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The lawyers are correctly suggesting how to minimise legal risk, it's up to HR and the company if they feel like the risk is worth it.

The lawyer isn't likely to get upside of giving feedback, they will likely get the downside of the company gets involved in legal stuff.




> The lawyers are correctly suggesting how to minimise legal risk, it's up to HR and the company if they feel like the risk is worth it.

A good lawyer should also tell you how big the risk is that you are avoiding, otherwise their advise is worthless.


Lawyers at companies have much bigger fish to fry like constantly reviewing sales and customer contracts in the high six figure ballpark not reviewing the risk of the feedback for every rejected candidate. For the latter their answer is always clear cut, "don't give any meaningful feedback to avoid ANY AND ALL risk of litigation, period". Their job is to keep the company safe from any litigation risk, no matter how small, not to keep rejected candidates happy.


Their job should be to help manage the litigation risks so that the companies can assume those risks that provide sufficiently high returns.


Sorry to burst your bubble, but outside of the SV bubble(see Europe) most companies don't see feedback from rejected employees as a high return ("who cares what some people that were not good enough for us think?") since the're never in the firing range of reddit/twitter mobs like the big FAANGs.


So you think that companies don't care what candidates might tell their peers...

But at the same time they're sponsoring meetups and conferences, hosting coding contests, sending people to career fairs, buying huge ads on job platforms to advertise company culture, just to get people to apply?

I can't talk about all of Europe, but here in Linz a lot of companies struggle to get candidates, and they spend a lot of money and effort to get a good reputation as an employer.




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