I disagree with this. I've had two companies contact me and offer legitimate feedback after interviews, and I always left feeling happy and with good feelings about them.

I applied to one company and got a response back which was effectively "we really like you as a candidate, but it doesn't seem like you would be the right fit for this job / it doesn't seem like the interests you expressed in your interviews [which they correctly restated] matched up well with the duties we would have you perform. We will likely have jobs opening up which would align with what you like and you will be on the shortlist of candidates if you apply for those". Was it truthful? Who knows, but it left me feeling happy about how things went and I would consider applying there again.

Similarly, earlier on in my career after taking a few CS classes I applied for a different job, and the response was effectively "You are smart but you don't have the skills we require yet which are [x, y, z]. Come back when you do". What they said was true and I appreciated the feedback.

Contrast that with the myriad companies I applied to and never heard a response back from or didn't get a response back for many months from. I will never apply to these places again because it is clear that they don't respect prospective employees enough to even send a perfunctory email. Boiler plate rejections aren't as irritating but they are definitely still irritating. If you don't provide reasons for not hiring then employees will construct their own reasons, and they may not be true and / or favorable towards your company.

So what exactly did these companies gain?

They didn't hire you now, but might be able to hire you in the future because you would maybe apply again (assuming you get passed the "we already didn't hire this person" filter)?

With all the risk, that doesn't seem like much of a payoff to the company, to me.

(Though I am glad you got feedback you considered valuable, and I think it's cool that the companies did that)

They gain the goodwill of a prospective employee who might cycle back and be a great fit later on in their career (and who has more skills then). It's also about what they don't lose, which is not only me but potentially other prospective candidates. Know what happens when someone mentions they are considering applying to a place that never got back to me? I tell them don't apply there, they waste your time / they don't care about candidates / their interview process sucks. How many people does that person then go tell? I've absolutely punted on applying to places which my friends have said similar things about.

Reputation matters a lot.

And providing feedback is very likely to hurt your reputation. One major company did give me feedback, and I've made fun of them endlessly for it - they explained that the manager loved me, I did great on systems design and architecture, but I couldn't pass the hiring committee because I didn't do well enough on tree traversal tricks.

Even that in a way is useful to them. If they are constantly getting confused, bemused, or angry responses to what they think is honest feedback, it is a red flag about their hiring process.

I still give Google shit for the feedback they gave me. Good feedback is incredibly hard to do well.

That company's problem is their shit-tier hiring process, not the fact that they give feedback.

Every hiring process under the sun has a large, vocal group of people who think it's shit-tier. (Some people like me are equal opportunity haters - I've never seen a process that didn't have stupid flaws.) If you give feedback, eventually the group for your hiring process is going to find you.

Reputation only matters if your candidate pipeline isn't full enough. For example, Google is notorious for their awful hiring gauntlet, but people still line up around the block to work for them. If your pipeline is fine, reputation and goodwill from people you rejected are worthless.

Most companies are not Google, so their (local) reputation matters a lot.

I'm a .Net developer. In my area there is a well known company that hires a lot of .Net devs. I heard from 2 people that .Net devs are basically treated as 2nd class citizens (after Delphi devs). So now I will not consider applying there. I don't know if they would want to hire me, but I have nothing to gain finding out.

It’s not clear what you disagree with, since everything you mention is entirely a personal benefit. The company itself only increases its risk with feedback simply by exposing a larger surface area to potentially contest.

> we really like you as a candidate

It’s not you, it’s me

If a candidate has given my company their time and energy to interview with us I think we owe them a chance to understand why we didn't hire them. We're not obliged to but, if requested, offering feedback is quite clearly beneficial. There's an obvious benefit for the candidate and the subsequent companies they interview with. There's also an indirect benefit to my company - if everyone else behaves like this it means that we'd be much more likely to find our next hire.

I suppose if you're thinking exclusively about a short-term benefit to the company alone without considering the impact to the candidate, the wider ecosystem and culture in general then it wouldn't make sense to take the risk.

When I've been on the other side of this -- ie, as a candidate rejecting a decent offer -- I've made a point of writing a personal non-boilerplate "letter" (email, but tone and format of a traditional letter) -- thanking those on the hiring side and giving some context for my decision. Relationship-building and mutual respect are only ever full of win.

If you want the candidate to be more likely to reapply feedback would help.

In fairness I received feedback I didn't get the position because I was too chatty from a hr person who told me to act more chatty because qualified candidates on paper were failing for being too quiet. I kinda wished they didn't provide feedback because I have an opinion on the internal culture that would make me avoid them in the future.

> If you want the candidate to be more likely to reapply feedback would help.

I'd be so happy simply hearing feedback on whether I should bother with the company again.

"You were barely beat out by another candidate, we hope you apply again next time!"

"You are not a fit for this company, don't try again"

> "You were barely beat out by another candidate, we hope you apply again next time!"

If this is true and if the company is half competent they'll be reaching out to you proactively next time, not hoping you might see the position and think to apply :)

Sounds like you met a very particular HR archetype and they likely took delight in the games they played with you. You're better off knowing about those sort of HR depts than not.

> If you want the candidate to be more likely to reapply feedback would help.

Do companies really want that? Presumably they didn't hire the candidate because they believe better candidates exist. Why invest in someone if there are better candidates readily available?

Interviewing is such a crapshoot; just because someone doesn't make the cut the first time, doesn't mean they weren't the better candidate.

That's one reason I hate the "just hire the best person" argument against diversity; usually "the best person" is entirely non-obvious.

Google, Facebook, and Amazon have made a sport of shoving people through their interview pipeline multiple times.

They'll have openings again in the future, and maybe at that time their desires and your skills will be a better match.

Especially when interviewing for non-intro-level stuff...

usually there's only a few open positions. after a long process of phone screens and on-sites, you might have five viable candidates but only two slots at that particular time. if you would have been happy to hire any of the remaining three if the first two didn't accept your offer, you might encourage them to apply again later.

They do want it. A strong signal is when a weak candidate comes back a year later and kicks ass.

I've always considered it just a professional courtesy, within reason. Just like it would be nice, but not required, for an applicant to say why they turned down a job offer. It can help us understand what's lacking to determine whether or not it's worth improving upon.

Professional courtesy doesn't matter much when it's now the norm not to be curteous, and thought to be unprofitable (in all the ways benefit is measured, not just in monetary terms) if the company is curteous. There is no professionalism above the level requried to maintain an increasing rate of profit. Workers in all industries since the beginning of waged labour have learned this fact the hard way.

Strong disagree. Eroding standards of civility are no excuse for lowering the bar on how you behave. I'd urge you to set an example, honor yourself and contribute to the solution, rather than compounding the problem by sinking to the lowest common denominator.

I do think we should be curteous, far from it (and employers doubly so); I'm not excusing their beahviour, but I am saying it many cases it pays to not be curteous (note, not being curteous isn't the same as being definitely uncurteous). It is the sort of behaviour interviewees have grown to expect.

The pursuit of protit over courteousness is bound to happen when positive courteousness has a negligible and potentially negative impact on profit.

In my experience, they often like to give feedback on subsequent interviews about the past interviews. Google has some pretty detailed feedback on a interview I did years ago, which they were happy to reveal over the phone on a subsequent onsite invitation.

What are they losing in this case? I don't see how a company is actually harmed by someone complaining about an interview. Unless you're trying to attract people who subscribe to cancel culture, I don't see a problem.

Employee hours. Someone has to collect, document, sanitize, and explain the feedback. Then respond to the response to the feedback. In the time it takes our recruiter to provide feedback to a candidate, they could have sourced 20 more candidates.

edit: I'll argue instant feedback is even more expensive and risky. It's not coordinated, potentially duplicative, may impact/contaminate later rounds, and may not be complete or representative of the interview as a whole. Engineers aren't known for being naturally HR/legal-compliant, and having multiple expensive engineers spend time doing things not in their typical skillset that's typically done by a single resource that specializes in said skillset doesn't sound cheaper at all.

> Someone has to collect, document, sanitize, and explain the feedback.

Either something like this is being up collected and articulated up through the decision points in the hiring process, or the decisions are being made on a fuzzy basis that can't even be explained internally, which presumably represents a risk that decisions couldn't be properly justified should a candidate suspect discrimination and pursue a claim.

(This is especially true for any kind of exercises, btw. If an employer asks me to do some, I am going to screen them on whether they have (a) complete reference solutions with (b) numbers on how long it took to complete each and why they're confident those numbers are reliable(c) a written rubric for evaluating candidate solutions that (d) they'll agree to share with me when we're done.)

Considering most of the interview is evaluation of soft skills and unique backgrounds there's almost certainly fuzzy basis.

On the other hand, by giving good feedback, your company engenders goodwill and brownie points ratings on Glassdoor and elsewhere. Shouldn’t good PR be worth a little work from a company?

Companies that are that concerned about PR spin their situation with actual PR.

Word of mouth is also a thing.

The article recommends instant feedback, presumably much less costly.

They've only disrupted their day to talk to you, in many cases having done these increasingly-prevalent and always-bullshit 4+-hour "exercises", and they have way less time to be allocating than you do. That's all they've done. Their time isn't deserving of respect and it's just downright ridiculous to think that it's the decent thing to do to tell them something that might, just might, not make it a waste for them to have spent it.

...Or, you know. Don't be that guy. Candidate, candidate, candidate--depersonalizing language for depersonalized processes. How about person? These are people you're talking about. They matter more than your recruiter's cattle-call throughput, each and every one of them.

Have some empathy, my dude. Or at least some enlightened self-interest, for someday will be your day in the barrel.

Interviewing is a business transaction, not social services. They'll min-max their time just like you'll mix-max your compensation.

I'll happily give advice, feedback, mock interviews, and other sorts of help on my own time in more appropriate environments. When it's company time, it's just business.

It's interesting how "it's business" has become catch-all for absolving every breach of previously accepted social norm.

As a hiring manager, you're unlikely to be on the clock. And even if, I am somewhat certain that you could come up with good justifications for giving feedback if anybody asks, which nobody will.

It seems to be a specific disease of middle management to feel the need to demonstrate their "professionalism" by going out of their way to deny their humanity. At Wall Street, they buy ugly but expensive clothes for this purpose. But I guess on the West Coast you only have the Gordon Gecko playbook to fall back on.

I used to work at a branding agency, and it was interesting to see how risk averse middle management was: ideas for product names tend to only be good if they evoke some sort of not entirely pure concept. Think of "Plan B", "Virgin", or "CockroachDB". These would always get shot down by middle management as "unprofessional". Go a level up and people are far more open to be human. I don't know if they are just more self-assured and therefore willing to trust their instincts, or if the selection process for higher management actually works quite well.

I feel like the reason that is, because middle managers believe they need to be better by not making mistakes, and things without mistakes are bland and inhumane, also some of them maybe have a some kind of complex. I might be wrong tho?

You can rationalize how you'd like, but it's never "just business." These are people you're talking about. They matter more than your company does.

Be decent.

They're getting a prompt, professional, inoffensive response in exchange for their time. That is decency.

You can't expect a business to feed the hungry, cure the sick, and house the poor out of the goodness of their hearts because these are people that spent a couple hours of their day with you. There are more appropriate institutions for charity.

Uh. I can certainly expect a business to be responsible in it's treatment of others. They exist at the sufferance of the society that grants their charter. Why should shitty behavior be normalized, ever?

And why are you stanning so hard for a process whose bloodless mind would bleed you dry and kick you to the curb for a nickel? Was Steinbeck really that right?

Perhaps the easiest business-oriented solution to this mess is to simply comp applicants for investing their time in interviews with a company. At least then there isn’t the sentiment of having wasted time.

This is an excellent suggestion that treats people as people and as professionals whose time is valuable. It would, of course, never happen, because those same employers fear of what might happen if they granted the same respect they demand, but I admire your lateral thinking.

Sure, and as a business transaction, what do you think will happen if you treat potential business partners poorly?

The answer is that they'll leave negative reviews, tell people to avoid your company or decimate any goodwill your company might have. I have in the past left scathing reviews on Glassdoor and was on some occasions the first one to drop my experience. Because after long projects or a company promising to get back in touch, they decided to instead ghost me or make me do ridiculous tricks for the application process.

If you view something as a business transaction, then you should know one of the worst things you can do in business is spurn the person you're working with.

I had someone ghost me right before a christmas holiday once, after the hiring manager (a VP) told me they'd for sure give me a call the next day. It was right before a major storm went through the area, and because I had waited for their call at home I had to drive 10 hours through the storm to see my folks as the storm had arrived the following day.

I naturally left a scathing review for that place, but Glassdoor removed it (of course).