Flunking my Anthropic interview again

One great piece of advice an informal mentor gave me long ago is that there is no information in a rejection.

That is to say that you cannot draw any conclusions about yourself or your interviewing technique or your skills or anything from the single accept==0 bit that you typically get back. There are so many reasons that a candidate might get rejected that have nothing to do with one's individual performance in the interview or application process.

Having been on the hiring side of the interview table now many more times than on the seeking side, I can say that this is totally true.

One of the biggest misconceptions I see from job seekers, especially younger ones, is to equate a job interview to a test at school, assuming that there is some objective bar and if you pass it then you must be hired. It's simply not true. Frequently more than one good applicant applies for a single open role, and the hiring team has to choose among them. In that case, you could "pass" and still not get the job and the only reason is that the hiring team liked someone else better.

I can only think of one instance where we had two great candidates for one role and management found a way to open another role so we could hire both. In a few other cases, we had people whom we liked but didn't choose and we forwarded their resumes to other teams who had open roles we thought would fit, but most of the time it's just, "sorry."

> there is no information in a rejection

Building on that: There's a few reasons why a company won't explain why they reject a candidate.

One of the reasons is that they don't want candidates to "game" the system, because it makes it hard to screen for the people they want to hire.

Another reason is that often rejections are highly subjective, and telling a candidate that "we didn't hire you because of X" could be highly insulting.

Finally, quite often candidates are rejected because the people hiring ultimately are looking for people they will get along with. It doesn't matter how smart someone is, if something about the working relationship causes friction, the team dynamic can quickly devolve. (And to be quite frank, in these situations the candidate will probably have a better job working elsewhere.) These kinds of rejections are highly subjective, so no one really wants to give a candidate feedback.

These are all likely enough to contribute, but there's one big one.

If you don't say anything at all, the applicant has nothing to go on for a lawsuit against you.

If you say anything, and the applicant is a malicious litigant, you just became a potential paycheck via settlement.

If you're hiring a dozen people a year, you can probably ignore this. If you're hiring hundreds or thousands, and thus many times that number of applicants, you're going to step on that landmine eventually. Better then to have a company-wide policy "no feedback ever"

I hear this about lawsuits a lot, but it doesn't really track for me. If a hiring manager says, "we decided to pass on you because you didn't go in depth as much as we hoped on how you would handle latency," why does that open the company up to a lawsuit anymore than no answer?

I could see if the feedback was "we wanted someone who better fit the culture," but giving a specific answer on a core hiring criteria doesn't seem like it would cause a problem.

In reality, I think the most likely reason is what others have mentioned, that candidates would argue the point.