How hard can it be to show some basic decency and courtesy?
I've been related several times about people that wanted explicit reasons of why they've been rejected, and ending up mad at the (perceived as dishonest) hard truths they've been told, and anything said delicately can be dismissed, seen as cryptic or even displayed as hypocrisy.
Courtesy is hard, and all are not well equipped to see it when it's given.
I managed a hiring process last year (my first) and from the outset I wanted to make sure I let every applicant that we talked to know if we had decided to pass. It was a lot easier said/thought than done.
That email is horrible to send. My stomach dropped out every time I hit “send”, for exactly the reasons you stated. I dreaded the replies which often included some kind of “Why?” question.
I completely understand where the candidates are coming from. They want to know what they did wrong and how they can improve. On the surface this seems like an easy thing to do, but in my experience, it’s more like opening a can of worms. How do you tell someone “I’m sorry, you’re too junior, try again in a few years” or “your entire personality was off-putting/rude” or “you spent an inordinate amount of time in the interview tying to convince me I was wrong about tabs vs spaces and even sent me a follow up email citing more reasons” or “You told me you worked with PHP 6 when I asked you what version you had used” [0], or “you couldn’t remember if you used Angular 1 or 2+” [1], or “you told me you had a great memory then proceeded to say ‘I don’t know’ and ‘I don’t remember’ to 90% of my questions”…. The list goes on
When sending a rejection letter the best case scenario is that they say “thank you” and move on (or don’t reply at all). Worst case scenario, they start asking follow-up questions which I feel obligated to respond to, they get irate, and/or they attempt some kind of bargaining/arguing. I’m not going to say I’d never do any of these things myself (however unproductive) but it shocks me that some people think they can change your mind by arguing about why you passed on them.
It’s all very uncomfortable and feels like you are navigating a field of land mines.
[0] PHP 6 never was released, it went from 5->7, though you can find books on “PHP 6” because they were printed before it was clear the version was going to be skipped.
[1] Angular 1 vs 2+ is essentially a completely different framework. Anyone working in web tech should be aware of that fact.
If/when you don't want to interact further, just say it (hopefully stating the reasons, such as that the hiring process is imperfect, but the company can't devote infinite resources to it); after you did that it's completely fine to ignore further inquiries.
How else can you improve or be mindful of things in the future if you don't even know what happened or what went wrong?
I sort of feel like the people who don't give honest feedback or ghost aren't trying to protect anyone's feelings or are avoiding conflict. They themselves have something going on internally that bothers them when it comes to giving or receiving feedback. They are maybe letting unrelated previous experiences dictate their current life and decisions.
So now you have 2 types of people. People who want honest feedback and people who never give it. You can't force either one to do the other thing so we're always left with 1 side feeling unhappy.
It doesn't make sense to me that this is how most folks are ok with operating.
Courtesy starts with the giver. If someone chooses to not be equipped, then you have done your job by attempting courtesy, nothing more is required.
While there's a lot of awful behavior, I have found complete silence (no initial rejection) triggers worse behavior. For example, silence leads to people constantly reaching out, rightfully wanting to know status. Moreover, it greatly encourages the psychotic people to bombard you with craziness via any means of contact. For that reason, an initial response that a person is rejected is enough typically.
Courtesy is not hard and saying so is concerning. While people may have different reactions, a simple sentence is a courtesy and a thank you, nothing beyond that is required. Still, I admit reading this site sometimes makes me think basic humanity is a challenge for many people. Unfortunately, those people seem to be in charge of hiring at many companies.
All you have to do in a job context is respond at least once - thank you, but no. If the other person does not see a simple email as courtesy, that is their problem. A response is a universal courtesy, no response is a universal insult. I can understand not wanting to engage further, however.
No response at all is also demeaning. It takes seconds to formulate an initial rejection response. If someone presses you, simply reply with that dreaded canned response + simply use their name. If you want to further personalize things in either case, you pick 1 detail you remember to sound more genuine, which for a functioning human should be quite easy.
If you want something more dry in a follow-up, you can say that for legal reasons, you are not allowed or comfortable discussing further, but you wish the person luck. That covers all the normal people, and for crazies, you have no choice either way but at least this has a chance of getting them to go away. What you are saying is that people are not even worth seconds of your time, especially people who potentially invested hours, weeks, or even months in the process. I would hope any reasonable person is above this.
Lastly, a response is important because it allows people to prioritize and further their job search. If you keep someone hanging, it can have huge implications that I should not have to explain. There are many other problems it can cause as well. As an example, I once applied for a job I thought I wanted because the company confused me with someone else and their SOP was silence. They stopped responding to my inquiries which insulted me so much, I rejected their subsequent offer when the mistake was caught. Another example - a company scheduled interviews for me and just didn't show up, making me have to leave my wife alone in the hospital at the time which I only did because my job search was that important at that time financially.
Honestly, I'm so tired of the attitude of companies and people on here validating unprofessional and awful behavior. If it were legal and without issue, I'd make a list and publicly shame. The only redemption is that when someone can't even be human enough to respond to you, working at their company would be a miserable experience. Still, that does not help when you waste weeks, months, or even years going through this nonsense with ego tripping weirdos doing hiring these days, ghost jobs, and complete psychos. I've been interviewing candidates for over 20 years and I do not say this lightly that the current process is disgusting, awful, and unacceptable at a disturbingly large number of companies.
> They themselves have something going on internally that bothers them when it comes to giving or receiving feedback.
The idea that some people would judge them like this certainly wouldn't help people to try to be more honest and open, especially if such a person is demanding an "honest answer".
I agree that doing all of this well is quite time-consuming and stressful. I want to be reasonably honest in why I rejected someone, but also don't want to slag anyone off or make them feel bad. For some this is easy ("we're looking for a tech lead and you're just out of college"), for others not so much. Especially when they seem they might be okay, but you have a bunch of other candidates that just seem much better. Someone that bangs on about tabs vs. spaces would be "we're looking for someone with a more pragmatic approach", although phrasing that well can easily take up 10 minutes.
I generally just ignore challenges to my reply, unless there really was a misunderstanding on my part (which did happen once).
Still, I think it's worth it, including giving people the ability to reply to the rejection: most of them are positive and grateful – it's just that negative interactions register more strongly. Looking for a job is difficult, stressful, and depressing these days and I've been on the end of that too, and being a bit nice can really make a difference for some people.
Something like "we're looking for someone with a different skill set" would still be reasonable honest, but also wouldn't make me feel terrible. The notion that you can fully asses someone's technical abilities from a one-hour interview is mistaken anyway. So an honest reply should take that in to account.
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A second scenario is where I did a take-home code test thinghy. I went for the "simple but obviously correct and easy to implement approach". The performance for that seemed more than enough for the stated use case, and included some benchmarks and a bit of text to justify it. Performance wasn't mentioned in the task, but seems like the common sense thing to do. After a few weeks I got a one-line "doesn't meet expected performance" rejection. Well, you didn't mention what the "expected performance" is motherfucker. That's not what I sent back (I didn't reply at all), but what a fucked up way to evaluate and dismiss people.
For me? Yes, in almost all cases, especially if we're talking about either getting no feedback vs. honest feedback. There's been a number of times where someone said X, I thought about it and either changed or at least internally made a note.
I will say it really depends on the context and situation. For example, if it involves someone you care about then sure an honest 5 minute conversation can help eliminate a lot of assumptions from both sides or uncover unknown tensions from the other side. On the flip side, if nothing gets said then nothing will change.
Being honest and transparent doesn't always mean literally saying what's on your mind too. It could be trying to achieve an outcome, such as with a code review. There's lots of ways to provide feedback in a way where you can get the other person to self-realize something without you needing to say it just by asking questions a certain way. This isn't an easy skill and it's something I'm always trying to improve. It applies outside of coding too.
Do you think if they were more specific it could have helped?
As someone who does like honesty, that type of response would bother me too because it doesn't feel like an honest reply. It feels like a blanket statement to quickly say something and move on.
If they said something like "when it came to thinking about and writing database queries, we felt like your solutions could have used more thought around performance optimizations and fundamental knowledge about joins".
I'd be really happy with a rejection like that because it's super specific. Now there's 2 action items I can do to improve, such as focusing on query tuning and getting better at joins. These are things you could search for and find tons of content / examples to improve on.
If you think about it like a loop, it's a loop that's complete. You did something poorly, you know what you did poorly, you can level up those specific skills and try again. The problem is when the feedback doesn't let you complete the loop.
To be honest I think it was just a "bad vibe" or whatever you want to call it, and/or didn't meet an exactly pre-defined approach they wanted during the "systems design" interview which was quite badly done IMHO, and felt like stumbling around trying to find the answer he was looking for while he was going out of the way to drip-feed me information.
But who knows...
But yes, I agree with you: it's non-actionable feedback. And also came across as quite personal (that is: the difference with "you're a bad coder" vs. "this is bad code").