear no? If you can list one (or more) serious reason (lack of experience, education, whatever, once, I was told that I was simply too pesimistic, but that was on phone), fine, but still, keep it short. And well, don't expect much feedback.
For an all day interview, sure some feedback would be nice.
For a phone interview, I'd probably think you're a bigger asshole if you went into details about how I failed the interview, what's wrong with me, why I'm unqualified, and how I can go about improving myself. Imagine someone going into the details about why we won't be going out on a second date.
At the end of interviews when they ask "Do you have any questions for me" I make a point of asking what they felt was good about my interview and how they think I could have improved it. Most of the time, they refuse to answer that question. I think it's probably a bad idea for me to do this.
A lot of big companies do give feedback on request though especially for developer roles where you can give specific factual feedback (candidate was weak in multi-threading, etc.)
It's one of the big advantages of technical interviews. You don't have to rely purely on subjective human judgement.
You don't have to rely purely on subjective human judgement.
And yet (aside from mega deal-breakers, like clearly overstating competence in some category) that's pretty much what hiring decisions come down to: "Are they for real? Can I rely on them? Will I get along with them?" -- the battery of contrived, essentially "objective" assessment that get thrown at candidates notwithstanding.
I've interviewed in several foreign big companies in Japan. After enduring multiple interviews spanning 2 to 4 months (compared to 2~4 weeks in Japanese companies), not once did I get any specific feedback. In one particular case, during the process, I asked HR for the contact details of 2 of the technical interviewers and they refused; I had to send my questions via HR.
Frankly, just doing the actual rejection makes you less of an asshole than pretty much everyone else. I've applied for a handful of positions over the last few years, and the fraction of people who actually bothered to tell me I was rejected is 0. The only exception was the supreme asshole who hired me one day, then called me the next day to tell me that I wasn't hired after all. He didn't really have a choice.
A company I turned down a job offer for has been contacting me every about every three months asking if I had changed my mind.
I just recently told them to please stop contacting me and I'll contact them if I change my mind in the future.
It felt a bit assholish asking them to stop contacting me like that, but I can't decide if that's just my personality having difficulty with it or if there was a better of way of telling them "No".
I'd love to get rejected by somebody in this way. :)
Really, you're above average if you bother to contact the person at all once you've decided not to hire.
A lot of people are pointing out liability issues with this approach, and sadly, they're probably right. But I bet there are constructive things you could tell rejected applicants that would be still be safe from lawsuit.
Reality check -- sometimes you reject a candidate for less than scientific reasons. Either you didn't "click" with them, or there was something that you just didn't like. Shallow? Maybe. But when I've hired people in the past, I've made the mistake of overlooking someone's personality in favor of what looked like a superior skillset. Several magnificent failures later, I won't do that again.
The reality is that you have to look at someone's personality and whether they'll mesh with your team as much as their skills. That's a fact, and nobody -- repeat NOBODY -- wants to hear that they come off arrogant, ageist, misogynist, etc.
If the reason your not offering someone a job is because they messed up technical questions, I think its a good idea to give them candid feedback on the spot. Its objective. If you are having to choose among several qualified candidates, then I think this is asking for trouble, since there isnt an objective clear reason for the person not getting the job.
There are so many things you can't say or ask in an interview, that a lot of companies that are big enough to have an HR person or department will require a very generic rejection letter just to be sure they don't provide grounds for a lawsuit.