> 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.
> Hey, guess what? IT’S ZERO! THIS HAS NEVER HAPPENED. EVER.
> As some of my lawyer contacts pointed out, a lot of cases get settled out of court, and that data is much harder to get.
It seems like this is the best possible methodology (Lexis Nexis + survey of labor lawyers) that one can ask for.
As some of my lawyer contacts pointed out, a lot of cases get settled out of court, and that data is much harder to get.
Anecdotally I've heard of and worked for companies that have been sued due to bias or perceived bias in the interview process. I have not heard of anyone suing or getting sued for feedback on technical interview performance, but in most cases there would be no basis for a candidate to sue.
That said I think the feedback suggestions are really off base unless the person writing the feedback personally knows the candidate. All of the suggestions are in the vein of "you clearly don't know X, you should learn it", which is fine if a candidate is actually completely unfamiliar with a topic. But the more common case, especially with basic CS stuff like Big O notation as used in the example article, is the candidate is familiar and got it wrong due to nerves, being rusty or interview time pressure. The same goes with the suggestion to recommend or buy a book for the candidate. Unless you are completely sure the candidate does not own the book already this is a terrible idea. Imagine how demoralizing buying, or even recommending, the candidate a book that they already owned and studied pre-interview could be.
I'm pro no feedback, but if the candidate absolutely insists I think feedback should be direct and based on the candidates interview performance, not perceived judgement of their skillset or knowledge (even if this is what most employers are trying to get from interviews). For example...
"You reached a working brute-force solution but did not solve the problem optimally. Here is a link on leetcode or hackerrank and a geeks for geeks solution to help you practice the problem."
"You did not come up with complete solutions to 2 out of 5 questions, even if given more time you were on the right track. Leetcode more and come back in 6 months"
But no one is that direct with interview feedback because the same set of leetcode questions that everyone asks are "company trade secrets". The feedback suggestions I gave are also not particularly tactful, but they are more useful given the current state of most tech interview process. I've learned a lot more about becoming a good interviewee from Blind and Hackernews than from any employer feedback. Richard Geldreich also has good insight into how the process works for senior candidates, and some of the political games that happen during the interview process that make any feedback even more of a joke.
If it went to court it is public knowledge by the US constitution. If someone settled out of court that is not easy to find (as the article points out)
You don’t have to file any court documents to inform somebody that you believe they have wronged you, and that you believe you are entitled to compensation for the resulting damages. The civil court system is there to handle things if you can’t work it out among yourselves.
If you haven’t filed any documents, you haven’t sued anyone, either. I find it really hard to believe that every single case of an engineer suing over post-interview feedback has settled out of court, too.
That’s getting a little bit nit-picky over the definition of “sue”. In this context the risk people are talking about is that a candidate will make some sort of legal claim against them. Whether that claim ends up in court really only changes the potential impact of that risk. Especially considering most HR related legal complaints end up with an out of court settlement (even a lot of the frivolous ones), because the cost of litigation (including potential reputations damages) usually outweighs the cost settlement.
There’s no legal definition of “sue”. You can’t go to court and file “suing documents”. If you define “sue” as to make a legal claim against somebody, then it’s immaterial whether they do that via a letter from a lawyer, or by serving them documents to appear in court.
So you think the phrase “I’m worried I’ll get sued” would commonly be understood to mean “I’m worried that formal legal proceedings will be initiated against me, but I’m not at all worried that legal proceedings might be threatened in an attempt to leverage me into a settlement”?
If somebody hired lawyers to negotiate with another party to pay them damages, under threat of a lawsuit, I’d say that would commonly be described as “suing” or “getting sued”.
If an employer says “I don’t provide feedback to candidates for risk of getting sued over it”, they are absolutely referring to the risk associated with providing that candidate said feedback. Which includes both lawsuits and out of court settlements. So regardless of what you think the common usage is, that’s certainly how it’s used in this situation. Otherwise you could just tell said employers “you never have to worry about getting sued, because you can just pay the settlement lol...”.
> So you think the phrase “I’m worried I’ll get sued” would commonly be understood to mean “I’m worried that formal legal proceedings will be initiated against me, but I’m not at all worried that legal proceedings might be threatened in an attempt to leverage me into a settlement”?
Yes, that is what that means in the English language.
Definitely. The fact that there are no known cases at least demonstrates the risk is very low. Much less risky than the kinds of things people do all the time in interviews.
It could just as likely demonstrate that very few companies provide feedback to rejected candidates, or at least that when companies do, that they legally vet the feedback first (which would make you question the value and candidness of it). I have personally never heard of anybody giving or receiving it myself. So I’m not surprised that you would fail to find cases of disputes originating over it.
I give it whenever asked. Last I was interviewed, I got it at about half the places I talked to.
It's a very natural thing for people to ask about. And answering questions is also pretty natural. The notion that it happens approximately never strikes me as something that needs a lot more evidence than your personal experience.
The entire premise of the OP is that candidates are “rarely told why they got the outcome that they did”. The author claims to have a survey supporting this, but they didn’t publish any of those details. I did a bit of googling and found this[0] article citing a report that claims:
* 69.7% of rejected candidates receive no feedback
* Of those that did, 77.3% said the feedback wasn’t useful
That leaves 6.8% of rejected candidates receiving useful feedback, which sounds quite plausible to me. In reality “risk of getting sued” is over simplified. If you want to give feedback to candidates, you can choose between two options. Just do it (and risk getting sued), or have your feedback legally vetted. The number of people receiving useful feedback is so small that it’s entirely plausible that those cases mostly represent the employers who choose to accept such an expense when rejecting candidates. The author makes no attempt to explain why they think such risk aversive behaviour is not the cause of the lack of lawsuits, instead jumping to the conclusion that the aversion is unnecessary.
The other half of the headline claim (regardless of any debate about its technical accuracy) is spurious at best. Any plaintiff would know that the threat of filing a discrimination case is leverage in a settlement negotiation. Without knowing how many settlements of that nature take place, it’s not possible to draw such a conclusion.
Finally, the authors methodology is questionable. A survey (especially one that doesn’t report its sample, or methodology) is not sufficient to draw the conclusion “never”. Putting aside the matter of out of court settlements, you’d need to perform a rather extensive study of case law to draw such a conclusion. Certainly something more than “had a quick look, didn’t find anything”.
I don't understand how you reconcile "It could just as likely demonstrate that very few companies provide feedback to rejected candidates" and "69.7% of rejected candidates receive no feedback".
It doesn't have to be useful feedback for somebody to sue over it. But even if it were, I still don't see how your point makes sense. Let's say there are a million software developers in the US. Let's assume they change jobs every 3 years and do 3 interviews when they do change. That's 68,000 things that people could sue over. Even if one in a thousand actually reaches the lawsuit stage, that's over a thousand lawsuits over the last 20 years.
I agree "never" is too strong, but I think this search puts a plausible upper bound on the rate of lawsuits.
It if happened (and I'd bet it did many times), it wouldn't be public knowledge.