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I know why rejection emails suck – I write them

365 points by nosseo 8y ago

nosseo 8y ago
Article author - I'm on the writing team at Triplebyte. Most of what we do is summarize candidates' technical performance for their introduction to companies, but we also send feedback to everyone who takes our two-hour interview. I took this responsibility over from our first engineer, who built a bunch of software to make the process faster - it lets me quickly autogenerate emails by clicking all the resources I want to include, and then highlights the things that require more careful review. (So the people who accuse me of being a robot are half-right, I guess.)
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- mikepurvis 8y ago
  Isn't giving detailed feedback a liability nightmare? Everything I've ever heard on this is to say as little as possible. It's certainly great as a candidate to get detailed feedback (would have really appreciated it back in the day as a co-op student), but I just wonder if the concerns over it have any merit or are overblown.
  - frereubu 8y ago
    This is dealt with at length in the article.
  - thaumasiotes 8y ago
    This is called out early in the post: > The number one reason companies cite for not sending feedback is legal risk. Interestingly, I don’t think this is true. Companies put themselves at legal risk if they are rejecting candidates for illegitimate reasons, like race, gender, or a disability. If they send feedback which tells candidates, truthfully, that they were rejected because they didn’t get very far on the coding project, then if anything a company reduces their legal risk: they have a transparent track record of evaluating candidates based only on their skills. I recently talked with an employment lawyer about this, and he didn’t think that specific feedback on technical performance put companies at risk. So legal risk, despite being frequently cited, seems unlikely to be the real driver of policies here. Then, an explanation that legal risk isn't the same thing as lawsuit risk: > Even if your process isn’t biased, if you send feedback that creates the perception you’re biased, that’s enough for a costly lawsuit. So while legal risk isn’t a reason not to send detailed, honest technical feedback (as long as you’re not discriminating), it’s a very good reason not to send carelessly compiled feedback through a haphazard process (even if you’re not discriminating).
    - icelancer 8y ago
      Right, the liability is not "we are going to send a letter that says you're too old/you're a woman" or something blatant like that, the liability is that a very well-meaning person sends a thoughtful rejection letter and it can be inferred in the language - true or not, and this is the kicker - that there is discrimination going on. You are doing a nice thing by being detailed, but you are basically introducing nearly unbounded downside for the upside of being nice. Most companies don't find much value in this calculus. It doesn't make it the right thing to do, but it is understandable.
      - Apocryphon 8y ago
        I doubt that liability is much more of an excuse- how often do disgruntled candidates actually sue corporations, in any context? If a company doesn't want a candidate, there's not much value lost by them burning bridges with them, by refusing to send them feedback, or even a rejection notice. This is especially true for big companies who receive a lot of candidates. And for smaller startups, they simply lack the time and energy to give detailed responses to people they pass on. A failed candidate is of marginal use to a company.
  - dewski 8y ago
    The article addresses the "liability nightmare" and they mentioned they reached out to an employment lawyer.
  - nosseo 8y ago
    My understanding is that as long as you're not discriminating against candidates on the basis of race, gender or some other protected category membership, and as long as your feedback reflects that by being focused on the technical abilities the candidate demonstrated during the interview, you're not actually at all that much risk. Of course, if you are illegally discriminating, or if your feedback suggests that you are by giving feedback on candidate appearance or something (never do that), then you're absolutely better off not sending it.
    - mehrdadn 8y ago
      How do you imagine they would give feedback on something that's neither technical nor illegal? I'm imagining everything from "we found you too arrogant" to "you smelled awful when you came in"...
      - nosseo 8y ago
        For arrogant, I'd try to make the feedback as concrete and specific as possible - "sometimes you gave confidently wrong answers. If you're guessing, it's better to tell your interviewer that. Interviewers typically won't hold it against you if you guess and guess rightly, but if you don't acknowledge you're guessing and get things wrong, it raises questions about whether you know what you don't know." or "sometimes it's great to ignore the spec because you have something better in mind, but on an interview it's typically better to demonstrate your creativity and knowledge while still building to the spec - it makes it easier for us to evaluate you" or "when talking about your last company, you said some things that came across as disdainful about your coworkers. It'd be better to highlight your achievements." All of those are ways being arrogant can manifest, but they're much more actionable than 'you were arrogant' and unsurprisingly get received a lot better. I wouldn't comment on smell - yes, that's valuable feedback a candidate really ought to hear from someone, but the risk of really angering them is too high for me to feel comfortable with it.
        mehrdadn 8y ago
        The thing is you still reduced arrogance to technical correctness. However, what I was trying to get at was, what about cases where the technical correctness is just fine? If it's their attitude or hygiene or something else that you don't like, how do you tell them that? I was trying to get at the same thing you just said, which is that, like you, most people would become uncomfortable providing feedback on at least some of these. Meaning that you would have to turn away these candidates without any concrete feedback. Now how do you imagine they'll react when they realize most people do get feedback but they didn't? Is their reaction (which might result in bad publicity) a risk you and your company really want to take? For what gain?
- account2 8y ago
  >Every few months, I check that all our recommended resources are still up-to-date, available, and free. What are your recommended resources for technical improvements in coding interviews?
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  - nosseo 8y ago
    We have a blog post with some recommendations based on what we've seen at Triplebyte: https://triplebyte.com/blog/how-to-pass-a-programming-interview https://triplebyte.com/blog/how-to-pass-a-programming-interv... I think it's a pretty good starting point. I also like Cracking the Coding Interview and I think there's definitely a place for timed coding challenge sites like leetcode - especially if you've been in a role where you're mostly working on larger-scale problems rather than on producing smart, working code quickly on the fly.
    - nybblesio 8y ago
      Can you tell me what companies find attractive about: "...producing smart, working code quickly[;] on the fly," (emphasis mine)? I understand there are a lot of substandard programmers in the marketplace. However, why is it that this specific criteria is the one the industry is so attracted to? Could it be that kids are proficient at these kind of games? Because I can tell you that in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, I wasn't being asked to write a regular expression parser under time pressure. Others in this thread say they've done Triplebyte take-home tests, only to end up in a "go fast-fast-fast!" interview in the end. Why is speed so important? Every popular [aA]gile methodology today is implicitly -- if not explicitly -- against such "machismo" programming. If you're pair programming, how is this ever relevant? Whenever I see someone say leetcode, hackerrank, and Cracking the Coding Interview is the "answer" it translates to "only the young need apply" in my head.
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- mpeg 8y ago
  It's interesting that you pat yourself on the back about it, I think the whole Triplebyte interview process is poorly thought out, including your email comms. I did your online code quiz and got sent an email about doing a 2-hour technical interview, without really knowing much about what the job I was supposed to be applying for was. On the interview, since I didn't really want to waste 2-hours on something I didn't want to do, I asked the guy a few questions about the company only to learn he's actually a freelancer interviewer, has little direct relationship with triplebyte and doesn't really know anything about me. I carried on for a 2-hour quick-fire interview with a guy that was obviously trying to fill in a questionnaire rather than actually gauge my ability, questions designed by people who likely have no real-world experience in the scenarios they describe ("how would you architect the amazon.com frontpage?" is not a 2-minute answer) About 15 minutes in, I was sure that even if I had wanted the job in the first place I wouldn't have taken it; and I had forgotten about it when I got an incredibly patronising email explaining how, if I do some online code puzzles and study hard, I too can get a job. Gee, thanks. Granted: a bored, funemployed, grumpy dev is probably not your target audience, and I'm sure this interview style works to filter out people fresh off college, but the email was definitely the most ridiculous part.
  - nosseo 8y ago
    Yeah, another disadvantage of feedback is that some people really resent suggestions on how to improve - they can come across as condescending. I definitely would rather get feedback to someone who wants it even if this annoys someone who didn't, but I think lots of companies are making the opposite tradeoff - and that's part of why feedback is so rare in the industry.
    - mpeg 8y ago
      I don't think the suggestions are bad per se. The reason they come across as condescending is because they're obviously very generic and they're sent to people who, in the current market, can be picky about who they want to work with. Ultimately your whole business model is competing with tech recruiters, and my recruiters will call me to give me feedback from a role application, you have reduced that human touch aspect to an email with a few links to hackerrank.
- faitswulff 8y ago
  As a writers for TripleByte, how much technical background do you and the rest of the writing team have?
  - nosseo 8y ago
    I did a degree in symbolic systems (CS + philosophy + linguistics; I have some CS background but less than I'd have gotten from a CS degree), I did one software internship, and Triplebyte was my first job when I graduated. I'm sure every candidate I send feedback is a stronger engineer than I am, but I do have some technical background. Most engineers want to write code all day, not emails, but I think a technical background does help us do our jobs.
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Insanity 8y ago
At least you get a response even if it is a rejection letter. I have heard - not experienced - that sometimes you just don't hear back from the company at all, which seems worse to me.
- nosseo 8y ago
  I get why companies don't do honest rejection letters, but this there's no excuse for whatsoever.
  - PascLeRasc 8y ago
    It'd be nice to have some kind of public list where we could report companies that ghost, to warn other engineers to stay away.
    - sigstoat 8y ago
      seems like the interviews portion of glassdoor would support that? (caveats re trusting glassdoor, blah blah)
    - paulie_a 8y ago
      Just write up a review on glassdoor. Specifically calling them out for a crappy interview process. Or if you are really bold and bother with linkedin, make a post.
    - FLUX-YOU 8y ago
      You can't trust this because candidates do get petty when they get rejected and invent or omit details. That happens often on glassdoor.
      - mmt 8y ago
        Just like with any "crowdsourced" review site, I find value in the reviews, even if I don't, strictly, trust them. Of particular value are multiple reviews that corroborate certain details, especially in the absence of reviews providing contradictory details. At the very least, with something like "ghosting" during the interview process, it can help set expectations and inform behavior such as follow-up. For example, if interview reports complain of ghosting, I might still apply, but I wouldn't exert as much (if any) effort in soliciting a post-interview reply.
Harj 8y ago
I used to write rejection emails for companies at the end of YC interview days. It always sucked, especially when it was borderline decision (which it often was) but PG made doing these well an important part of internal YC culture. We couldn't leave until they were finished and each one was reviewed by another partner before sending. In hindsight I'm glad we did this. In the years since I've had multiple people tell me the rejection was a positive turning point and the only honest feedback they'd received.
dep_b 8y ago
Getting rejected at Triplebyte was actually a pretty good investment time wise. Guess the whole thing costed me three hours in total and I got quite a list of things to improve and how. It was clear it was tailored towards the interview not just a larger generic mail. There are tons of companies that give you a generic email after you completed an IQ test, a questionary, open questions and of course the 8hours+ homework. That's just perverse. "Try again in three months" Why? I wouldn't do anything different.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  > "Try again in three months" > Why? I wouldn't do anything different. But they will. The interview process is stochastic; exactly the same performance from you will lead to different results on different attempts. > Getting rejected at Triplebyte was actually a pretty good investment time wise. Guess the whole thing costed me three hours in total and I got quite a list of things to improve and how. It was clear it was tailored towards the interview not just a larger generic mail. For another perspective, here's the entire feedback I got when they rejected my application: > This was a tough decision and one that we were on the fence about. We really appreciate you taking the time to work on the take home project. We're aware this requires a substantial time commitment and we are really grateful that you invested the time in completing it. We thought you wrote a great, very full featured regular expression matcher. It was especially impressive how much you dug into the academics behind regular languages. > However we made the decision because we felt that while going through the project together during the interview, we didn't see the fluency of programming when adding to it that we had hoped for. While we specifically designed the take home project track to help overcome the difficulties of coding under time pressure with someone watching, we do still need to see a certain level of programming during the interview. This didn't seem to be the case here, where making changes to the project seemed to be slower and more difficult than we'd have liked.
  - dep_b 8y ago
    That's quite a bit less than I got. Perhaps you're just better than me? ;) But I didn't know there might be another take home assignment. > But they will. The interview process is stochastic; exactly the same performance from you will lead to different results on different attempts. Yeah I thought about that. But "try x months later" really means that you didn't pass some kind of bar. If I would be one of the five people that passed there would be no problem if I applied next week again, right?
paulie_a 8y ago
Id rather get a rejection email than just not hear back. If you dont bother responding with a rejection after an interview you are a coward. And shouldnt be interviewing people.
eat_veggies 8y ago
my triplebyte rejection was surprisingly insightful. I don't know whether it's cookie-cutter, entirely handwritten, or a combination of a few macros, but it makes sense to me. https://pastebin.com/AGPyzmgU https://pastebin.com/AGPyzmgU
gwbas1c 8y ago
> When someone can’t answer an interview question about relational databases, it might be that ... they know them inside-and-out but aren’t used to answering questions on the fly, or that our question didn’t use the vocabulary they’re familiar with, or that they misheard the question and answered a different one. Ultimately, that means your interviews have bias. (Even though it appears you try very, very, very hard to avoid bias.) Honestly, I don't think interview feedback is a good idea. It just encourages gaming the system. I'd rather that feedback come through a neutral 3rd party. We just haven't set our field up to do that. Why neutral 3rd party? Because of the above situation! The 3rd party could just say things like, "looks like this was just a bad interview. Don't read too deep into it, and keep trying." The 3rd party could also push back on the employer if the interview ran poorly. And no, recruiters are not neutral 3rd parties.
segmondy 8y ago
Seriously, we need something written on why rejection sucks? Rejection sucks because we all like to imagine that we are good enough and the only reason we applied is because we believed we are good enough so it stinks to be told that we are not good enough. Doesn't matter how you phrase the email, might be nice to give a feedback, but for anyone who receives it, it stings. The only difference is that some folks have a positive mindset, they get over the sting and work towards getting better. Feedback or not.
desireco42 8y ago
I was lead dev in a company, I felt strongly that I don't want to reject people without providing them with clear feedback what they did well and didn't do well. VP hated the idea and very quickly was abandoned. We got a lot of bad candidates tbh, so it was hard to tell them what they did wrong (they bombed pretty much). I still think, done well, it provides great benefit to candidates being considered. Thing that worked well for me, I had elaborate set of topics/knowledge I want my developers to know and be rated on, it wasn't arbitrary selection. Still, when someone bombs, it is hard to relay they did bad.
apetresc 8y ago
> I work at Triplebyte, and over the last year I’ve written over 3,000 detailed, individual rejection emails. Wait, what? That means you're interviewing on average 12 people every single working day of the year. Even for someone who's job title was "Technical Recruiter" that would be a TON, let alone for someone who is a Team Lead and presumably has other duties. How is that possible?
- kulahan 8y ago
  It's possible his job is JUST to write these rejection letters. He gets feedback forms from all the interviewers, compiles them, reviews them, condenses them, touches them up, then sends them out. That could easily be a full-time job for a large company.
- nosseo 8y ago
  I don't conduct the interviews, you're right that that'd be impossible. I take the notes from our interviewers and turn them into feedback emails.
tptacek 8y ago
When someone can’t answer an interview question about relational databases, it might be that they don’t know anything about relational databases. I thought you all were better than this. Why are you asking questions about relational databases? Why not just have candidates accomplish the thing you're assessing with an actual relational database? I know you're work-sample-literate! But if your feedback emphasizes communication, doesn't that imply a lot about your process is subjective? After all, and to extend an analysis used in this blog post: it could be that the candidates couldn't effectively communicate knowledge about RDMBS's. Or, it could be that the interviewer wasn't effectively listening to what the candidate was saying.
- dmitrygr 8y ago
  Because sometimes understanding the base concept is important. I cannot possibly ask you to solve 1,000 scenarios in 45 minutes. But if you get the basic idea of how the concept works, I can be sure that when you encounter scenario #945, you'll have the basic grasp on the concept to at least know where to look, and when scenario #487 comes up, you'll know the basic idea of how to handle it. Asking you just to do one thing in an interview risks accidentally hitting one of the ten-twenty things you do know how to do, leaving me with no proof that you can solve the other 980-ish possible problems.
- wdewind 8y ago
  Isn't a lot of the job of software engineering to quickly and concisely communicate complicated concepts? Might this actually be an accurate work sample? How else might you measure something like this? Also the next few lines kinda address what you are saying: > It also might be that they know them inside-and-out but aren’t used to answering questions on the fly, or that our question didn’t use the vocabulary they’re familiar with, or that they misheard the question and answered a different one. It made quite a difference just to phrase the feedback in a way which acknowledged all those possibilities.
  - FLUX-YOU 8y ago
    >Isn't a lot of the job of software engineering to quickly and concisely communicate complicated concepts? No, I write code daily but I might have to distill down technical concepts once a week or so (usually not even that much) and even then if I happen to be the only one who can distill it down. If your devs are often explaining basic stuff like 'what is a relational database?', you need to hire someone specifically to do that. It's not a good use of time especially when they can go google/wikipedia those concepts and figure it out themselves.
draw_down 8y ago
I don't think legal risk is the main reason companies refrain from elaborating on why they chose not to hire. That's just a convenient thing to point to (in other words, lazy). It's more like, there's all downside and no upside. I can't think of one benefit that would accrue to an employer for doing that, but I can think of a lot of bad (or just undesirable) things that could potentially come from it.
paulsutter 8y ago
Companies hire the candidate they like best, they don't even spend mental energy 'rejecting' the other candidates. If you don't get hired, it says more about the candidate they chose and little about you.
rdl 8y ago
I'd settle for "do you at least send a rejection email of any kind to the candidate?" vs. the "dropping someone on the floor and not responding for weeks/months/ever". Even without detailed or personalized feedback, it's a huge improvement. Also if an internal person refers someone, you should let the internal person know if you're passing, I think (depends on other factors, though.)
- Liron 8y ago
  "Ghosting" seems like a common phenomenon across different types of human interaction. There's dating, interviewing, and even pitching investors. This was a common experience for me pitching my company last year: 1. Investor likes my co enough to schedule an in-person meeting 2. I meet investor in person to pitch 3. I send them a followup email 4. Radio silence I'd read that investors like to keep you in limbo instead of passing, I just didn't realize these well-respected professionals would value someone highly enough to give them an hour of their day, but low enough to neglect all followup communication. In retrospect I don't think it's a big deal, but I felt bad about it at the time.
- _delirium 8y ago
  This is the biggest US/Europe cultural difference I've noticed. I can't speak for every country in Europe or every industry, but for every job in Europe I've personally applied for, I got a rejection letter if I wasn't offered the job. Sometimes just a minimal notification, but always something. Not in America though... The best is for European academic jobs. Often there's a schedule up front for when they'll make a decision, usually a 2-stage thing like: we will shortlist candidates by Sept 15, interview in the following 3-4 weeks, and make a hiring decision by Oct 15. So if you didn't get shortlisted, you get informed early and don't have to wonder whether your resume is still under consideration or what. American universities, though, leave you guessing what their schedule is, may take months to get back to you even if they're interested, and usually don't send a rejection letter if they aren't.
rossdavidh 8y ago
So, good article, but another point occurred to me while reading it that wasn't covered. I think that writing a good email explaining the rejection, might be a good exercise for the company doing the rejecting. "Well, why are we rejecting this person, exactly?" Of course, this will only be true if the email is honest (if diplomatic). It could serve as an institutionalized review of whether candidates are getting rejected for the right reason. Building feedback loops into a company's internal process can be a very powerful thing, even when there's no bonus or penalty involved for the person doing the writing. I wonder, does Triplebyte have any kind of annual summary of why candidates are getting rejected?
stone-monkey 8y ago
Solid content marketing - I just spent the last 30 minutes taking the coding test because of this post.
kenjackson 8y ago
The other reason specificity is a legal issue is that it provides data that can be disputed. For example, if you reject someone black and say the reason they were rejected because hey didn’t get far enough in the coding test — you’d better not hire the white guy who only got just as far (which might happen for a variety of reasons). It’s almost the same reason you stay quiet when held by police. Even something seemingly innocuous may end being used against you in the future.
werbel 8y ago
If you/your company doesn't have a policy of sending personal feedback please consider doing this at least for junior people. Volunteer your after work time if needed. Trying to find the first job is extremely stressful process. A junior person has no notion of his worth on the market. Each rejection even if only by a lack of any response ("I'm sorry, I'm afraid we are looking for a bit more experienced person" would suffice) can be like a kick on the face when you're just barely learning to walk and most likely is a burned bridge. I've mentored my girlfriend for 3 years from almost 0 to getting her first job in a company run by a React Native core developer. She had the skill, great attitude, really solid work ethic and very analytical thinking. It'd trust her more with any task than significant number of my past and current senior coworkers. It's hard to prove and no one expects that so naturally her applications had been ignored or rejected. With each one I saw her confidence, self-esteem and enthusiasm crumb. With each positive reply/invitation she was invigorated until the next step came. I'm pretty sure for some the roller-coaster or even worse, being rejected over and over again can be a life defining experience. Any reply is great, personal is even better. If you spend time describing what was missing from the expectations of your company (don't say "You don't know enough", say "We need someone with more knowledge") and sincerely wish the person well you can be sure they'll be grateful, remember you, work on the gaps and who knows... maybe some day become part of your team. Please feel free to reach out if you want some example for inspiration. Edit: Please don't do that against the policy of your company. But if there are no reasons against just ask if you could provide some feedback and resources for the rejection letter.
- lixtra 8y ago
  Our HR asked me to personally call people and thank them for their declined application. But at the same time requested to not give any feedback because of fear from litigation. Sad world.
  - werbel 8y ago
    If someone told me that in my country (or maybe just outside US) I would simply not believe them at first. It might just be the choice of companies I've worked with though. It is sad indeed.
Johnny555 8y ago
If they send feedback which tells candidates, truthfully, that they were rejected because they didn’t get very far on the coding project, then if anything a company reduces their legal risk: they have a transparent track record of evaluating candidates based only on their skills I think the problem comes when he talks to his friend of another race/gender and that friend said "Yeah, I couldn't finish that either, but they still hired me". The company may have had a legit reason to overlook the coding project (like the second candidate had experience in some other technology), but when you tell candidate X that they didn't get the job because they didn't complete the coding exercise, but then you hire candidate Y despite him not completing it, it provides candidate X with some concrete evidence of discrimination.
Dwolb 8y ago
>I heard back from many of the engineers I write to, and often, they were furious Bingo. I've opted to share specific team feedback via phone and although candidate feedback was generally positive and thankful, once in awhile the reaction would be extremely negative. I now opt for the much more (emotionally) safe route. Triplebyte is more incented to provide candidate feedback because if the candidate improves, Triplebye may be more likely to place them in the future. With companies, this incentive is less apparent.
- smelendez 8y ago
  Yeah, this sounds like as much of an issue as the legal risk to me. Imagine if you reject someone and they blog about the letter you sent them and the interview process, and the post makes Hacker News or Reddit. Now you have to decide whether to fight in public with someone you didn't hire, normally bad form, or say nothing.
joeax 8y ago
I'm going to go against the grain and say that interview feedback is overrated (at least for senior people). If you got offered the job, then there's your feedback. If not, the interviewing company isn't going to tell you any more than you could already discern yourself by playing back your answers and conversations with the interviewers. If you honestly feel you aced the interview, then other factors are in play - perhaps they realized they are overstaffed, layoffs are imminent/hiring freezes, or just a slightly better and more personable candidate came along. One time I interviewed for a position that I wanted badly. I studied and prepped for the interview, then during the interview I nailed every question. I waited a week but never heard back. After a few weeks of silence and giving up hope, I searched the company on LinkedIn, and found the person they hired for the position. It turns out he had more backend experience, which is what they were looking for. It was a painful truth, but them sending me a rejection email telling me this wouldn't have helped me at all.
- namanyayg 8y ago
  An email would've at least saved your time spent in LinkedIn search. And what if the new employee wasn't on LinkedIn?
- m104 8y ago
  Precisely. Often times a rejection isn't saying that the candidate didn't meet the job requirements or wouldn't do well in the position, it says that the employer found someone who fit the role even better or knew that they could given past hiring experience.
- herodotus 8y ago
  I agree with you, except that the company should send out a rejection letter as soon as they can. If I were hiring, I would only send a non-generic response if the rejected candidate specifically asked me if I would be willing to give her or him constructive feedback, or otherwise indicate why they did not get the position.
  - joeax 8y ago
    What if they are not rejecting you? What if they like you as a candidate but decided to move forward with someone else (and it was a tough decision), and want to wait to see if that person will work out. It sucks, but it happens.
save_ferris 8y ago
I once got a detailed, feedback-driven rejection email, stating very clearly and professionally where I shined in my interview, and where I didn't. I was so appreciative of the message that I made sure to follow up with the manager working on my application and thanked them. 9 months later, I found myself in a bad management situation at another company, thinking about looking for another gig when the company that rejected me reached out asking if I'd be willing to come back and interview again. I did and accepted the offer. By giving good and candid feedback, they wound up saving months of searching for a new dev when they reached back out knowing I was a good fit for what they needed at that time. I was essentially a lead they'd already warmed months prior. It made me wonder why more companies don't think of this.
mikeleeorg 8y ago
When I was a hiring manager, I used to always include a personal note that included suggestions and constructive criticism for the candidate. In a couple of cases, those people replied to me, demonstrated some actions towards those goals, and I hired them later, when I had more available positions. And those that I didn't hire, I encountered them at other companies. It was flattering to hear them say they remembered me and had a positive impression of our recruiting process, even though they were rejected. I've always believed that the recruiting process is a great way to sell one's company. Even if the candidate isn't a good match, that candidate may recommend peers to the role if they have a positive experience with you.
- fermienrico 8y ago
  I appreciate people like you but unfortunately most companies' policy mandates not talking about the reasons due to some sort of legal risk of law suit.
- Mister_Snuggles 8y ago
  I interviewed for an internal position once and got similar feedback, by phone, from the HR person. She was on the phone with me for about an hour and, in all honesty, that rejection phone call made that one of the best interviews I've ever had. I didn't get that job, but it gave me a lot of constructive advice and I ended up getting the next one I interviewed for.
  - camelCaseOfBeer 8y ago
    That's nice and helpful, especially since tech interviews can be taxing. Sounds like they actually liked you and probably would've hired you under different circumstances. I had terribly frustrating experiences interviewing. Mostly just taking a bunch of tests and interviewing two, three times, and not hearing back for months. What sticks out was a post-interview for a large company that aggressively recruited from my uni. When I asked how I could have improved the answer was, "You ask too many specific questions about the company and software platform. Be more focused on the interviews." "For example?" "It isn't appropriate to discuss how wages are adjusted according to location or salaried overtime policies or the tech stack... in an interview..." I took that one as the, "not gonna drink the Kool Aid." box being checked. Dodged a bullet there, though, seeing as her answers did not exactly inspire faith.
sixdimensional 8y ago
Perhaps I'm being too broad but I think that rejection emails suck because generally, as a society, we aren't valuing communication or we don't think we can afford the time for actual feedback. It triggers one of those "how much better would the world be" feelings, if more people took more time to give each other genuine feedback. I mean, maybe giving good feedback (for candidates that took time to apply and clearly made effort) could help people learn, it might even ultimately address unemployment, homelessness, or other root cause problems. I understand the legal concerns - and there would be candidates who would exploit the process of genuine feedback as well - but I think it would serve to help people more than it would hurt. It does require time and resources, so organizations / institutions would have to look at it as a sort of a social benefit cost or something. But I do wonder how much good it might really do.
cm2187 8y ago
Actually this is in my opinion the main advantage of headhunters. They will typically call the recruiter after the interview and seek feedback. And it is easier to provide feedback to the headhunter than to the interviewee directly.
pmiller2 8y ago
Here's one thing that stuck out to me: > Even Triplebyte only sends individualized feedback to candidates who've done a two-hour interview with us - we simply don't have the resources to do it for everyone who takes our online quiz. Unless there's something interesting going on, it seems like it would be easy to give some kind of feedback based on the online quiz, even if it's only "You answered X out of Y questions correct on $TOPIC", repeated for however many topics were covered.
microcolonel 8y ago
> The number one reason companies cite for not sending feedback is legal risk. Interestingly, I don’t think this is true. Companies put themselves at legal risk if they are rejecting candidates for illegitimate reasons, like race, gender, or a disability. If they send feedback which tells candidates, truthfully, that they were rejected because they didn’t get very far on the coding project, then if anything a company reduces their legal risk: they have a transparent track record of evaluating candidates based only on their skills. I recently talked with an employment lawyer about this, and he didn’t think that specific feedback on technical performance put companies at risk. So legal risk, despite being frequently cited, seems unlikely to be the real driver of policies here. I think the problem here is that it exposes you legally even if you're not discriminating. If your explanation can in any way be argued as euphemism, or analogous to discrimination against a protected class, then you could face trouble. Maybe the risk is overblown, but the form of exposure you're talking about may not be the main one, far as I reckon.
btilly 8y ago
I believe that the article is fundamentally wrong. The bulk of the article is true. But companies are not lying when they say that legal risk is a reason not to send feedback. Triplebyte is in the unusual position of being able to say, "Everyone who has enough technical skill gets through the interview." And that fact is sufficient to defuse their risk. But real companies don't have the luxury of ignoring non-technical aspects of the job. Here are real reasons why I've seen people denied a job. "Nobody could understand his accent." "Accidental personal referenced summed him up as, 'Loves to make things crash and burn in production to see the pretty fireworks.'" "Nobody could believe the argument he got into at lunch." In my books those are all valid reasons to not want to work with someone. However the first opens you up for an accusation of racism, the second would break a personal confidence, and the third had demonstrated sufficient irrationality that tiptoeing away was a great idea. And you can't give feedback on technical issues, and not on the rest, because that amounts to a tacit acknowledgement that there was something non-technical. Leave the non-technical to your imagination and guess what happens?
- marcoperaza 8y ago
  On the point of legal risk, I’m concerned by the authors naïveté in believing that as long as you’re not actually discriminating based on race/sex/religion, you won’t be accused of it. The more data you put out there, the more likely that someone will crunch it and find some statistical patterns that they will label “racism” or "sexism". Even if you’re innocent, you will get dragged through the mud in the press and maybe even in court. Not worth it. No matter what, you lose. And what’s the upside? You gave some random guy some feedback. This is the world we live in, unfortunately.
  - mrkurt 8y ago
    The upside is that you've treated a human being with decency. People you treat decently in rejection help you with later hires. If you're going to argue the fantastical downside, you should at least acknowledge the possible upside (which my company, and apparently TripleByt, have both experienced).
kevindong 8y ago
I've applied to hundreds of internship positions by this point (I'm a senior looking for a full-time job starting this upcoming summer). During those hundreds of applications, I've only received explicit feedback (aside from getting offers, since getting an offer means I did good enough; I never got explicit feedback from any of those offers) a total of twice. One was for a marketing company that's already gone public because I made it to the final round and really fell apart during the coding portion. I knew I screwed up and the recruiter confirmed that (without me asking) during the "thanks for applying, but no thanks" phone call. The other time was for a medium-size startup. I had to ask the recruiter via email after I got the "no thanks" email, but she provided the info within minutes.
lizhang 8y ago
I went through the Triplebyte process 1.5 years ago and their feedback was so influential in where I spent the next few weeks studying. I think their process and feedback played a huge role in getting my first (and probably current, too) developer gig.
mbesto 8y ago
> I recently talked with an employment lawyer about this, and he didn’t think that specific feedback on technical performance put companies at risk. So legal risk, despite being frequently cited, seems unlikely to be the real driver of policies here. This was either written very poorly or lacks serious basis to conclude thoughts about employee feedback (of which drives the thesis of the whole article). First - "I talked to a lawyer and he didn't think it was a risk", does not sound very much like legal advice. Is there precedence for civil cases that were thrown out due to the basis of "just giving technical feedback"? How often do firms that provide "just technical feedback" get sued and how often do they settle those suits? Second - I think most people want feedback on "how they interviewed" and not "were they the right fit for the job". This is where you get into a gray area of legality, because anything you might say may get misconstrued as discrimination. "Oh you think I was too nervous during my interview...well I have X condition that makes me like that and you can't reject me for that" Third - feedback on technical skills? To what avail does this hold for the candidate? Example: Potential Employer: "You couldn't reverse a string, so work on string reversals." Potential Candidate: "Ok, I'll go learn a string reversal so I can ace my next interview" Feedback on interviews is imperfect because the hiring process is imperfect.
dunpeal 8y ago
> The number one reason companies cite for not sending feedback is legal risk. Interestingly, I don’t think this is true. Companies put themselves at legal risk if they are rejecting candidates for illegitimate reasons, like race, gender, or a disability. If they send feedback which tells candidates, truthfully, that they were rejected because they didn’t get very far on the coding project, then if anything a company reduces their legal risk: they have a transparent track record of evaluating candidates based only on their skills. Ah, but have you considered what would happen when you give this "transparent skills-based feedback" to 90% of your rejected candidates, but then a couple of them get rejected for reasons you don't want to specify, or could potentially be interpreted (by an aggressive litigation attorney) as illegal discrimination? Some candidates get rejected because "nobody enjoyed talking to him", "he seemed weird", "alienated the interviewers", etc. Are you going to write any of that in your transparent rejection letter?
starpilot 8y ago
Hard to care about the specific content of rejection emails when the average applicant will get hundreds of them before landing a position. It's like getting mad at the rain in Seattle winter. Though I do admit, the more effusive they seem to be about turning me down, the more offended I am as a professional. Then I forget about it 5 seconds later and move on to my next applications.
duxup 8y ago
I WISH I could get rejection emails. I'll talk to a recruiter at a company, exchange emails, even meet them .... 99.9% of the time if they're not offering I get NOTHING. They just don't respond. I don't care that they're not hiring me, I'd just like some feedback. FEEDBACK PLEASE, anything that really matters that I can improve on or such. It is to the point that even automated rejection letters seem nicer than the usual "ghosting".
- HillaryBriss 8y ago
  I was once told by a recruiter that she absolutely guaran-damn-teed that she would call me after the interview process and let me know the employer's decision. Guaran-damn-teed. After my in-person interview, about a month passed with no contact from her. I figured I didn't get the job. But I wanted to call her anyway, just because. She said, "Oh, I thought I sent you an email about it. Yeah, they don't want you."
  - duxup 8y ago
    Same, it's a pretty terrible system.
thidr0 8y ago
I will often tell candidates on the phone screen that I don't want to go forward for XYZ reasons (always technical). At one point one of the guys I gave feedback to like this turned the call into an occupational therapy session whining about the chicken/egg experience problem, how all these companies want him to know the "trivia" of CS fundamentals, etc. Believe me, it's a lot easier to just send a form rejection.
RoryRecruiter 8y ago
Interesting read/points about risk and candidates not being receptive to feedback. I've worked for companies that reason like this but personally, I believe the biggest challenge to overcome is for the person declining the candidate to articulate clear/concise constructive feedback over the PHONE vs sending an EMAIL. My current firm (McKinsey & Company) expects every candidate in round 1 or final round interviews (either from the recruiter or hiring manager) to receive a call same day or within a day of interviewing with their interview results. If the results are a decline, feedback as to how and why we came to that decision is provided. It's painful for sure and no one likes to give bad news but the firm has been operating this way for years and I’ve found candidates appreciate knowing sooner rather then later. Let's face it, there are a lot of bad hiring processes out there and not hearing back is the WORST when on the job hunt. At my firm, we rigorously evaluate candidates based on performance and will always do our best to ensure they are provided with feedback in a timely manner (note: I'm sure there have been slip ups in the past RE: same day/1 day after interviewing feedback but the firm expects every recruiters/interviewer to follow this process).
bitwize 8y ago
I've occasionally had a moment of schadenfreude where, after interviewing at a place I hated, I could write something like this: Dear <So-and-so>, Thank you for considering me for <position>. I certainly enjoyed talking to you in person. Unfortunately, I feel that <company> is not a fit for my needs at this time. I wish you the very best of luck in your candidate search. Sincerely, etc.
AngeloAnolin 8y ago
I would really rate a company that provides honest and truthful feedback a notch on top of the others as this shows some form of the culture that they have in their organization. You can do an automated response to 95% of the rejected ones, and for the rest which made the cut past the initial stage of applying, having a more human-centric approach on providing response is the way to go. The good words that would come out vouching for the company I think is enough reason that hiring organizations should take the effort to provide a meaningful response to some applicants.
andrewprock 8y ago
In my experience, most of the feedback I've gotten has been trite and superficial. It's not surprising, since most interview processes are not designed to measure quality but rather to measure interest. I once got feedback that I wasn't technically qualified, and when I asked how they knew that, they said that I hadn't spent enough time on leetcode studying the answers.
s0uthPaw88 8y ago
I found the feedback from my Triplebyte rejection to be very helpful in directing my preparation for other interviews. It helped me get a job offer 3 days later from just the type of company and role that they screen for.
brendonjohn 8y ago
I don't think a company should offer an interview if they're not willing to give proper feedback at the end of it. When interviewing candidates, I have been more than happy to give detailed feedback if they've asked me to give it. I realise it's unconventional, so I get the feedback peer reviewed before sending it away. I'm pleased to see that there are other companies learning how to give better feedback. Giving feedback is a small token of respect that a company can give in return for a candidates time. In my experience, interviewees have been thankful and shared how hard it is to get feedback from their interviewers.
HillaryBriss 8y ago
> Even Triplebyte only sends individualized feedback to candidates who've done a two-hour interview with us - we simply don't have the resources to do it for everyone who takes our online quiz. I'm surprised by this. I would think that Triplebyte could automate the feedback for applicants who took the online quiz but didn't make the cut.
kaizendad 8y ago
When I was getting my MBA, about <many> years ago, I suggested to our career placement folks that they work up a legal agreement with the companies who recruited with us, indemnifying them against any EEOC suits if they shared detailed feedback with us (most large companies go directly to business schools to hire on a yearly basis). They asked a half-dozen companies, and no company's legal team thought they could be confident such a document would stick. Pity, as, at that stage, we all had a lot of interviews to take, and a lot of support in getting new interviews.
insiderinsider 8y ago
Triple byte interviewers don’t know what they were interviewing all they have is bunch of questions they keep on asking without any opportunity to answer
burntrelish1273 8y ago
It's less effort and seems kinder to give a soft "no" by more-or-less ghosting the candidate. It's better to focus on "yes," actionable interest than get hung-up on where there's no business to be had.
industriousthou 8y ago
I recently bombed a Triplebyte interview. I didn't realize how badly until I got the feedback email. It honestly hurt, but it was really useful. I definitely respect their approach.
sixstringtheory 8y ago
> giving feedback effectively is an enormous amount of work I take a lot of issue with this. Interviewing and doing code projects is also an enormous amount of work. If a company sends an 8 hour exercise to each candidate, then in aggregate the candidates are probably expending way more person hours than the total expended by the hiring company to settle on a new hire. I no longer do unpaid work. Of course I’ll interview, but to show them how I code on their product and work in their processes, I will only accept a contract-to-hire offer. If more people did this I believe it would exert pressure on companies to not be so wanton with what they ask of candidates, and how expendably they treat them.
whydoineedthis 8y ago
you could also just give feedback in the cases where it is requested. As a fresh-faced out of college coder I was rejected from ThoughtWorks after spending 3 days on a coding question. Yes, I sucked - all I wanted to hear though was "we really wanted to see TDD, even though it was optional" or whatever. I asked for feedback, they didn't give it, I now and forever will have a negative impression of their company and will avoid them - and often people whom have worked for them - technicality be damned. You don't always need to give feedback, but a little compassion for those that are new would be nice.
sunstone 8y ago
Hmmm, so on standardised tests I typically score in the top two percentile. (yes I'm fabulous). But the best developer I ever worked with was a Russian guy who interviewed terribly. He was great at code, he was even great as a team lead. But he sucked at interviews. I never interviewed him so I can't say why that is but...if there's more than a few of these guys out there, there's room for (major) improvement in the interview business.
arunmp 8y ago
On a side note, this also reads as an interesting insight into human behavior and how to communicate in general. A wonderful article.
Markoff 8y ago
again decent article (though stating obvious) until last bracket which was whole point of posting it
bbq42 8y ago
Often time, it's just that after interviewing 20 candidates, we realize that this candidate is amongst the worst and telling him/her that isn't helpful.
jiveturkey 8y ago
I read the title as, you suck at your job therefore the emails suck. :) Reminds of a recent prudential billboard. "We spend more time reading billboards than planning for retirement." Great, if you aren't doing your job of planning then I'll use someone else!
rezashirazian 8y ago
TripleBye articles are generally bad. They're a mishmash of random ideas that feel A/B tested for the highest possible SEO return. I still remember reading through this: https://triplebyte.com/blog/a-taxonomy-of-programmers https://triplebyte.com/blog/a-taxonomy-of-programmers when it was first published trying to make sense of it.

365 points by nosseo 8y ago

Article author - I'm on the writing team at Triplebyte. Most of what we do is summarize candidates' technical performance for their introduction to companies, but we also send feedback to everyone who takes our two-hour interview. I took this responsibility over from our first engineer, who built a bunch of software to make the process faster - it lets me quickly autogenerate emails by clicking all the resources I want to include, and then highlights the things that require more careful review. (So the people who accuse me of being a robot are half-right, I guess.)

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mikepurvis 8y ago
Isn't giving detailed feedback a liability nightmare? Everything I've ever heard on this is to say as little as possible. It's certainly great as a candidate to get detailed feedback (would have really appreciated it back in the day as a co-op student), but I just wonder if the concerns over it have any merit or are overblown.
- frereubu 8y ago
  This is dealt with at length in the article.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  This is called out early in the post: > The number one reason companies cite for not sending feedback is legal risk. Interestingly, I don’t think this is true. Companies put themselves at legal risk if they are rejecting candidates for illegitimate reasons, like race, gender, or a disability. If they send feedback which tells candidates, truthfully, that they were rejected because they didn’t get very far on the coding project, then if anything a company reduces their legal risk: they have a transparent track record of evaluating candidates based only on their skills. I recently talked with an employment lawyer about this, and he didn’t think that specific feedback on technical performance put companies at risk. So legal risk, despite being frequently cited, seems unlikely to be the real driver of policies here. Then, an explanation that legal risk isn't the same thing as lawsuit risk: > Even if your process isn’t biased, if you send feedback that creates the perception you’re biased, that’s enough for a costly lawsuit. So while legal risk isn’t a reason not to send detailed, honest technical feedback (as long as you’re not discriminating), it’s a very good reason not to send carelessly compiled feedback through a haphazard process (even if you’re not discriminating).
  - icelancer 8y ago
    Right, the liability is not "we are going to send a letter that says you're too old/you're a woman" or something blatant like that, the liability is that a very well-meaning person sends a thoughtful rejection letter and it can be inferred in the language - true or not, and this is the kicker - that there is discrimination going on. You are doing a nice thing by being detailed, but you are basically introducing nearly unbounded downside for the upside of being nice. Most companies don't find much value in this calculus. It doesn't make it the right thing to do, but it is understandable.
    - Apocryphon 8y ago
      I doubt that liability is much more of an excuse- how often do disgruntled candidates actually sue corporations, in any context? If a company doesn't want a candidate, there's not much value lost by them burning bridges with them, by refusing to send them feedback, or even a rejection notice. This is especially true for big companies who receive a lot of candidates. And for smaller startups, they simply lack the time and energy to give detailed responses to people they pass on. A failed candidate is of marginal use to a company.
- dewski 8y ago
  The article addresses the "liability nightmare" and they mentioned they reached out to an employment lawyer.
- nosseo 8y ago
  My understanding is that as long as you're not discriminating against candidates on the basis of race, gender or some other protected category membership, and as long as your feedback reflects that by being focused on the technical abilities the candidate demonstrated during the interview, you're not actually at all that much risk. Of course, if you are illegally discriminating, or if your feedback suggests that you are by giving feedback on candidate appearance or something (never do that), then you're absolutely better off not sending it.
  - mehrdadn 8y ago
    How do you imagine they would give feedback on something that's neither technical nor illegal? I'm imagining everything from "we found you too arrogant" to "you smelled awful when you came in"...
    - nosseo 8y ago
      For arrogant, I'd try to make the feedback as concrete and specific as possible - "sometimes you gave confidently wrong answers. If you're guessing, it's better to tell your interviewer that. Interviewers typically won't hold it against you if you guess and guess rightly, but if you don't acknowledge you're guessing and get things wrong, it raises questions about whether you know what you don't know." or "sometimes it's great to ignore the spec because you have something better in mind, but on an interview it's typically better to demonstrate your creativity and knowledge while still building to the spec - it makes it easier for us to evaluate you" or "when talking about your last company, you said some things that came across as disdainful about your coworkers. It'd be better to highlight your achievements." All of those are ways being arrogant can manifest, but they're much more actionable than 'you were arrogant' and unsurprisingly get received a lot better. I wouldn't comment on smell - yes, that's valuable feedback a candidate really ought to hear from someone, but the risk of really angering them is too high for me to feel comfortable with it.
      - mehrdadn 8y ago
        The thing is you still reduced arrogance to technical correctness. However, what I was trying to get at was, what about cases where the technical correctness is just fine? If it's their attitude or hygiene or something else that you don't like, how do you tell them that? I was trying to get at the same thing you just said, which is that, like you, most people would become uncomfortable providing feedback on at least some of these. Meaning that you would have to turn away these candidates without any concrete feedback. Now how do you imagine they'll react when they realize most people do get feedback but they didn't? Is their reaction (which might result in bad publicity) a risk you and your company really want to take? For what gain?
account2 8y ago
>Every few months, I check that all our recommended resources are still up-to-date, available, and free. What are your recommended resources for technical improvements in coding interviews?
- deleted 8y ago
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- nosseo 8y ago
  We have a blog post with some recommendations based on what we've seen at Triplebyte: https://triplebyte.com/blog/how-to-pass-a-programming-interview https://triplebyte.com/blog/how-to-pass-a-programming-interv... I think it's a pretty good starting point. I also like Cracking the Coding Interview and I think there's definitely a place for timed coding challenge sites like leetcode - especially if you've been in a role where you're mostly working on larger-scale problems rather than on producing smart, working code quickly on the fly.
  - nybblesio 8y ago
    Can you tell me what companies find attractive about: "...producing smart, working code quickly[;] on the fly," (emphasis mine)? I understand there are a lot of substandard programmers in the marketplace. However, why is it that this specific criteria is the one the industry is so attracted to? Could it be that kids are proficient at these kind of games? Because I can tell you that in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, I wasn't being asked to write a regular expression parser under time pressure. Others in this thread say they've done Triplebyte take-home tests, only to end up in a "go fast-fast-fast!" interview in the end. Why is speed so important? Every popular [aA]gile methodology today is implicitly -- if not explicitly -- against such "machismo" programming. If you're pair programming, how is this ever relevant? Whenever I see someone say leetcode, hackerrank, and Cracking the Coding Interview is the "answer" it translates to "only the young need apply" in my head.
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mpeg 8y ago
It's interesting that you pat yourself on the back about it, I think the whole Triplebyte interview process is poorly thought out, including your email comms. I did your online code quiz and got sent an email about doing a 2-hour technical interview, without really knowing much about what the job I was supposed to be applying for was. On the interview, since I didn't really want to waste 2-hours on something I didn't want to do, I asked the guy a few questions about the company only to learn he's actually a freelancer interviewer, has little direct relationship with triplebyte and doesn't really know anything about me. I carried on for a 2-hour quick-fire interview with a guy that was obviously trying to fill in a questionnaire rather than actually gauge my ability, questions designed by people who likely have no real-world experience in the scenarios they describe ("how would you architect the amazon.com frontpage?" is not a 2-minute answer) About 15 minutes in, I was sure that even if I had wanted the job in the first place I wouldn't have taken it; and I had forgotten about it when I got an incredibly patronising email explaining how, if I do some online code puzzles and study hard, I too can get a job. Gee, thanks. Granted: a bored, funemployed, grumpy dev is probably not your target audience, and I'm sure this interview style works to filter out people fresh off college, but the email was definitely the most ridiculous part.
- nosseo 8y ago
  Yeah, another disadvantage of feedback is that some people really resent suggestions on how to improve - they can come across as condescending. I definitely would rather get feedback to someone who wants it even if this annoys someone who didn't, but I think lots of companies are making the opposite tradeoff - and that's part of why feedback is so rare in the industry.
  - mpeg 8y ago
    I don't think the suggestions are bad per se. The reason they come across as condescending is because they're obviously very generic and they're sent to people who, in the current market, can be picky about who they want to work with. Ultimately your whole business model is competing with tech recruiters, and my recruiters will call me to give me feedback from a role application, you have reduced that human touch aspect to an email with a few links to hackerrank.
faitswulff 8y ago
As a writers for TripleByte, how much technical background do you and the rest of the writing team have?
- nosseo 8y ago
  I did a degree in symbolic systems (CS + philosophy + linguistics; I have some CS background but less than I'd have gotten from a CS degree), I did one software internship, and Triplebyte was my first job when I graduated. I'm sure every candidate I send feedback is a stronger engineer than I am, but I do have some technical background. Most engineers want to write code all day, not emails, but I think a technical background does help us do our jobs.
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Insanity 8y ago

At least you get a response even if it is a rejection letter. I have heard - not experienced - that sometimes you just don't hear back from the company at all, which seems worse to me.

nosseo 8y ago
I get why companies don't do honest rejection letters, but this there's no excuse for whatsoever.
- PascLeRasc 8y ago
  It'd be nice to have some kind of public list where we could report companies that ghost, to warn other engineers to stay away.
  - sigstoat 8y ago
    seems like the interviews portion of glassdoor would support that? (caveats re trusting glassdoor, blah blah)
  - paulie_a 8y ago
    Just write up a review on glassdoor. Specifically calling them out for a crappy interview process. Or if you are really bold and bother with linkedin, make a post.
  - FLUX-YOU 8y ago
    You can't trust this because candidates do get petty when they get rejected and invent or omit details. That happens often on glassdoor.
    - mmt 8y ago
      Just like with any "crowdsourced" review site, I find value in the reviews, even if I don't, strictly, trust them. Of particular value are multiple reviews that corroborate certain details, especially in the absence of reviews providing contradictory details. At the very least, with something like "ghosting" during the interview process, it can help set expectations and inform behavior such as follow-up. For example, if interview reports complain of ghosting, I might still apply, but I wouldn't exert as much (if any) effort in soliciting a post-interview reply.

Harj 8y ago

I used to write rejection emails for companies at the end of YC interview days. It always sucked, especially when it was borderline decision (which it often was) but PG made doing these well an important part of internal YC culture. We couldn't leave until they were finished and each one was reviewed by another partner before sending. In hindsight I'm glad we did this. In the years since I've had multiple people tell me the rejection was a positive turning point and the only honest feedback they'd received.

dep_b 8y ago

Getting rejected at Triplebyte was actually a pretty good investment time wise. Guess the whole thing costed me three hours in total and I got quite a list of things to improve and how. It was clear it was tailored towards the interview not just a larger generic mail. There are tons of companies that give you a generic email after you completed an IQ test, a questionary, open questions and of course the 8hours+ homework. That's just perverse. "Try again in three months" Why? I wouldn't do anything different.

thaumasiotes 8y ago
> "Try again in three months" > Why? I wouldn't do anything different. But they will. The interview process is stochastic; exactly the same performance from you will lead to different results on different attempts. > Getting rejected at Triplebyte was actually a pretty good investment time wise. Guess the whole thing costed me three hours in total and I got quite a list of things to improve and how. It was clear it was tailored towards the interview not just a larger generic mail. For another perspective, here's the entire feedback I got when they rejected my application: > This was a tough decision and one that we were on the fence about. We really appreciate you taking the time to work on the take home project. We're aware this requires a substantial time commitment and we are really grateful that you invested the time in completing it. We thought you wrote a great, very full featured regular expression matcher. It was especially impressive how much you dug into the academics behind regular languages. > However we made the decision because we felt that while going through the project together during the interview, we didn't see the fluency of programming when adding to it that we had hoped for. While we specifically designed the take home project track to help overcome the difficulties of coding under time pressure with someone watching, we do still need to see a certain level of programming during the interview. This didn't seem to be the case here, where making changes to the project seemed to be slower and more difficult than we'd have liked.
- dep_b 8y ago
  That's quite a bit less than I got. Perhaps you're just better than me? ;) But I didn't know there might be another take home assignment. > But they will. The interview process is stochastic; exactly the same performance from you will lead to different results on different attempts. Yeah I thought about that. But "try x months later" really means that you didn't pass some kind of bar. If I would be one of the five people that passed there would be no problem if I applied next week again, right?

paulie_a 8y ago

Id rather get a rejection email than just not hear back. If you dont bother responding with a rejection after an interview you are a coward. And shouldnt be interviewing people.

eat_veggies 8y ago

my triplebyte rejection was surprisingly insightful. I don't know whether it's cookie-cutter, entirely handwritten, or a combination of a few macros, but it makes sense to me. https://pastebin.com/AGPyzmgU https://pastebin.com/AGPyzmgU

gwbas1c 8y ago

> When someone can’t answer an interview question about relational databases, it might be that ... they know them inside-and-out but aren’t used to answering questions on the fly, or that our question didn’t use the vocabulary they’re familiar with, or that they misheard the question and answered a different one. Ultimately, that means your interviews have bias. (Even though it appears you try very, very, very hard to avoid bias.) Honestly, I don't think interview feedback is a good idea. It just encourages gaming the system. I'd rather that feedback come through a neutral 3rd party. We just haven't set our field up to do that. Why neutral 3rd party? Because of the above situation! The 3rd party could just say things like, "looks like this was just a bad interview. Don't read too deep into it, and keep trying." The 3rd party could also push back on the employer if the interview ran poorly. And no, recruiters are not neutral 3rd parties.

segmondy 8y ago

Seriously, we need something written on why rejection sucks? Rejection sucks because we all like to imagine that we are good enough and the only reason we applied is because we believed we are good enough so it stinks to be told that we are not good enough. Doesn't matter how you phrase the email, might be nice to give a feedback, but for anyone who receives it, it stings. The only difference is that some folks have a positive mindset, they get over the sting and work towards getting better. Feedback or not.

desireco42 8y ago

I was lead dev in a company, I felt strongly that I don't want to reject people without providing them with clear feedback what they did well and didn't do well. VP hated the idea and very quickly was abandoned. We got a lot of bad candidates tbh, so it was hard to tell them what they did wrong (they bombed pretty much). I still think, done well, it provides great benefit to candidates being considered. Thing that worked well for me, I had elaborate set of topics/knowledge I want my developers to know and be rated on, it wasn't arbitrary selection. Still, when someone bombs, it is hard to relay they did bad.

apetresc 8y ago

> I work at Triplebyte, and over the last year I’ve written over 3,000 detailed, individual rejection emails. Wait, what? That means you're interviewing on average 12 people every single working day of the year. Even for someone who's job title was "Technical Recruiter" that would be a TON, let alone for someone who is a Team Lead and presumably has other duties. How is that possible?

kulahan 8y ago
It's possible his job is JUST to write these rejection letters. He gets feedback forms from all the interviewers, compiles them, reviews them, condenses them, touches them up, then sends them out. That could easily be a full-time job for a large company.
nosseo 8y ago
I don't conduct the interviews, you're right that that'd be impossible. I take the notes from our interviewers and turn them into feedback emails.

tptacek 8y ago

When someone can’t answer an interview question about relational databases, it might be that they don’t know anything about relational databases. I thought you all were better than this. Why are you asking questions about relational databases? Why not just have candidates accomplish the thing you're assessing with an actual relational database? I know you're work-sample-literate! But if your feedback emphasizes communication, doesn't that imply a lot about your process is subjective? After all, and to extend an analysis used in this blog post: it could be that the candidates couldn't effectively communicate knowledge about RDMBS's. Or, it could be that the interviewer wasn't effectively listening to what the candidate was saying.

dmitrygr 8y ago
Because sometimes understanding the base concept is important. I cannot possibly ask you to solve 1,000 scenarios in 45 minutes. But if you get the basic idea of how the concept works, I can be sure that when you encounter scenario #945, you'll have the basic grasp on the concept to at least know where to look, and when scenario #487 comes up, you'll know the basic idea of how to handle it. Asking you just to do one thing in an interview risks accidentally hitting one of the ten-twenty things you do know how to do, leaving me with no proof that you can solve the other 980-ish possible problems.
wdewind 8y ago
Isn't a lot of the job of software engineering to quickly and concisely communicate complicated concepts? Might this actually be an accurate work sample? How else might you measure something like this? Also the next few lines kinda address what you are saying: > It also might be that they know them inside-and-out but aren’t used to answering questions on the fly, or that our question didn’t use the vocabulary they’re familiar with, or that they misheard the question and answered a different one. It made quite a difference just to phrase the feedback in a way which acknowledged all those possibilities.
- FLUX-YOU 8y ago
  >Isn't a lot of the job of software engineering to quickly and concisely communicate complicated concepts? No, I write code daily but I might have to distill down technical concepts once a week or so (usually not even that much) and even then if I happen to be the only one who can distill it down. If your devs are often explaining basic stuff like 'what is a relational database?', you need to hire someone specifically to do that. It's not a good use of time especially when they can go google/wikipedia those concepts and figure it out themselves.

draw_down 8y ago

I don't think legal risk is the main reason companies refrain from elaborating on why they chose not to hire. That's just a convenient thing to point to (in other words, lazy). It's more like, there's all downside and no upside. I can't think of one benefit that would accrue to an employer for doing that, but I can think of a lot of bad (or just undesirable) things that could potentially come from it.

paulsutter 8y ago

Companies hire the candidate they like best, they don't even spend mental energy 'rejecting' the other candidates. If you don't get hired, it says more about the candidate they chose and little about you.

rdl 8y ago

I'd settle for "do you at least send a rejection email of any kind to the candidate?" vs. the "dropping someone on the floor and not responding for weeks/months/ever". Even without detailed or personalized feedback, it's a huge improvement. Also if an internal person refers someone, you should let the internal person know if you're passing, I think (depends on other factors, though.)

Liron 8y ago
"Ghosting" seems like a common phenomenon across different types of human interaction. There's dating, interviewing, and even pitching investors. This was a common experience for me pitching my company last year: 1. Investor likes my co enough to schedule an in-person meeting 2. I meet investor in person to pitch 3. I send them a followup email 4. Radio silence I'd read that investors like to keep you in limbo instead of passing, I just didn't realize these well-respected professionals would value someone highly enough to give them an hour of their day, but low enough to neglect all followup communication. In retrospect I don't think it's a big deal, but I felt bad about it at the time.
_delirium 8y ago
This is the biggest US/Europe cultural difference I've noticed. I can't speak for every country in Europe or every industry, but for every job in Europe I've personally applied for, I got a rejection letter if I wasn't offered the job. Sometimes just a minimal notification, but always something. Not in America though... The best is for European academic jobs. Often there's a schedule up front for when they'll make a decision, usually a 2-stage thing like: we will shortlist candidates by Sept 15, interview in the following 3-4 weeks, and make a hiring decision by Oct 15. So if you didn't get shortlisted, you get informed early and don't have to wonder whether your resume is still under consideration or what. American universities, though, leave you guessing what their schedule is, may take months to get back to you even if they're interested, and usually don't send a rejection letter if they aren't.

rossdavidh 8y ago

So, good article, but another point occurred to me while reading it that wasn't covered. I think that writing a good email explaining the rejection, might be a good exercise for the company doing the rejecting. "Well, why are we rejecting this person, exactly?" Of course, this will only be true if the email is honest (if diplomatic). It could serve as an institutionalized review of whether candidates are getting rejected for the right reason. Building feedback loops into a company's internal process can be a very powerful thing, even when there's no bonus or penalty involved for the person doing the writing. I wonder, does Triplebyte have any kind of annual summary of why candidates are getting rejected?

stone-monkey 8y ago

Solid content marketing - I just spent the last 30 minutes taking the coding test because of this post.

kenjackson 8y ago

The other reason specificity is a legal issue is that it provides data that can be disputed. For example, if you reject someone black and say the reason they were rejected because hey didn’t get far enough in the coding test — you’d better not hire the white guy who only got just as far (which might happen for a variety of reasons). It’s almost the same reason you stay quiet when held by police. Even something seemingly innocuous may end being used against you in the future.

werbel 8y ago

If you/your company doesn't have a policy of sending personal feedback please consider doing this at least for junior people. Volunteer your after work time if needed. Trying to find the first job is extremely stressful process. A junior person has no notion of his worth on the market. Each rejection even if only by a lack of any response ("I'm sorry, I'm afraid we are looking for a bit more experienced person" would suffice) can be like a kick on the face when you're just barely learning to walk and most likely is a burned bridge. I've mentored my girlfriend for 3 years from almost 0 to getting her first job in a company run by a React Native core developer. She had the skill, great attitude, really solid work ethic and very analytical thinking. It'd trust her more with any task than significant number of my past and current senior coworkers. It's hard to prove and no one expects that so naturally her applications had been ignored or rejected. With each one I saw her confidence, self-esteem and enthusiasm crumb. With each positive reply/invitation she was invigorated until the next step came. I'm pretty sure for some the roller-coaster or even worse, being rejected over and over again can be a life defining experience. Any reply is great, personal is even better. If you spend time describing what was missing from the expectations of your company (don't say "You don't know enough", say "We need someone with more knowledge") and sincerely wish the person well you can be sure they'll be grateful, remember you, work on the gaps and who knows... maybe some day become part of your team. Please feel free to reach out if you want some example for inspiration. Edit: Please don't do that against the policy of your company. But if there are no reasons against just ask if you could provide some feedback and resources for the rejection letter.

lixtra 8y ago
Our HR asked me to personally call people and thank them for their declined application. But at the same time requested to not give any feedback because of fear from litigation. Sad world.
- werbel 8y ago
  If someone told me that in my country (or maybe just outside US) I would simply not believe them at first. It might just be the choice of companies I've worked with though. It is sad indeed.

Johnny555 8y ago

If they send feedback which tells candidates, truthfully, that they were rejected because they didn’t get very far on the coding project, then if anything a company reduces their legal risk: they have a transparent track record of evaluating candidates based only on their skills I think the problem comes when he talks to his friend of another race/gender and that friend said "Yeah, I couldn't finish that either, but they still hired me". The company may have had a legit reason to overlook the coding project (like the second candidate had experience in some other technology), but when you tell candidate X that they didn't get the job because they didn't complete the coding exercise, but then you hire candidate Y despite him not completing it, it provides candidate X with some concrete evidence of discrimination.

Dwolb 8y ago

>I heard back from many of the engineers I write to, and often, they were furious Bingo. I've opted to share specific team feedback via phone and although candidate feedback was generally positive and thankful, once in awhile the reaction would be extremely negative. I now opt for the much more (emotionally) safe route. Triplebyte is more incented to provide candidate feedback because if the candidate improves, Triplebye may be more likely to place them in the future. With companies, this incentive is less apparent.

smelendez 8y ago
Yeah, this sounds like as much of an issue as the legal risk to me. Imagine if you reject someone and they blog about the letter you sent them and the interview process, and the post makes Hacker News or Reddit. Now you have to decide whether to fight in public with someone you didn't hire, normally bad form, or say nothing.

joeax 8y ago

I'm going to go against the grain and say that interview feedback is overrated (at least for senior people). If you got offered the job, then there's your feedback. If not, the interviewing company isn't going to tell you any more than you could already discern yourself by playing back your answers and conversations with the interviewers. If you honestly feel you aced the interview, then other factors are in play - perhaps they realized they are overstaffed, layoffs are imminent/hiring freezes, or just a slightly better and more personable candidate came along. One time I interviewed for a position that I wanted badly. I studied and prepped for the interview, then during the interview I nailed every question. I waited a week but never heard back. After a few weeks of silence and giving up hope, I searched the company on LinkedIn, and found the person they hired for the position. It turns out he had more backend experience, which is what they were looking for. It was a painful truth, but them sending me a rejection email telling me this wouldn't have helped me at all.

namanyayg 8y ago
An email would've at least saved your time spent in LinkedIn search. And what if the new employee wasn't on LinkedIn?
m104 8y ago
Precisely. Often times a rejection isn't saying that the candidate didn't meet the job requirements or wouldn't do well in the position, it says that the employer found someone who fit the role even better or knew that they could given past hiring experience.
herodotus 8y ago
I agree with you, except that the company should send out a rejection letter as soon as they can. If I were hiring, I would only send a non-generic response if the rejected candidate specifically asked me if I would be willing to give her or him constructive feedback, or otherwise indicate why they did not get the position.
- joeax 8y ago
  What if they are not rejecting you? What if they like you as a candidate but decided to move forward with someone else (and it was a tough decision), and want to wait to see if that person will work out. It sucks, but it happens.

save_ferris 8y ago

I once got a detailed, feedback-driven rejection email, stating very clearly and professionally where I shined in my interview, and where I didn't. I was so appreciative of the message that I made sure to follow up with the manager working on my application and thanked them. 9 months later, I found myself in a bad management situation at another company, thinking about looking for another gig when the company that rejected me reached out asking if I'd be willing to come back and interview again. I did and accepted the offer. By giving good and candid feedback, they wound up saving months of searching for a new dev when they reached back out knowing I was a good fit for what they needed at that time. I was essentially a lead they'd already warmed months prior. It made me wonder why more companies don't think of this.

mikeleeorg 8y ago

When I was a hiring manager, I used to always include a personal note that included suggestions and constructive criticism for the candidate. In a couple of cases, those people replied to me, demonstrated some actions towards those goals, and I hired them later, when I had more available positions. And those that I didn't hire, I encountered them at other companies. It was flattering to hear them say they remembered me and had a positive impression of our recruiting process, even though they were rejected. I've always believed that the recruiting process is a great way to sell one's company. Even if the candidate isn't a good match, that candidate may recommend peers to the role if they have a positive experience with you.

fermienrico 8y ago
I appreciate people like you but unfortunately most companies' policy mandates not talking about the reasons due to some sort of legal risk of law suit.
Mister_Snuggles 8y ago
I interviewed for an internal position once and got similar feedback, by phone, from the HR person. She was on the phone with me for about an hour and, in all honesty, that rejection phone call made that one of the best interviews I've ever had. I didn't get that job, but it gave me a lot of constructive advice and I ended up getting the next one I interviewed for.
- camelCaseOfBeer 8y ago
  That's nice and helpful, especially since tech interviews can be taxing. Sounds like they actually liked you and probably would've hired you under different circumstances. I had terribly frustrating experiences interviewing. Mostly just taking a bunch of tests and interviewing two, three times, and not hearing back for months. What sticks out was a post-interview for a large company that aggressively recruited from my uni. When I asked how I could have improved the answer was, "You ask too many specific questions about the company and software platform. Be more focused on the interviews." "For example?" "It isn't appropriate to discuss how wages are adjusted according to location or salaried overtime policies or the tech stack... in an interview..." I took that one as the, "not gonna drink the Kool Aid." box being checked. Dodged a bullet there, though, seeing as her answers did not exactly inspire faith.

sixdimensional 8y ago

Perhaps I'm being too broad but I think that rejection emails suck because generally, as a society, we aren't valuing communication or we don't think we can afford the time for actual feedback. It triggers one of those "how much better would the world be" feelings, if more people took more time to give each other genuine feedback. I mean, maybe giving good feedback (for candidates that took time to apply and clearly made effort) could help people learn, it might even ultimately address unemployment, homelessness, or other root cause problems. I understand the legal concerns - and there would be candidates who would exploit the process of genuine feedback as well - but I think it would serve to help people more than it would hurt. It does require time and resources, so organizations / institutions would have to look at it as a sort of a social benefit cost or something. But I do wonder how much good it might really do.

cm2187 8y ago

Actually this is in my opinion the main advantage of headhunters. They will typically call the recruiter after the interview and seek feedback. And it is easier to provide feedback to the headhunter than to the interviewee directly.

pmiller2 8y ago

Here's one thing that stuck out to me: > Even Triplebyte only sends individualized feedback to candidates who've done a two-hour interview with us - we simply don't have the resources to do it for everyone who takes our online quiz. Unless there's something interesting going on, it seems like it would be easy to give some kind of feedback based on the online quiz, even if it's only "You answered X out of Y questions correct on $TOPIC", repeated for however many topics were covered.

microcolonel 8y ago

> The number one reason companies cite for not sending feedback is legal risk. Interestingly, I don’t think this is true. Companies put themselves at legal risk if they are rejecting candidates for illegitimate reasons, like race, gender, or a disability. If they send feedback which tells candidates, truthfully, that they were rejected because they didn’t get very far on the coding project, then if anything a company reduces their legal risk: they have a transparent track record of evaluating candidates based only on their skills. I recently talked with an employment lawyer about this, and he didn’t think that specific feedback on technical performance put companies at risk. So legal risk, despite being frequently cited, seems unlikely to be the real driver of policies here. I think the problem here is that it exposes you legally even if you're not discriminating. If your explanation can in any way be argued as euphemism, or analogous to discrimination against a protected class, then you could face trouble. Maybe the risk is overblown, but the form of exposure you're talking about may not be the main one, far as I reckon.

btilly 8y ago

I believe that the article is fundamentally wrong. The bulk of the article is true. But companies are not lying when they say that legal risk is a reason not to send feedback. Triplebyte is in the unusual position of being able to say, "Everyone who has enough technical skill gets through the interview." And that fact is sufficient to defuse their risk. But real companies don't have the luxury of ignoring non-technical aspects of the job. Here are real reasons why I've seen people denied a job. "Nobody could understand his accent." "Accidental personal referenced summed him up as, 'Loves to make things crash and burn in production to see the pretty fireworks.'" "Nobody could believe the argument he got into at lunch." In my books those are all valid reasons to not want to work with someone. However the first opens you up for an accusation of racism, the second would break a personal confidence, and the third had demonstrated sufficient irrationality that tiptoeing away was a great idea. And you can't give feedback on technical issues, and not on the rest, because that amounts to a tacit acknowledgement that there was something non-technical. Leave the non-technical to your imagination and guess what happens?

marcoperaza 8y ago
On the point of legal risk, I’m concerned by the authors naïveté in believing that as long as you’re not actually discriminating based on race/sex/religion, you won’t be accused of it. The more data you put out there, the more likely that someone will crunch it and find some statistical patterns that they will label “racism” or "sexism". Even if you’re innocent, you will get dragged through the mud in the press and maybe even in court. Not worth it. No matter what, you lose. And what’s the upside? You gave some random guy some feedback. This is the world we live in, unfortunately.
- mrkurt 8y ago
  The upside is that you've treated a human being with decency. People you treat decently in rejection help you with later hires. If you're going to argue the fantastical downside, you should at least acknowledge the possible upside (which my company, and apparently TripleByt, have both experienced).

kevindong 8y ago

I've applied to hundreds of internship positions by this point (I'm a senior looking for a full-time job starting this upcoming summer). During those hundreds of applications, I've only received explicit feedback (aside from getting offers, since getting an offer means I did good enough; I never got explicit feedback from any of those offers) a total of twice. One was for a marketing company that's already gone public because I made it to the final round and really fell apart during the coding portion. I knew I screwed up and the recruiter confirmed that (without me asking) during the "thanks for applying, but no thanks" phone call. The other time was for a medium-size startup. I had to ask the recruiter via email after I got the "no thanks" email, but she provided the info within minutes.

lizhang 8y ago

I went through the Triplebyte process 1.5 years ago and their feedback was so influential in where I spent the next few weeks studying. I think their process and feedback played a huge role in getting my first (and probably current, too) developer gig.

mbesto 8y ago

> I recently talked with an employment lawyer about this, and he didn’t think that specific feedback on technical performance put companies at risk. So legal risk, despite being frequently cited, seems unlikely to be the real driver of policies here. This was either written very poorly or lacks serious basis to conclude thoughts about employee feedback (of which drives the thesis of the whole article). First - "I talked to a lawyer and he didn't think it was a risk", does not sound very much like legal advice. Is there precedence for civil cases that were thrown out due to the basis of "just giving technical feedback"? How often do firms that provide "just technical feedback" get sued and how often do they settle those suits? Second - I think most people want feedback on "how they interviewed" and not "were they the right fit for the job". This is where you get into a gray area of legality, because anything you might say may get misconstrued as discrimination. "Oh you think I was too nervous during my interview...well I have X condition that makes me like that and you can't reject me for that" Third - feedback on technical skills? To what avail does this hold for the candidate? Example: Potential Employer: "You couldn't reverse a string, so work on string reversals." Potential Candidate: "Ok, I'll go learn a string reversal so I can ace my next interview" Feedback on interviews is imperfect because the hiring process is imperfect.

dunpeal 8y ago

> The number one reason companies cite for not sending feedback is legal risk. Interestingly, I don’t think this is true. Companies put themselves at legal risk if they are rejecting candidates for illegitimate reasons, like race, gender, or a disability. If they send feedback which tells candidates, truthfully, that they were rejected because they didn’t get very far on the coding project, then if anything a company reduces their legal risk: they have a transparent track record of evaluating candidates based only on their skills. Ah, but have you considered what would happen when you give this "transparent skills-based feedback" to 90% of your rejected candidates, but then a couple of them get rejected for reasons you don't want to specify, or could potentially be interpreted (by an aggressive litigation attorney) as illegal discrimination? Some candidates get rejected because "nobody enjoyed talking to him", "he seemed weird", "alienated the interviewers", etc. Are you going to write any of that in your transparent rejection letter?

starpilot 8y ago

Hard to care about the specific content of rejection emails when the average applicant will get hundreds of them before landing a position. It's like getting mad at the rain in Seattle winter. Though I do admit, the more effusive they seem to be about turning me down, the more offended I am as a professional. Then I forget about it 5 seconds later and move on to my next applications.

duxup 8y ago

I WISH I could get rejection emails. I'll talk to a recruiter at a company, exchange emails, even meet them .... 99.9% of the time if they're not offering I get NOTHING. They just don't respond. I don't care that they're not hiring me, I'd just like some feedback. FEEDBACK PLEASE, anything that really matters that I can improve on or such. It is to the point that even automated rejection letters seem nicer than the usual "ghosting".

HillaryBriss 8y ago
I was once told by a recruiter that she absolutely guaran-damn-teed that she would call me after the interview process and let me know the employer's decision. Guaran-damn-teed. After my in-person interview, about a month passed with no contact from her. I figured I didn't get the job. But I wanted to call her anyway, just because. She said, "Oh, I thought I sent you an email about it. Yeah, they don't want you."
- duxup 8y ago
  Same, it's a pretty terrible system.

thidr0 8y ago

I will often tell candidates on the phone screen that I don't want to go forward for XYZ reasons (always technical). At one point one of the guys I gave feedback to like this turned the call into an occupational therapy session whining about the chicken/egg experience problem, how all these companies want him to know the "trivia" of CS fundamentals, etc. Believe me, it's a lot easier to just send a form rejection.

RoryRecruiter 8y ago

Interesting read/points about risk and candidates not being receptive to feedback. I've worked for companies that reason like this but personally, I believe the biggest challenge to overcome is for the person declining the candidate to articulate clear/concise constructive feedback over the PHONE vs sending an EMAIL. My current firm (McKinsey & Company) expects every candidate in round 1 or final round interviews (either from the recruiter or hiring manager) to receive a call same day or within a day of interviewing with their interview results. If the results are a decline, feedback as to how and why we came to that decision is provided. It's painful for sure and no one likes to give bad news but the firm has been operating this way for years and I’ve found candidates appreciate knowing sooner rather then later. Let's face it, there are a lot of bad hiring processes out there and not hearing back is the WORST when on the job hunt. At my firm, we rigorously evaluate candidates based on performance and will always do our best to ensure they are provided with feedback in a timely manner (note: I'm sure there have been slip ups in the past RE: same day/1 day after interviewing feedback but the firm expects every recruiters/interviewer to follow this process).

bitwize 8y ago

I've occasionally had a moment of schadenfreude where, after interviewing at a place I hated, I could write something like this: Dear <So-and-so>, Thank you for considering me for <position>. I certainly enjoyed talking to you in person. Unfortunately, I feel that <company> is not a fit for my needs at this time. I wish you the very best of luck in your candidate search. Sincerely, etc.

AngeloAnolin 8y ago

I would really rate a company that provides honest and truthful feedback a notch on top of the others as this shows some form of the culture that they have in their organization. You can do an automated response to 95% of the rejected ones, and for the rest which made the cut past the initial stage of applying, having a more human-centric approach on providing response is the way to go. The good words that would come out vouching for the company I think is enough reason that hiring organizations should take the effort to provide a meaningful response to some applicants.

andrewprock 8y ago

In my experience, most of the feedback I've gotten has been trite and superficial. It's not surprising, since most interview processes are not designed to measure quality but rather to measure interest. I once got feedback that I wasn't technically qualified, and when I asked how they knew that, they said that I hadn't spent enough time on leetcode studying the answers.

s0uthPaw88 8y ago

I found the feedback from my Triplebyte rejection to be very helpful in directing my preparation for other interviews. It helped me get a job offer 3 days later from just the type of company and role that they screen for.

brendonjohn 8y ago

I don't think a company should offer an interview if they're not willing to give proper feedback at the end of it. When interviewing candidates, I have been more than happy to give detailed feedback if they've asked me to give it. I realise it's unconventional, so I get the feedback peer reviewed before sending it away. I'm pleased to see that there are other companies learning how to give better feedback. Giving feedback is a small token of respect that a company can give in return for a candidates time. In my experience, interviewees have been thankful and shared how hard it is to get feedback from their interviewers.

HillaryBriss 8y ago

> Even Triplebyte only sends individualized feedback to candidates who've done a two-hour interview with us - we simply don't have the resources to do it for everyone who takes our online quiz. I'm surprised by this. I would think that Triplebyte could automate the feedback for applicants who took the online quiz but didn't make the cut.

kaizendad 8y ago

When I was getting my MBA, about <many> years ago, I suggested to our career placement folks that they work up a legal agreement with the companies who recruited with us, indemnifying them against any EEOC suits if they shared detailed feedback with us (most large companies go directly to business schools to hire on a yearly basis). They asked a half-dozen companies, and no company's legal team thought they could be confident such a document would stick. Pity, as, at that stage, we all had a lot of interviews to take, and a lot of support in getting new interviews.

insiderinsider 8y ago

Triple byte interviewers don’t know what they were interviewing all they have is bunch of questions they keep on asking without any opportunity to answer

burntrelish1273 8y ago

It's less effort and seems kinder to give a soft "no" by more-or-less ghosting the candidate. It's better to focus on "yes," actionable interest than get hung-up on where there's no business to be had.

industriousthou 8y ago

I recently bombed a Triplebyte interview. I didn't realize how badly until I got the feedback email. It honestly hurt, but it was really useful. I definitely respect their approach.

sixstringtheory 8y ago

> giving feedback effectively is an enormous amount of work I take a lot of issue with this. Interviewing and doing code projects is also an enormous amount of work. If a company sends an 8 hour exercise to each candidate, then in aggregate the candidates are probably expending way more person hours than the total expended by the hiring company to settle on a new hire. I no longer do unpaid work. Of course I’ll interview, but to show them how I code on their product and work in their processes, I will only accept a contract-to-hire offer. If more people did this I believe it would exert pressure on companies to not be so wanton with what they ask of candidates, and how expendably they treat them.

whydoineedthis 8y ago

you could also just give feedback in the cases where it is requested. As a fresh-faced out of college coder I was rejected from ThoughtWorks after spending 3 days on a coding question. Yes, I sucked - all I wanted to hear though was "we really wanted to see TDD, even though it was optional" or whatever. I asked for feedback, they didn't give it, I now and forever will have a negative impression of their company and will avoid them - and often people whom have worked for them - technicality be damned. You don't always need to give feedback, but a little compassion for those that are new would be nice.

sunstone 8y ago

Hmmm, so on standardised tests I typically score in the top two percentile. (yes I'm fabulous). But the best developer I ever worked with was a Russian guy who interviewed terribly. He was great at code, he was even great as a team lead. But he sucked at interviews. I never interviewed him so I can't say why that is but...if there's more than a few of these guys out there, there's room for (major) improvement in the interview business.

arunmp 8y ago

On a side note, this also reads as an interesting insight into human behavior and how to communicate in general. A wonderful article.

Markoff 8y ago

again decent article (though stating obvious) until last bracket which was whole point of posting it

bbq42 8y ago

Often time, it's just that after interviewing 20 candidates, we realize that this candidate is amongst the worst and telling him/her that isn't helpful.

jiveturkey 8y ago

I read the title as, you suck at your job therefore the emails suck. :) Reminds of a recent prudential billboard. "We spend more time reading billboards than planning for retirement." Great, if you aren't doing your job of planning then I'll use someone else!

rezashirazian 8y ago

TripleBye articles are generally bad. They're a mishmash of random ideas that feel A/B tested for the highest possible SEO return. I still remember reading through this: https://triplebyte.com/blog/a-taxonomy-of-programmers https://triplebyte.com/blog/a-taxonomy-of-programmers when it was first published trying to make sense of it.