Why do companies not list your weaknesses in rejection emails?

- it's more work - there's a nonzero chance nobody even saw your application, let alone carefully review it and think about whether you would be a good/bad candidate and why

- there's no incentive for them to do it - it's a rejection, they don't have a reason to please you

- the less information they give, the less exposed they are to liabilities like being accused of hiring discrimination

Apart of the already named reasons (mainly legal): I once actually did it, because I LIKED the applicant. The result was simply lots of follow up mails on how and why I am mistaken. Wouldn't do this again.

As several others have pointed out, the primary reason is the concern/fear of legal liability. All the information is already put together for the Hire/NoHire decision, and the entire Interview Team is usually aware (though this may differ depending on the company).

If you are working with a recruiter, it may be useful for you to ask them - as a Hiring Manager, I shared candid feedback with the recruiter so that they could provide better candidates in the future. Alternately, if you connect with someone in the Interview Team, you may be able to get them to give you "off-the-record" feedback.

Please remember to accept all feedback without getting defensive or pushing back, even if you believe the Hiring Team didn't do the right thing. If you want to set the record straight, it is better to do so in a separate conversation.

As a candidate, I wondered why I didn't get detailed feedback on why I didn't get a role - now I'm on the other side, it often comes down to:

- Time and volume: think of how many applicants they've been through and the time it would take to write this feedback for each of them

- A good chance that people will dispute the reasons, leading to more time, more effort and more chance of a lawsuit

If it's at the final or penultimate stage, I've known this to happen. I also find it more common coming through a recruiter (as the company will be speaking to the recruiter anyway and knows that they will shut down any disputes you have).

As long as there's a concrete rejection email rather than never hearing back, that's all you should expect.

Many reasons have been stated but I would like to add one:

It does not matter and it would only hurt your feelings.

This is not solely about you or them its a match between the two.

Therefore its the same thing as asking a girl "why dont you like me? I am a such good guy". There simply are no answers for this.

When some recruiter from an underrepresented minority working at a FAANG company got fired, they wrote a tweet thread where there were glaring mistakes and wrong concepts about everything.

Like they said the company hired 0 grads from Historically Universities (HMUs) before they were hired, and they increased it to 300. And they said it was "a 300% increase". Their words, not mine.

When people from the co went to one HMU, and they hired a very low number of people, and the engineers wrote in their documents absolutely true things, like, "the grads have no idea about even the basic algorithms" (paraphrased). They cited that report and accused the engineers and the whole company of discriminatory practices.

Now, say, you start writing weaknesses, and write "lack of understanding basic arithmetic like GCD" for some of the candidates.

Now all it takes for your company and you to be accused of discriminatory practices is one zelous reporter from WaPo or NYT to get a sample of ~15 of these rejection mails and find your list of weaknesses. Then they just have to show that all of the ~15 people are from historically underrepresented communities.

This is the reason I am never going to do it.

From an interviewee perspective, it's even worse when you don't hear anything; they just ghost you. That's the norm in my experience, though it's been a long time since I've done the cold interview thing.

From an interviewer perspective, I suspect it's mostly a time/volume thing. Last time I did it, I put out a req for a position, I'll get 10-20 resumes trickle in over the next week or four. I pick the ones that are the best of the lot and schedule interviews until I find someone that I think has the best chance of being successful. Some of it is the way the resume reads, some of it is how well the skills match what we need, some of it is just gut. I certainly don't have the time to go through all the ones that I didn't pick and give a detailed (re: useful) explanation on why. Most of them I could't really offer much advice other than there were better matching resumes. It's usually someone has more years experience, or were better able to articulate their experience, or had more skills that matched what we need, or had more experience in my particular industry.

Also, for most smaller shops, it's the devs that are doing the interviewing and filtering. Typically, we should have hired someone months ago, but companies usually hire later than they should, so I'm buried in work and I have the additional task of filtering resumes and interviewing on top of my already overburdened workload.

Maybe they’re just not that into you. Don’t overthink it. There doesn’t always have to be a specific weakness they could list that you could then work on. It might not even be anything to do with you or anything in your control.

Maybe you just don’t fit with what their team needs. You could be excellent, but be a duplicate of skills they have enough of already when they need something different.

Maybe you’re good, but it just so happens that someone did a god-tier interview that day and they have to choose between you for a single post.

Maybe you’re god-tier but the reason they were hiring has changed (ie a person they thought was leaving got persuaded to stay, headcount allocations suddenly changed, the project got cut etc).

Maybe it’s just a timing thing. You applied and before your application got processed they saw someone great and that person had a competing offer so they had to close them quickly. You might be better than the person they ran after but that’s life.

Currently working on hiring for a frontend position (literally just produce well structured html and CSS that matches design, not even getting into frontend frameworks or JS) and in the first 3 days I received over 400 applicants - most of which clearly didn't read the JD. More than half of which couldn't manage to string together a sentence without major spelling / grammar / spacing / punctuation errors. All but 3 of which, on inspection of GitHub profile or frontend mentor profile (one of the places we put out the job) clearly could barely write CSS at a basic level and/or had basically zero attention to detail.

Why in the heck would I bother to write 400 customized rejection letters when most applicants can't even be bothered to spend 2 minutes reading the JD fully, and avoiding applying unless they: Are actually qualified, and are willing to put at least a modicum of effort into a good first impression?

I feel like people on the application side have no idea about the sheer volume of people who apply to each role. In "Smart and Gets Things Done" Joel might of hit the nail on the head with his speculation that we are all receiving the same mountain junk application from the same junk "developers" and it just drowns out everything else.

Have you tried contacting them to ask? Some companies are open to it. A couple of years ago I interviewed with a number of companies. Two companies I really liked rejected me after a full round of interviews.

It hurt, but I decided to try something. I sent an email with something along the lines of "I am disappointed that you decided to pass on me, but I respect your decision. I know this is a big ask, but I'd really like some feedback on how I can be better at what I do".

Surprisingly, both companies agreed to meet with me again (via Zoom), and the feedback sessions were about 1/2 hour each. I just sat back and listened (and at the end, thanked them again for their time). In one case, it was with the hiring manager, in the other it was with the recruiter. What I learned was very valuable, and these two companies are definitely on my list to work with again. With one company, what sank me was that they felt I did not have the technical depth for the role (and I was impressed with how detailed their feedback was). With the second company, they felt that I did not have leadership experience of the breadth that they needed.

Now, granted, it is pretty rare for companies to invest time in a candidate that they have already rejected (unless they figure this is someone they would love to recruit in the future when they had more experience or for a slightly different role), but it is possible if you send an email thanking them for the opportunity and phrase the request for feedback as a growth opportunity for you that they might be open to it.

Also, I know that some people state that companies do not do this for legal reasons but truth be told, unless the company is rejecting you for an illegal reason, this is a non-issue. It is more an issue of how much bandwidth the company is willing to spare.

I once got great feedback by asking verbally at the end of the interview.

I said "You've just interviewed me, what do you think I need to improve?" That way it's really easy for the interviewer to give the feedback and you get round any corporate policies about not giving feedback.

Hi, GitLab team member here. Due to a number of factors, which includes high applicant volumes, the talent acquisition team may not be able to provide detailed decline feedback. You can get more details on our handbook page: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/hiring/interviewing/#rejec...

When you are applying for a job you are trying to sell something (your time). When someone is trying to sell me something and I don’t want it, I’ve learned the best approach is to say, “no, thanks” and not to give reasons, especially if they ask for reasons. Every reason is an opening for a conversation that I’m not interested in having.

Lots of legal liability and often more applicants than needed. Similar to the reason to not say anything in an exit interview and “ok thanks“ is really all employees get to say to management.

That a company even sends a rejection letter is a major concession - it takes time (even when automated) to tell everyone who doesn't get chosen that they're not chosen

There are ~8 billion people on the planet

Even if you want to cut that number down to the 100s or 1000s that apply for a given role, only 1 will be chosen for a given position

No one is entitled to be told why they weren't picked

Often as not, it's not a "weakness" so much as they just plain liked someone else more

Interviewing (or any selection process for that matter) is a highly subjective and noisy process.

I’ve been accepted and rejected at FAANGs / startups / top schools. I’ve succeeded wildly at each one. I’ve had the same academic paper accepted and rejected from top conferences. The papers have all gotten cited more than the vast majority of research papers accepted.

The ones who rejected me could probably come up with a list of flaws but they would have probably not been that useful. If they were being honest with themselves, they would probably admit they have no insight into how to judge something or someone comprehensively based on the limited time and information they had.

You may be rejected because an interviewer thinks you’re weak at something you’re actually not, based on your response during the interview.

The truth is that it is impossible determine what a candidate is truly strong or weak at based on a 1hr interview.

The best you can do is test someone a number of times and if they succeed a greater number of times than the average strong candidate, conclude that they’re a strong candidate too. There is no objective measurement of one’s strengths and weaknesses here.

As a hiring manager making a fairly low volume of hires annually I always told the candidates why. I also did this in all F2F interviews. If the candidate didn’t make it, Id tell them and then take them through what we thought and why they didn’t make it.

Some candidates were outraged — they thought they did fine. Some would fight back and start clarifying stuff and then you’d have to start clarifying stuff and so on. Some would be very grateful.

On the balance I believe it to be the ethical option since you’ve just wasted an hour or 10 of someone’s time, and if they want to improve outcomes you’ve made available the information to take or leave.

I also kept artefacts documenting the hiring process for every candidate — both for future managers (who invariably didn’t care) but also for FOI requests or complications.

Personally I think hiding information and being guarded for fear of legal troubles is a slippery slope to less trust and more legal trouble.

The best way to hire is to hire based on strengths, not weaknesses. I don't tell you your weaknesses because I they are not important to me. If you didn't pass an interview, it's because you didn't demonstrate enough strengths. This is hard to write up, and certainly not worth doing at scale.

Hey, we actually do give interview feedback at OpsLevel:

https://www.opslevel.com/blog/why-opslevel-offers-interview-...

Feedback is a big part of our culture, so we extend that towards interview candidates.

It does take more time, but it's also good forcing function for us to ensure we're intellectually honest about why we're not moving forwards with a person.

There is legal risk, but it stems from the fact that it's illegal to discriminate in the US and Canada based on protected traits. To combat that, we strive to ensure that our feedback is situational and objective. This also helps prevent a lot of back-and-forth.

Why even care? You should be aware whether u have the credentials and experience. Most of the time the rejection is a subjective decision by a small group of people. And as of lately big tech is freezing their hiring anyway.

Keep applying and don't wait for any one company to give any feedback.

Very simple - it all too often invites you to dispute the reasons. At the end of the day it's not productive for the employer to give you this because you will likely not accept it. As with many things in life the unfortunate reality is this is on you to figure out...

There is nothing for them to gain for doing so, but doing so means risks and further costs.

Liability: If they disclose something that can be construed as discriminatory within current or future cultural norms.

Spending (even more time) on a rejected candidate gives them nothing but costs them time.

When interviewers ask me what my greatest weakness is I tell them "I'm too honest." If they tell me they don't consider that a weakness I tell them "I don't give a f*ck what you think."

Defend companies all you like but interviewing is exhausting, sometimes you've been out of the game for a while and you absolutely do need the feedback.

If I hadn't pressed the issue with two companies about a year ago I would have never found out that me being kind of cheerful in interviews came across as being overconfident to one team.

(And btw I did solve their homework with something like 95% grade so me saying "heh, how hard can it be" was in fact completely representative of my knowledge and abilities -- there was no actual overconfidence.)

Another team told me that they liked me but they were still concerned that I switched jobs several times the two years before the interview. I told them that having such a bias but still wasting the time of the candidate is not cool. They begrudgingly acknowledged and said sorry and we went our own merry ways.

In both of these cases I passed all oral interviews, people liked me, and the CTO was impressed by the quality of the homework's solution. Yet -- a rejection. Sure, there are other reasons, I understand that. But have I not asked and promised not to pursue further discussion of their negative feedback, I would have never found out.

And I want to find out. I want to know.

So honestly, I don't care if it's "harder" for you or "it takes time". You used the time of the candidate and they have nothing to show for it after. You owe them a feedback at least.

They do not inform you for a number of reasons, the most important of which is that they do not benefit from the information you think they should or could give you. And it could fire back. Through this lens, it becomes much easier to interpret many of the "easy things to do" that do not occur in personal and professional relationships.

Think about online dating. You chat with someone, they seem interesting, but you notice something you hadn't paid enough attention to when you were too caught up in your earthly desires. Maybe they live 40 miles away from you, maybe they have bad teeth, maybe they could lose a few pounds. You, an outspoken and, in your mind, generous person, decide to tell them that they are perfectly fine, but that you prefer someone a little taller than they are, or someone of lighter build, because you have always been active and you are not sure you can share your lifestyle with them.

You expect them to appreciate your candor and helpful cooking tips, but instead they tell you that you are a loser and don't know what you are missing out.

What happens then is that whenever you next feel you are losing interest in the person you are chatting with, you simply delete their profile: "Oh, well."

Giving a reason will give the person a point to dispute. I used to work in customer service dealing with applications to join a membership website. Without fail if I told the person the reason they were declined they would argue against it. You're never going to change your mind so arguing is pointless. Much easier to say you weren't successful without specifics.

> I feel awful when rejections are void.

For what it's worth, it can be worse, from an emotional point of view, when you do get feedback. I recently spent two full days working on a take-home assignment. I carefully addressed all of the requirements and spent the extra time adding in features that I know from experience would be useful in a real-world application.

Attached to the rejection email was a code review from the CTO which contained not a word of approval in respect of any of my ideas, but simply methodically picked holes in my entire approach.

This is my third rejection over the last year from roles that I had believed myself perfectly suited for. In the previous instances, I was ghosted after third-round interviews - that's a terrible feeling too, but at least I could persuade myself that an intangible personality issue had been the cause. But now, I have written evidence that I'm a moron. My self-confidence is completely shattered. Be careful what you wish for!

To add to those who have said that there are legal implications, I would add anecdotally I was advised by my HR department not to give feedback for exactly that reason. (We had a junior candidate who misrepresented his experience on his resume, and I would've offered some advice about this sort of thing for the future.)

There is also often a very high volume of candidates for particular positions, and it is a challenge to offer feedback, especially when they're not brought in for a live interview.

In my own process, interesting positions result in me searching for hiring managers at the company, sending a cover letter+resume that includes a table of their needs listed in the JD alongside my skills. This tends to get me closer to the interview table and provides an opportunity to exchange enough information for feedback purposes. It's also a bit of a differentiator in terms of resume structure (more than one interviewer has commented on it).

Dev here. There are so many interviews in my calendar that they are usually a chore. I do them professionally, but outside of 1h phonescreen/onsite and a panel syncup I'm not willing to spend any extra minute. The truth is we don't care about you, legal concern might be valid but more for HM/HR.

Most don't. They don't want to list something that could potentially be used against them in court. In addition, if you give people pointers like that people could "study" the interview by getting information from other applicants.

It starts a chain of mails. Also, they need to answer cross questions. For some candidates you might find the same criteria worked and they got hired.

In short, privacy and internal preference is what they hide for not giving a reason for rejection

Ask them for feedback on why your application wasn't successful this time and what they think you do to improve your chances of employment with them in the future. They still might not give you any, but in my experience most places will.

Then you can take their feedback into consideration for your next application. Sometimes it'll be something you can't do much about quickly (e.g. if there was a candidate with more experience than you). Other times though you'll discover a quick win (e.g. your application didn't clearly state your relative skills or experience).

Sometimes your interview was the same as the past three interviews. You did as well as them so I can't point to what your weakness was where you were rejected. Maybe you did good compared to a dud four interviews back. Then after you I interview someone who answered every question I asked correctly and in great depth. They are also pleasant. They get the offer.

You are not taking a pass/fail test, you are in a marathon and the first person who crosses the finish line gets an offer. Your weakness is they got to the finish line before you did.

It's really hard to write a kindly written email saying that someone seems a little dumb or dishonest or an asshole. What am I supposed to say? "Cultural fit"? If they really are an asshole, they'll interpret that as racism and ageism.

I actually do write feedback because of the golden rule. And not one person has thanked me for it, so it feels like it's unwelcome. These emails are also emotionally draining to type.

You can actually ask them for feedback after the rejection, or when they give you the pre-rejection feedback form. Many are happy to respond in detail.

I’m sorry that things are the way they are :(

One time I tried telling someone that I wanted to interview them but also point out that they had a typo in their resume and they responded something like “I’m a bad ass mother fucker with experiences both military and civilian. Good luck finding a worker with your attitude.”

Another time I just got a multi paragraph email back arguing with my points.

Lots of people respond favorably to feedback, some don’t. Those who don’t can be draining and I just don’t care to deal with it anymore. The decisions are hard enough already

Sorry to hear! First, know that it's a numbers game, and your energy is better spent preparing for your next interview than wondering about this one. Second, talk to your peers. If you know someone who works at the kind of company you're applying to, they can tell you the vast majority of things that will make a difference. If you haven't, do a mock interview with one of them. That will reveal if there are any giant red flags, and those are the only things you should be worried about. Good luck!

I would expect they get a lot of resumes to pour through. It wouldn't be feasible to point out specifics when a lot of the rejected candidates would be rejected due to numbers more so than weaknesses.

Pointing out weaknesses also invites argument, and possibly even public goading, since these days so many people seem to enjoy airing grievances to "get back" at the company as if not hiring them was somehow (usually treated as obviously) inappropriate.

I don't know about your situation but I can say that sometimes its not even technical. For example we had one junior role where we got down to 3 great candidates (from 300 resumes). The deciding factor literally came down to taking the candidate the team liked best; one candidate discarded because he was a robot with zero personality and another because multiple interviewers complained about bad body odor.

One reason is that it's easier not to. LinkedIn automatically sends you a generic rejection email 2-3 days after you've been rejected by the company.

While I get that there are various reasons as to why a company may not want to provide feedback, I recently interviewed for a company that:

- reached out to me through a recruiter

- had me go through multiple interview rounds and a take home

only to ghost me afterwards entirely (even after my asking for feedback). Once a candidate has invested time, you would think common decency dictates keeping them in the loop properly. But even that appears to much to ask in the current climate.

I always follow up asking why, to date (over about 18 years of memory) only about 4 or 5 ever responded, and of those I think only 2 actually said why but incidentally they were smaller more technical companies, corporates don't even give applications to a human anymore so I don't bother.

It's a disgusting practice tbh and should be dealt with properly by things like regulation but why bother I guess.

I think at the application stage, this is fair to not provide any reasoning.

I think if you were interviewed and even made it past a round or two, you should be entitled to some deliberate feedback.

They avoid doing so because of legal liability and other repercussions. I have always emailed them constantly until they get annoyed enough to reply with "something".

From the perspective of the company the negatives far outweigh the positives.

- They reject many times more than they accept. - They've already decided and its done. They don't want to debate and discuss it with you. - It avoids potential legal liability to just give everyone the same response.

Because they are looking for employees. They are not offering a job-hunter's consulting service.

In my experience, most single person only interviews are done by someone who is probably not capable of giving a good enough explanation. And multi round interviews with several current employees would require a lot of extra work they simply don't have time for.

Here in the UK, in Financial sector, Tech roles most jobs are filled by recruiters. Recruiters have a lot of drawbacks, but one of the unsung upsides is that they generally do get feedback from employers and share it with clients.

Many companies will provide a rejection reason in a telephone call that they would not be happy to put into writing.

Especially companies located in places where phone call recording isn't legal.

It's all about not leaving a liability paper trail.

Because it requires time and because a large number of people don't apply with real intention companies often can't handle it. It shouldn't happen at the latest stages of the recruitment.

The Recurse Center explains why they stopped giving feedback to rejected applicants:

https://www.recurse.com/feedback

Question for OP: did you attend an interview? In my experience, companies will usually provide a rejection reason if an interview has taken place, especially if you have been through multiple rounds.

Because it potentially exposes them to exposure/criticism/lawsuit and has no value to them, which means it has negative definite expectation value.

Just be glad you at least got a rejection letter. Most employers nowadays just ghost people after the final interview process.

In Iran most companies don't even respond when they reject you let alone giving you any info on why you got rejected!

IMO it's all for liability reasons. If you really want the full story you can file a FOIA request ;)

They may not have rejected you, but instead filled the spot or reduced headcount for the year.

Operational overhead and increased liability for lawsuits, I imagine.

How will that sound? We are sorry, you are too expensive for us.

the best way to find your weaknesses is to just be more self aware.

no one can give you a better answer about yourself than you.

they usually dont even know why they rejected you. its not a logical thing. its mostly emotional.

What do you think an employer's responsibilities are exactly?

Fear of a lawsuit

because they are relative to who interviews you, 2 different people will give you completely different reasons

I guess it takes to much time.

Probably not applicable to GitLab, but may be useful to some. I think too often FAANG and startup interviews are discussed here vs. major companies that aren’t primarily tech yet have 1,000s of developers.

1st level is HR. They don’t understand the job and are just matching key words to the posting. Sometimes we can get the HR person to just give us all the applicants, but often that list is so huge it’s not worth it. They’re basically clicking an auto rejection.

Hiring managers are then not permitted to say “why.” They send the rejection to HR, who hits the button.

There is 0 win for the company to say why, and it opens up a ton of legal risk. It doesn’t even matter if it’s valid or not, legal doesn’t want to spend time/money on defending a frivolous law suit.

Now, the what to do if applying to a non-FAANG megacorp.

My company is so concerned with bias, we can’t do technical interviews and are limited to a list of canned behavioral questions. Some do ask for technical stories. We can request additional ones, but the process is too onerous. The same questions have to be asked to every candidate, although prompting for more details is allowed. Have to have multiple managers who are the only ones allowed to ask. We can have technical folks sit in and feedback into manager scoring and help prompt, but cannot ask questions or score results.

Make sure to cater your resume to the actual posting. Repeat the key words, not just related stuff obvious to technical people. You have to get through HR. It’s not common anymore, but I think it’s a good idea to say why you want THAT job. It stands out, especially for folks with little/no/different experience. We see too many spammed resumes.

To prep for these interviews, read up on “STAR” and typical behavioral questions. Have a library of situations in your mind. Multiple conflict situations. Admitting failure is fine, don’t worry about sounding perfect. Don’t focus on blame. Focus on a positive outcome. You can say you f’d up, but then how you changed your behavior. And then make sure you say how that made things better. The “results” are the most commonly ignored part and they’re the most important to the nontechnical managers scoring. Technical folks sitting in are mostly there to call BS.

Show leadership. You don’t have to “I” everything, but show your influence.

If you have no experience, talk about times you volunteered, had a random job, worked on a group project, did some extracurricular. Non-tech is fine for behavioral questions regarding conflict, etc.

Show in your skills section weird non applicable stuff you taught yourself. It shows interest beyond “I went to class.” Weird programming languages or projects always are cool to me.

If you are an EU citizen, you can try using GDPR to request the feedback information they have on you. This might also work even after joining the company to see what feedback they wrote on you.

As people mentioned, companies have no incentive of putting the extra effort just to get more liability, and lots of candidates that would contest that.

Did you ask afterward?

you got filtered. no human read your application.

Liability