[inopinatus]

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.

[javajosh]

Interesting. I'm curious: roughly how often did the candidate promise they'd take your feedback constructively, calmly and then argue with you anyway?

(I'd hope it would be close to 0, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was much higher.)

[jldl805]

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.

[p0sixlang]

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.

[jldl805]

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.

[macksd]

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.

[jldl805]

The only thing this tells me is you have an error in your hiring process that is leading you to interviewing people in person that cannot do the job. This should never happen.

[oblio]

Or just need to blow off steam: accept defeat AND also rant :-))

[davedx]

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.

[ghaff]

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."