The challenge isn't figuring out how you or I personally would deliver feedback, given time to plan it out and a good set of feedback to deliver. The challenge is establishing a process that ensures everyone at the company will always do it, even when the real reason is something like "meh I'm not sure the candidate quite clears our bar".

> even when the real reason is something like "meh I'm not sure the candidate quite clears our bar".

That's the problem, though - you're trying to make a hiring decision on hopelessly incomplete information, and so it will come down in large part to gut feeling. And the moment you admit to using some non-quantifiable feeling as a basis for not hiring someone, you open yourself up to claims of some form of discrimination.

It's all around safest to just stay quiet.

My internal translation: "I feel" -> "I have concluded, based on no evidence"

Or, alternatively, based on intuition. Which, in many cases, is an internalized experience.

That in no way solves the problem though, it just makes it ever so slightly less likely to happen.