Does your company actually hire programmers directly? I'm a bit confused by what you mean with working at a company in the recruiting space.

Detailed feedback can mean a lot of different things. Recruiters always think they're giving people detailed feedback. That's nothing compared to an honest code review.

Bearing in mind that code reviews often cause tension even in fully employed people, it's hard to imagine they're always well received by job seekers.

I also have data on this. I previously worked for a marketplace company that had to vet freelance writers.

The application process was partially automated, with multiple human reviewers that provided detailed scoring on the applicant’s performance.

Initially, we provided a score breakdown to applicants, but we turned this off within a few weeks after a cascade of hostility.

The difference is in the first case the feedback was constructive?

Probably. Our feedback doesn't contain question-by-question breakdowns or numerical scoring. Instead we try to make it actionable, practical and specific. It looks roughly like this:

"Based on our interview we think you would really benefit from studying up on data structures and algorithms. If you want to study this stuff on your own, many people find (link) and (link) useful. But there's also (link) or (link) books available on amazon that we've had people recommend."

Or: "We were impressed by your spoken communication skills, but sometimes you seemed to struggle to remember specific technical terms for some of the concepts and areas we discussed...."

The feedback emails themselves are assembled from a mix of interviewer notes and reused snippets for comments we give frequently. This sort of stuff has been very time consuming for us to prepare. At the volume of candidates we interact with, we think its definitely worth it. But its possible that no feedback is better than bad feedback, and most organizations might not have the time to write good feedback to candidates.

But I can say with confidence that almost everyone really appreciates the feedback we send. While its easy for senior people to find work at the moment, there's lots of junior people out there sending dozens of resumes for every call back. Receiving rejection after rejection from companies (or worse, being ghosted) without even being told what you're doing wrong is a really awful experience.

Constructive feedback is the key. No one is going to feel good about getting back a score card that says "Communication: 6/10, Technical Ability: 5/10..." etc. That just leaves you with more questions and no actionable feedback. "6/10? I'm at least 7/10!" or "I'm mostly 6-7s, why was I not given an offer".