I’ve come to believe that two factors hold companies back from giving honest feedback when they reject candidates. The first is that giving feedback effectively is an enormous amount of work. The second is that candidates often don’t really want the feedback companies are in a position to offer them.As Piper also cautions, the feedback loop can become fraught. Interviews are effectively two parties judging one another; you’re testing the waters of a company, and they’re trying to determine if you’re the right fit for the position. And maybe your shirt was a bit wrinkled from the drive to the office. Or maybe you flubbed an intricate, highly technical answer. Sometimes, instead of offering a rejection letter with zero information, the company offers too much detail on why your application went down in flames, and that's equally hurtful. Triplebyte has attempted to smooth some of the rougher edges of the rejection process. Instead of saying something like "You didn’t use the correct technical terms" in a rejection, they may offer something along the lines of, "You didn’t clearly communicate your level of expertise with the technology." This low-level positive reinforcement helps candidates learn from the experience without disrupting their confidence.
Why Job Rejection Emails Hurt: You're a Lawsuit-Happy 'Snowflake'
We’ve all received a job rejection letter or email, and they always hurt, even when you're pretty sure the job wouldn't have worked out anyway. Such letters are often boilerplate, with a minimum of detail, leaving it a mystery as to why you were rejected. Indeed, one of the worst parts of such letters is the opacity. You're rarely given a reason why you were turned down; you're just stuck with standard-issue "Thanks but no thanks" paragraphs. Many people assume this is an attempt on the company's part to mitigate legal risk (which is why services like Legal Zoom have candidate-rejection letter templates on their site). But Kelsey Piper of Triplebyte says the part about legal risk isn’t the whole reason. She claims to have written some 3,000 rejection emails over the last year, all detailed and unique to the individual. Her conclusion? The boilerplate isn't due to lawsuit fears so much as companies being too lazy... and candidates too sensitive: