It's always fun getting rejection letters from companies, long forgotten, after months of silence. What were they even hiring for?

I used to work at a medium sized firm (~2B revenue) and we had a policy where the candidate had an offer or a rejection (with reason) before they left the office.

It was hard turning folks down, and it pushed us to have very crisp reasons for saying no, but I think it made us better interviewers and more humane in the process.

The word humane is rarely used, most times in the context of "humane slaughter of farm animals" and now in "humane interview process."

This could also backfire with non-confrontational personalities. "Welp, I guess you're hired"

It was never decided by a single person. We always did a 5-15m debrief, consisting of about 4 people (hiring manager, 2 interviewers, hr to facilitate and maybe a shadow 2), between interviews on the day.