There was an article a few days ago on why you should keep your mouth shut during exit interviews. The same rationale applies for me when rejecting a candidate - some people tend to be angry and volatile when rejected, so the safest thing is to just say "we're going with someone else." I almost never give honest feedback on why.

That said, ghosting a candidate is completely uncalled for.

A slightly different point is that it's simply a liability for the company to provide that reason because there are reasons that are illegal. Unfortunately, it is true that not providing a reason removes that liability.

(I guess that's not true in states that don't allow "any or no reason" but I don't know what those states are, if any.)

> Even if it was “you were great, but we are going with someone else at this time”

This is how it is with two out of three people. By the time they pass the filter of their resume and whatnot, two or three people are OK. They can answer basic questions, they act normally, they seem to have been doing the job as they said for a few years. They are also somewhat interchangeable with the person we interviewed before. Then we interview someone else, and maybe they were referred by an internal team member with a recommendation, maybe they are just a standard deviation above who we interviewed in terms of what they know. There's nothing really wrong with the people rejected, it's "you seem to know how to program basic features like two out of three people we interviewed, but we interviewed someone else who has a deep understanding of the language we use".

Seems less like "you were great" and more like "you were okay but we found somebody who's great".

Sometimes there are three decent ca candidates but only one role, so yeah "you were great"

1. giving feedback is a skill that almost no one learns to do 2. bad feedback will often cause problems that wouldn't exist if no feedback were given 3. not everyone is well placed to actually receive feedback

>I will never understand why companies fail to give candidates constructive feedback.

Zero benefit to them with small but non-zero chance of causing them a lot of problems. Unless a lawyer looks over the feedback, all it takes is an uncharitable reading to try to spin it into an attack on a protected class.

It's kind of like the returning shopping carts vs leaving them next to your car when you're done with them debate.

Individually leaving shopping carts where it's most convenient is the best course of action but in aggregate we're all worse off for doing it.

Not really. If you could be sued for putting back a shopping cart the wrong way, no one would put them back at all, and everyone would understand why.