Ask HN: Why don't hiring managers provide feedback?

18 points by scrapcode 1 year ago | 42 comments

I have been applying for SWE positions for nearly 2 months now, at an average of 1 application per day. Of the 37% that have responded, nearly 70% have been rejections, to which I send a message thanking them for consideration and asking if they have any constructive feedback in how I might improve either my application, interviewing (if applicable), or my KSAs.

Most ghost at that point with zero response, some have explicitly replied by saying they will not give feedback at all. Only one organization gave any feedback at all, and they really took it to another level by scheduling a 30-minute call with an HR rep to have an entire feedback session.

I’m currently pivoting from a decade+ long career in government, albeit technical and involving development, and the feedback would be immensely valuable to me. It’s difficult for many of these organizations to find a person to actually request feedback from, but even when you can, seems unwilling to offer it.

Is there a liability reason here, or is it just a sheer volume problem at this point in the market?

bell-cot 1 year ago |

If I'm the HR VP, my choices look like this:

Forbid Feedback - this is a one-liner in our procedures manual. For internal Training, I might add a 3-minute "here's a real-world example, where well-intended feedback turned into a disaster" story to any 3+ hour training. That'll be a different case every time, to keep it fresh and drive home the point.

Allow Feedback - now I'm letting my front-line troops, who don't have much training for it, spend time wandering in legal minefields. The time is on my dime. Any additional training is on my dime. The liability (which could easily be $millions) is on my dime. And 99% of the (modest) upsides are for some declined candidate who we'll probably never see again.

scrapheap 1 year ago | |

I can understand when a company has a policy of never giving feedback, but it's a shame when they can't at least be polite about it. How hard is it to have an standard response saying something along the lines of "Sorry, it is not company policy to provide feedback"?

bell-cot 1 year ago | | |

> How hard is it...

Not very - though the experienced prospects don't need to be told.

And people who are inclined to sympathy and politeness tend not to stick around in a role which requires lots of saying "no", to people who really wanted to hear "yes".

Finally, the sooner you close the door on further communication, the less time you waste with candidates who fall short of "calm and professional" in accepting their "no".

romanhn 1 year ago |

Zero upside, all liability (however remote). Even if rejected after the full interview loop, you are very unlikely to receive any feedback. Expecting it after resume submission is entirely unrealistic given that the hiring manager (or maybe just a recruiter) probably spent no more than a minute or two on it before making a decision. And given the huge volumes of spray-and-pray resumes sent out these days, feedback is not realistic even if the company wanted to provide it. Kudos to the rare exceptions, given all this.

DataDaoDe 1 year ago | |

Basically it mostly boils down to liability I think. Companies can basically only lose from providing true feedback, so its an incentives issue and they are just not aligned here.

aprdm 1 year ago | | |

There are thousands of CVs per opening in some companies, how do you expect people who barely have time to read the CVs to also give individual feedback ?

toast0 1 year ago |

Feedback on just a resume with no prior connection is pretty much not going to happen. The number of resumes submitted is generally way too high to look at a resume long enough to write anything worth sending you.

Feedback on interviews can happen, but in my experience as an interviewer, when I've given feedback, candidates want to rebut it. That doesn't feel like a good use of my time, so I won't entertain requests for feedback anymore. For a very few candidates, I have reached out to the candidate to provide unsolicited feedback, like if they did pretty well on my interview but were missing some fundamentals and did poorly with the rest of the panel, and some guidance on things to study for future interviews would help them on future interviews; or they weren't a good candidate for the open position(s), but they seemed like they could do well in a different type of position.

tacostakohashi 1 year ago | |

I think the risk of it turning in a tedious back and forth / rebuttal that you touched on is a big reason in addition to the liability / risk aversion etc.

If you build a bit of rapport with your HR contact / recruiter / interviewers and mention that you'd appreciate feedback either way during the process, realize that maybe it might not end up being a fit now but maybe down the track or that you might have other referrals for them, etc., then in my experience you can actually get some reasonable informal/verbal feedback a lot of the time.

If you treat it as an entitlement and don't demonstrate that you understand their concerns, less so.

scrapcode 1 year ago | |

That makes sense. I guess I was only considering what my own response would be to receiving feedback. I think I'll just change my approach to just trying to articulate genuine appreciation for the opportunity to interview in the first place, and see if that sparks any love my way.

paulcole 1 year ago |

1. It is a liability thing and it’s just safer to not give feedback.

2. If I don’t want to hire you, it’s very likely that I have 0 interest in wanting to interact with you further. You don’t have a job and you want a job where I work. When I give you feedback are you going to take it or are you going to argue with it? “Oh, I’m actually ________, just let me talk to you again…” Not happening so why even pretend like I care?

I tell people we’re moving on with other candidates and thank them for their interest. If they write back and the first two words in the email aren’t “Thank you”, it’s an insta-delete.

2rsf 1 year ago |

At the risk of repeating others- - liability - a one liner is not a good feedback, proper feedback requires a lot of resources (time mainly but not only) - we reject multiple candidates per position, getting back to each consumes a lot of time - most of the times the "you are not a good match" is the right feedback, there is nothing to improve and I am not going to educate people about career improvements

nizahn 1 year ago |

I believe it has to do with the amount of work they're handling in the hiring process. The hiring process itself is time consuming and draining, so whenever feedback is asked, it is appreciated but perhaps not in the priority list of the hiring manager.

WheelsAtLarge 1 year ago |

It's more trouble than it's worth for them. A lot of times, they don't really know. Also, if they say the wrong thing, it might get them in trouble. If you get to know them better then maybe they will help.

Leftium 1 year ago |

Not quite a hiring manager, but the Recurse Center is very thoughtful about their application process. They stopped giving feedback, even though they really want to provide feedback. Here's their explanation:

https://www.recurse.com/feedback

scarface_74 1 year ago |

Why are you only applying for one per day?

And it’s not just liability. The minute you start providing feedback, the candidate is going to start arguing why you are wrong and it’s a waste of time.

scrapcode 1 year ago | |

I say average as I'm at about 60 for the past 60 days. Some days 0, some days 15. As an attempt to increase my success rate I have limited most of my applications to specifically target my most comfortable stack as well as focusing on orgs physically close to me that are seeking to fill hybrid positions. I check daily, but the supply of positions that meet that criteria go through waves.

I certainly do apply for remote-only positions as well if I match the requirements really well, but everything in the intermediate to mid-level range is getting 800-1,000 apps per week.

scarface_74 1 year ago | | |

If you are blindly applying for jobs via ATS, one a day is not nearly enough especially applying for remote roles.

When I was looking for jobs both in 2023 and again last year, my backup plan was working as a plain old C#/Javascript/Python backend developer with AWS experience. I was only looking for remote roles since now my wife and I live in a tourist heavy. But not software developer heavy metropolitan area.

I made it a habit of applying for at least 20 jobs a day while spending the rest of the time doing interview prep.

This is all while actually going through the interview process (and ultimately getting offers) for my more targeted opportunities based on my network, recruiters reaching out to me and my reaching out to companies where I had very specialized niche experience with AWS as well as more broad based AWS experience.

I never had to trigger my plan C. That was sucking it up and being willing to relocate to one of a few cities on my own dime and work in an office or hybrid.

Yes I realize Plan C isn’t as easily done for most people. We are just in a situation where we can easily and relatively cheaply relocate anywhere and rent and keep our condo where we live now.

But you have to get out of your “most comfortable stack” mentality. If you have other stacks that you have experience with, tailor a different resume to those and extend your search criteria.

There are also companies that don’t care about what technologies you know as long as you can pass a coding interview.

It’s time to “grind leetCode”. I’ve never had to do that myself. But it is reality today

shumakriss 1 year ago |

At the risk of not directly answering the question, I will try to make a stand for professional courtesy and human decency.

Many of us readers are in similar fields in the same job market all wondering why we can’t get even a bit of advice. I think we owe it to TRY to give each other to give feedback.

We also have to try not to get mad when we get feedback we don’t like, unless it’s illegal. Then shouldn’t we all be happier that the feedback was aired and the truth came out?

It may not scale and I may not have a solution but it seems like people give up very quickly on this topic.

One additional issue on this topic is power imbalance. These poor companies have so many applicants, however will they reject them all AND say why, maybe even in writing? The last statement is meant tongue in cheek, of course.

There’s other silly worries that lead to chalking things up to legality and scale:

What if we get caught for doing something illegal?

What if all of these unemployed people spend their savings on lawyers and sue us for giving useful advice because they’re (angry, unstable, unprofessional, arrogant, other generality about online applicants)?

What if our hypothetical solution for a better candidate experience isn’t perfect tanks our company?

I don’t think the issue is legality or scale but that it’s perpetually “someone else’s problem”. We can do better.

DataDaoDe 1 year ago | |

> What if all of these unemployed people spend their savings on lawyers and sue ...

This happens. There are people who work together with lawyers to send in applications knowing they are not looking for a job but looking for the ability to sue in any part of the application process. Sadly, this is also a reality of the world and unfortunately cannot be chalked up to a silly worry.

belter 1 year ago |

Mostly sheer volume, but you can't believe how dysfunctional most HR departments are.

Best of luck, but the best tip I can give you to be hired anywhere, is to absolutely avoid the HR team. Think about it, you don’t meet the real hiring manager until the last interview, too late already if you start with HR....

Go around, contact team managers directly, be creative, so that the HR team stays in their place...they are glorified invitation senders and should stay as such.

scrapcode 1 year ago | |

I have been trying this approach to some extent, but with a non-existent network it has essentially boiled down to using LinkedIn Premium features to guess who within the org might be close to the area the position is for. Thank you for the well wishes.

belter 1 year ago | | |

Try User groups and Industry conferences. You can meet all kind of interesting company people at their booths.

tthflssy 1 year ago |

Don't loose faith. With a single company giving feedback, you probably got already 50% of all feedbacks you can get. Your effort for asking all the others was already worth it.

On top of that, most of the feedback will reflect what state the company is in or what kind of people they are looking for, and not necessarily you or your skills. Eg. they want a deeply technical person, or a good communicator. In one year, for the same position, they will want a different set of skills.

If you know a lot of prospective companies, experiment with your CV / introduction and try to A/B test what is working. This is totally under your control.

scrapcode 1 year ago | |

Thank you for the valuable feedback, and positive nudge. I am trying to get creative in how I introduce myself to organizations to make a good first impression without coming off as "creepy," i.e. trying to connect or send a message with hiring managers on LI for example.

scarface_74 1 year ago | | |

I will tell you unless you have a really specialized skillset that I’m looking for (full stack developer is not specialized), if I reply at all to unsolicited message, I’m just going to tell you to go through the standard ATS funnel.

Of course if we worked together before and you impressed me, I’ll go through the standard internal referral process.

nextn 1 year ago |

I wish HR accepted payment in return for feedback.

gaws 1 year ago | |

They don't need the money because they're already paid well to push a button that filters applications through an AI tool.

bell-cot 1 year ago | |

Plenty of reasons for such feedback to be provided by a totally separate org.

Starting with the class action lawyers who'd love to argue that HR was interviewing & rejecting long-odd candidates for the purpose of boosting their Feedback Fee income.

shahbaby 1 year ago |

I've always assumed that the reason for rejection, especially if solicited, will likely not be the real reason due to liability concerns.

I think that no information is better than wrong information so I never ask for feedback.

superconduct123 1 year ago |

As a hiring manager what would you gain from giving feedback?

That person doesn't work for your company?

nextn 1 year ago | |

You could gain consistency of evaluation; being a lot clearer about the #1 thing you're looking for; hiring faster; paying for hiring costs.

There must be some reason a candidate is rejected. Putting the reason down in writing makes you accountable to the role, to the company, to the ideal candidate, and to the candidate currently evaluated.

Posting a job and not hiring until 6 months later doesn't make the hiring manager accountable.

To protect from legal liability, require candidates to sign something that clears the company from legal liability. Companies make candidates and employees sign all sorts of NDA/non-compete/etc documents anyway.

lostdog 1 year ago | | |

Writing down the reason for not hiring someone is helpful. Sending it to them isn't.

The reason is almost always "they did not appear to be good enough," usually around coding or problem solving. Very rarely is it something else.

I do prefer to give feedback, and so does our recruiter, so a lot of our candidates get feedback. But honestly I'm not sure how useful it is, being mostly "we have a high bar and they didn't reach it." The truly valuable feedback is how to get better, but that's hours and hours of help.

Plus, one time I did give feedback directly to the candidate over email, and they continued to badger me about it. I'm fine with shutting that kind of thing down, so I still give feedback, but it did sour me a bit.

scrapcode 1 year ago | |

Hard to say - but giving without the expectation of return can certainly lead to future gain. I highly respect the company that did schedule a feedback session and it certainly made them one that I will continue to watch for opportunities rather than just a position opening that popped up on a stream of jobs that I happened to find.

I'd be willing to bet they at least think there is some metric being improved there. Possibly assuming it might garner more interest as a desirable workplace during an staffer's market.

markus_zhang 1 year ago |

That's the normal. Let's just get used to it.