Many companies large enough to have HR and/or legal departments have rules specifically against providing feedback to candidates on why they were rejected.
I've been a FAANG hiring manager and those rules were not rigidly enforced. There are other deterrents, however. As a younger manager I was keen to respond to such requests, but a significant proportion of unsuccessful candidates would then argue, sometimes quite vehemently, about the validity of the feedback. This curtailed my enthusiasm, and I've been rather selective since.
I'm a recruiter and candidates argue 95% of the time. Maybe higher. I only give feedback in very, very selective situations and even then I almost always regret it due to the response. Most people are not calm, rational, dispassionate receptors of critical feedback... especially when there is money and ego at stake.
Who do you recruit for? I'm soon to be a new grad, looking for a job, and if you reject me.. you could literally berate me for things I didn't actually do and I wouldn't find it appropriate or productive to argue with you about it. Let's set up an interview, you can record my reaction to the rejection and send it to those who argue for reference on how not to be a moron.
I don't recruit new grads so it would never happen. Similar to OP's post, it's almost always a situation where it's painfully obvious to everyone else involved why the person isn't getting hired, but it would be awkward or a waste of time to try to tell the person.
It's also virtually always social skill related... if you weren't up to the task technically, you wouldn't have been asked to interview. The in person interview is normally to decide "do I want to see this person 40+ hours a week for the next 5 years" rather than "can they do the job."
Lots of exceptions obviously but mostly true across the board.
For what it's worth, that's definitely not my experience. I've interviewed or phone-screened at least 200 people over the last few years, and yes, there's been a handful of rejections where the major concern was social skills: abrasive, over-confident, poor communication or lacking the appearance of motivation. But I've had far more people who simply couldn't perform well enough on the technical problem or who had obviously over-stated their qualifications and knowledge on their resume. I actually distinctly remember several interviews lately where I really liked the candidate as a person and had a very enjoyable chat with them, but I just didn't think they would do the job well.
There are a lot of flaws in the way interviews are done in our industry that make it more subjective than it should be, but I still wouldn't consider the latter set of problems to be social skill related.
My experience too, it’s good to give a sentence or two out of courtesy but the arguing and sheer bullshit you get back sometimes, made me shake my head.
The other things is that far more commonly than sirens and alarm bells going off about something specific, is that someone just didn't wow me and I thought we could do better.
When we meet after an interview round "meh" is a much more common collective reaction than "run away now."
I don't disagree, but I think you'd be surprised at how many would respond in some capacity that was helpful. Even if 100 people refuse and one person doesn't, that's still more information than you had before.
And in my experience, if you fail the technical portion of an interview, most companies will tell you. Meaning, if you ask and they don't bring up technical skills, it's probably not the technical skills.
You can always say, “I know you can’t give me a specific reason on why I’m being rejected, but can you offer any guidance on how I can do better? Anything you can offer could be helpful.”
This is definitely true but it doesn't hurt to ask. I've asked every time and gotten some really useful responses.
When I was young I interviewed at Microsoft and was rejected. I asked the recruiter for feedback. She talked me through some of the feedback from the interviewers and gave me advice for the future. It was really helpful.
That may be true, but I've had good luck asking recruiters for feedback after getting bad news. They usually give some good advice or feedback - over the phone, of course, never in writing. Typically they say something like "You were really strong in X but the hiring manager is looking for someone with more Y." One recruiter told me that the HM had given me the thumbs down saying I was "insufficiently succinct" in my answers! But even there, I had good rapport with the recruiter and he was able to suggest other roles within the company.
If you get feedback that doesn't make much sense, it's likely not the real reason. Just like if a date rejects you, they'll give some silly fake reason why.
Sometimes the reason they give you is just the one that pushed you over the edge. At Amazon being "insufficiently succinct" is a greater err than one might think.
I like that one. I've done interviews where the answer should be at most a summary sentence, and 2-3 supporting points. I know the candidate knows the answer, it's a warmup question! Then what do I get? Word salad. A gigantic run-on sentence where the candidate talks and talks and talks and this, and that, and also, and furthermore... lasting 5 minutes or until I politely interrupt with, "OK let's move on to the next question."
A colleague of mine was sued (alongside the company) for rejecting a candidate. The feedback they provided the candidate to help them out was cited in the lawsuit.
It is better to keep quiet about negative feedback in the lawsuit-heavy culture we inhabit.