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Comment by mikepurvis | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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"...

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.

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?

So the thing is, I think arrogance is typically reflected in actual deficiencies in interview performance. If it isn't - if it's just a vibe that the interviewer got with no concrete implications for how they work with others, solve problems, or communicate - then I worry taking it into account is introducing bias. If I can't think of a concrete implication that the arrogance had, then I don't think I want to take it into account. (You almost always can identify concrete effects, though.)

The article addresses the "liability nightmare" and they mentioned they reached out to an employment lawyer.

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).

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.

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.

This is dealt with at length in the article.

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