The line isn't between detailed feedback and brief, uninformative feedback.

The line is between saying something brief and saying nothing.

Somehow, it has become standard to say absolutely nothing instead of telling people a simple no.

I've even had situations where people said they wanted to keep talking to me, and then went completely silent.

But brief feedback is probably more likely to result in pushback / being sued by candidates, since candidates will feel like you didn’t properly consider them.

The sad truth of the situation is that all the incentives for a company point in the direction of giving no feedback at all. This isn’t because hiring managers are sociopaths.

I'm not arguing for feedback, I'm arguing for an answer.

It's just common decency. "Sorry, we're not continuing" is not going to get you sued.

See after just having through 3 rounds of recruiting over the past three years, I don't think the ghosting is intentional from most companies. I would say 60% of companies give a "not continuing" response after 1-2 months from application, while ~25% seem like they have a configuration/software mistake that causes it to send the rejection 6 months - a year later, which people in the meantime think was just ghosting. Not sure why this is so common

I think there's something wrong with a hiring process where it takes 1-2 months to decide whether to proceed to next step (screening call, or interview, or offer) with a candidate, not to mention the fact that a well qualified candidate isn't going to be waiting around that long - they'll be applying to other jobs at the same time, and if good will be snapped up.

The time to send the "Sorry, not continuing" email is as soon as the company has decided that, and if that really is 1-2 months later, you may as well have just ghosted the candidate.

I think part of it may be they're not saying no until someone else is actually hired just in case they need a fallback, so everyone else gets to wait however long it takes for the role to be filled, most likely...

At least some kind of feedback is greatly appreciated. A simple, "No" would do so much more for me than being ghosted.

> A scary number of candidates did not take rejection well and tried to use my feedback against me.

This happened to one of my bosses. As a result, I've never attempted it.

Except once, a candidate realized at the end of a technical screen they had done poorly and demanded feedback. I gave an initial bit (shouldn't have, my mistake) and instantly turned it around on me.

> So now we’re back to simple “we’re proceeding with other candidates” feedback.

Hell if companies would even do that - I've spent a lot of time (7+ hours) interviewing with some known companies including meeting with the VP of engineering and then they just stop messaging and ghost you (looking at you Glassdoor..)

I've also seen the "your feedback is wrong" pushback. Like... do they expect me to say "oh woops my bad. actually here's an offer"?

I agree with what you're saying, but it can be immensely frustrating when you're rejected for a job when the interviewer themselves is actually wrong, which has happened a few times. I've been given technical questions in interviews, and I answer the questions correctly (I always double-check when I get home), and the interviewer pretty much tells me that I'm wrong.

For example, in an interview once I got the typical "design Twitter" whiteboarding question, and it's going fine, until the topic of databases and storage comes up.

I ask "do we want consistency or availability here?"

The interviewer says that he wants both. To which I say "umm, ok, but I thought you said you wanted this to be distributed?", and he said yeah that's what he wants.

So I have to push back and say "well I mean, we all want that, but I'm pretty sure you can't have stuff be distributed or partitionable while also having availability and consistent."

We go back and forth for about another minute (or course eating away at my interview time), until I eventually pull out my phone and pull up the Wikipedia article for CAP theorem, to which the interviewer said that this is "different" somehow. I said "it's actually not different, but lets just use assume that there exists some kind of database X that gives us all these perks".

Now, in fairness to this particular company, they actually did move forward and gave me a (crappy) offer, so credit there, but I've had other interviews that went similarly and I'm declined. I've never done it, but I've sort of wanted to go onto LinkedIn and try and explain that their interview questions either need to change or they need to become better informed about the concepts that they're interviewing for. Not to change anything, not to convince anyone to suddenly give me an offer, but simply to prove my point.

Not sure how the dialog went irl, but if the conversation was that adversarial and with as little diplomacy applied, I'd not hire the person nor accept the role if I was on either side of it...