[getsat]

The reason you don't get a reply (in the US anyways) is for legal reasons. If you say anything which could be even remotely (mis)interpreted as some sort of bias, your company could lose lots of money/time and potentially go bankrupt due to a discrimination lawsuit.

It's sadly safer to just not reject candidates at all. Don't hate the player, hate the game.

[uncletaco]

I'm pretty sure laziness would have more to do with not getting a proper rejection than the chance of triggering a lawsuit. If I'm applying to a small to medium sized business in my neck of the woods then nine times out of ten when I don't get a reply its because the hiring manager hasn't taken the time out of their week to get back to me.

When I applied to a local company the hiring manager kept emailing me about how he was "swamped" or some other variation of the word busy and would get back to me in the next few days. He did that for about two weeks before calling me and finding out I had accepted an offer somewhere else.

Heck when I applied to Google the recruiter (who contacted me first) took 5 months to get back to me after I sent in my CV and transcript, apologized profusely, and told me that the reason it took so long was because who ever was handling my case left abruptly without handing off the cases she was working on.

I know these are anecdotal but I have an extremely hard time believing that HR managers in the US are so worried about triggering a discrimination lawsuit that they choose inaction.

Very little, if anything, supports your claim. A quick search on the topic of why recruiters don't follow up with candidates reveals that the vast majority of people in the industry just have a really hard time with the hiring process. Its just plain broken.

Does your company not get back to candidates because they fear a discrimination lawsuit? Someone else's? I would love to know which companies' HR teams or recruiters have discrimination lawsuits at the top of their "things I'm really scared could happen if I reply to a job seeker" list.

[Spooky23]

Legal/compliance is a significant part of it. That rejection letter has zero upside to the employer and offers many opportunities to screw up.

If a company has: a mature HR process, people who know wtf they are doing, and give a crap, they'll do rejection letters. Most lack at least one of those things.

The guy at your SMB example is some jack of all trades, and dealing your resume is a priority-2 in a sea of P1's. He doesn't have a recruiting process. Google does, but even there it's still dependent on a human making a judgement call about what to write.

[uncletaco]

What you said about my resume being priority-2 in a sea of P1s is spot on in my opinion. However the OP's assertion about fearing a legal reprisal on the grounds of discrimination is farfetched to me. People don't just go around trying to sue people who send them nasty rejection letter. If the candidate could afford the legal fees then they probably wouldn't be looking for a job.

[Spooky23]

People do.

Also, you don't need to sue. You can file an EEOC or similar complaint to your state/local Human Rights Commission. The process is designed so that you do not need an attorney. You get assigned a hearing officer, they perform some sort of investigation and issues a finding, which can include a variety of remedies.

It's not something to be paranoid about, but when you're a bigger company interviewing alot of people, you want to tie up the loose ends.

[gkop]

This is merely a convenient excuse for companies behaving inconsiderately. Since many companies in the U.S. do send rejection emails, it's clearly one of any number of other reasons why some companies neglect this basic courtesy. The silver lining is, you probably don't want to work for these companies anyway :)

[vdaniuk]

>Since many companies in the U.S. do send rejection emails

Are you able to provide any kind of data backing up that claim?

I am strongly in the "don't hate the player, hate the game" camp on this issue.

This is NOT a basic courtesy but a business process that requires a lot of resources to be at least somewhat meaningful. How long do you think it takes to write a rejection letter that provides useful, actionable data for the potential candidate? Multiply that by 10-100 for every position.

Oh, and I've seen much more nasty replies and general insults than thank yous in response to rejection letters.

I would be in support of rejection letters if the process would be mandated by the hiring platform / shared culture / etc.

[gkop]

Try applying for a position at a large company with a reputation for a highly-engineered hiring process, eg. Google [0]. Rarely will you get specific feedback, but you can expect to get a notification when you are no longer under consideration.

[0] At Google's scale, some candidates fall through the cracks. But their recruiting process does mandate rejection notifications. It'd be great if a Google recruiter would back me up here :)

[thaumasiotes]

I interviewed at Google; they said they would give me a decision at some (soon) future point, and they did. They called me during work hours to do it... but they definitely did give me an explicit rejection.

[ghaff]

My impression is that rejection letters are fairly common but they're almost universally in the form letter "no fit at this time. Will keep on file" vein.

Maybe some companies do more personalized responses but I've never seen it and I would think it would often be difficult. As with many other things, say picking talks for conferences, you're usually not so much rejecting as you're picking some other person or thing. And, yes, there are a lot of reasons the typical HR department would have issues with brutal honesty even aside from the effort it would take.

[darrenmc]

At least that is some form of response. My experience with big tech firms is either a request for a phone screen or tumbleweeds. I'd prefer the courtesy of a one line email rejection instead of the application disappearing into a black hole.

[mcguire]

As for me, I'm still waiting for a response from the SouthWest Research Institute. I know, I know, most people would have given up by now, since it's been 25 years, but the initial interview went so well....

[Edit] Holy shit, I'm old.

[thedufer]

> How long do you think it takes to write a rejection letter that provides useful, actionable data for the potential candidate?

I see nothing in the post nor this thread that indicates that's what people are looking for. An obvious form letter would be just fine. The point is that a candidate wants to know that the process is over, instead of being left hanging.

[reagency]

Facebook gives candidate feedback.

[s73v3r]

"I am strongly in the "don't hate the player, hate the game" camp on this issue."

I am strongly in the "that is a shitty excuse perpetuated by people to excuse their crappy behavior on a wide number of things" camp.

[justizin]

I have often found myself working _for_ people who had the same negative experiences at other companies, so not only do all bad hiring practices create negative reputation, they create an entire class of people who would be perfectly happy if you didn't exist at all. :)

[gkop]

On "Who is hiring", you can abstain from upvoting those companies where you had a negative experience (or even downvote them, if you feel that's justified).

[Akkuma]

I stated on the update about "Who is hiring" that there needs to be a way to track and review the interactions with these companies. Glassdoor doesn't really have a "these guys never bothered to reply to my job application" section. I just went and "reviewed" companies on "Who is hiring" as this community should try to promote those we'd recommend others try to apply and those we don't believe others should waste their time with. Eventually, we'd be left with only quality job postings.

[rbcgerard]

A simple "you are no longer being considered for the [x] position, thank you for your application" is all most people are looking for.

[binxbolling]

Exactly! And modern HR tech makes rejection en masse so ridiculously easy. So if your company has an ATS that doesn't make it ridiculously easy to reject en masse with a boilerplate message, then you badly need to upgrade your ATS.

(LEGO even sent me a nicely formatted, well-branded letter within 7 business days despite not even making it to the phone screen stage.)

[burger_moon]

Yes this is all I want. I track all my applications and what stage I'm at with each company. It makes it incredibly difficult when they can't even be bothered to send me a generic rejection email.

[pauloteixeira]

Exactly something so simple but so important!

[takeda]

As other said there are plenty of companies that do notify you, personally majority of companies that I applied to do that.

I noticed though that my current company sometimes does it. It typically is when you did not do too well on an interview and effectively failed (or passed with flying colors but you are an international student, and they don't want to sponsor ), but they still won't notify in case they can't find anyone better. From my observation they generally never come back to those candidates.