Why do employers rarely offer explanations to rejected candidates?

Will you tell that guy that you won't grab dinner with him because, to be honest, you found him a bit creepy and plus he's kind of ugly?

Nah, you'll make up an excuse. Turns out that recruiters are people, too. They don't see many benefits, but they do see many costs: it just opens them up to lawsuits. If they give you a reason and you don't think it's the right reason, you might jump to discrimination. But if you don't know the reason, you have a much harder time arguing that their reason is invalid.

It might be mean. It's scary to deliver really harsh feedback to a candidate. It's so much easier to just not.

I would love it if companies gave feedback. In fact, the big consulting firms (McKinsey, Bain, and BCG) do. So you can do it, and I think companies should at least try it as an experiment.

But the easiest, least risky thing is to not give feedback. Everyone else is doing that anyway, so they are in good company.

Gayle Laakmann McDowell

The legal implications of offering someone a window into why they didn't get the job are definitely true. In a litigious society, and particularly in the aftermath of many of the class action and civil lawsuits of the late Nineties and early 2000s, companies became hypersensitive to protect their interests. As such, many companies adopted a blanket approach to dealing with interview feedback by simply declining to give any details.

The legal side is very important. But there's also the recruiter's side. As a recruiter, giving interview feedback is a slippery slope. There are a lot of factors that go into why a person may not have gotten the job and they aren't always things that a candidate wants to hear. I've honestly found that nine times out of 10, when I give a candidate feedback, they get very defensive. If you take one drawn-out-feedback conversation and multiply it by the 20 to 25 candidates we may be rejecting every week, you have a massive time-suck.

I will say that when a candidate seems thoughtful, mature, and professional, I will often give them a little bit of feedback because I know they can handle it. But many cannot and getting into daily debates with candidates isn't a good use of my time. In my industry, it's gotten so bad that sometimes companies won't even give out the last names of the interviewers because candidates do things like approach them on LinkedIn, trying to argue with the outcome of their interview. In the day of Twitter venting, blogs, Glassdoor, Reddit, and HuffPo and all other media outlets, you never know what the tipping point might be for a candidate to air their opinions.

Ambra Benjamin, Engineering Recruiter at Facebook

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