- pregnant women
- parents with care responsibilities
- disabled people who would need the company to make accommodations they currently don't have in place
There's a lot of scenarios that aren't immediately obvious unless they apply directly to you which is why many of those regulations exist in the first place.
In many cases, as long as your company's representatives don't explicitly say why the applicant didn't get the job, then the company is not on the hook.
It literally happened to my wife the other day - she was asked if she wanted kids. HR could have warned them not to say that. Apparently they did not.
The same companies that don't give a shit about this don't suddenly become more legally risk averse when it comes to feedback. They aren't genuinely worried that your programming test feedback might say your algorithm was too jewy or your knowledge of data structures made you look pregnant. Theyre just afraid that your feedback will make them look stupid and don't want to admit it.
Sounds like a delightful place full of delightful hiring managers.
Labor laws get violated all the time in interviews because most companies don't provide pre-interview warnings and most interviewers aren't familiar with the law. Outside of a few big companies that actually have been sued over this, I think most companies just don't care.
With feedback, liability just sounds like a WAY more prudent reason than "we're lazy" and "we're actually just afraid of our own employees humiliating us".
Nobody has once ever said to me "we're not hiring you because of [ethnicity]" and I'm certain they never would, but several times I have received feedback which proved incompetence.
In general I think being unwilling to give feedback is a sign that the company is not confident in the abilities of its employees and vice versa.