It is my experience across 4 EU countries and 30+ interviews. If it doesn't match your own experience there's nothing I can do about it.
>In Germany, you are expected to give honest (and sometimes brutal) feedback, but always with a way to improve in mind.
You are expected by ... law? In which case it's a legal requirement and not an expectation. Or expected by ... candidates?
Also, the devil is in the details as German culture and language is often designed to cleverly camouflage negative feedback as neutral or positive to avoid lawsuits, so you can definitely have generic cookie cutter rejection messages that legally qualify as "honest" like for example in your Arbeitszeugnis.
How would you legally challenge that if otherwise? Do you sue the company because you feel like their feedback wasn't brutally honest as per your expectations as it was too generic and "nice sounding" and had nothing bad to say about you?
IMHO you choose a bad example as German corporate culture is not as "brutally honest" as you portray it to be, quite the opposite, it's just very good at pretending to be honest.
From my personal experience across several countries, I've noticed the more difficult it is to fire someone and the more anti-discrimination laws exist in that country, then the less honest and more generic your feedback will be, if you get any feedback at all and it's not a generic automated rejection.
Sometimes they do, but that's very rare nowadays. I think companies were more willing in the past, but all it takes is one angry rejected candidate with a chip on his shoulder and a lawyer on speed-dial, to change that company's culture on "honest feedback" forever.
It's why we can't have nice things, there will always be someone to abuse the system and take it down with him.
Actually, it's not that hard. Provided you have had a discussion with your team on why not to hire the candate, it's easy to send them a short summary without revealing too much information.
I should clarify, I don't mean this for every candidate. Just for those who have gotten pretty far into the process.
There are legitimate reasons (you want rejected candidates to still have a good impression of the company, you think the feedback could help them improve and want them to interview again in the future, you want to include them in your professional network, etc.) but I think it is best if that is an intentional choice.
You underestimate how lazy some companies are when it comes to non-billable hours/tasks. The question on their end is "why bother, what's in it for us?".
>Provided you have had a discussion with your team on why not to hire the candidate, it's easy to send them a short summary without revealing too much information.
That's the problem, it's NOT easy to send feedback that's truthful yet at the same time is 100% iron clad against any potential expressions that might be interpreted as discriminatory. Engineers are not good at formulating such things and their bluntness is a liability.
Which is why engineers are left with the technical part, and the final candidate-feedback communication and rejection is left to the HR who's main job is eliminating employee/candidate liability for the company, so they usually take the route that makes their job easier and send the same generic message to everyone, especially that in many companies HR is understaffed.
Frankly I was not a big steam fan, but now I'm close to defend Gabe like Tesla fans defend Musk.
Really great people, if someone from that team read this: kudos.