I’m finding the hard way that finding another job is a grind: you invest time reading what they want to hire, you write a CV and an application.
Most of the time you don’t get an answer, meaning you are that irrelevant to them. Most of these times it is YOU the one who has to ask if they decided for or against. On the limited times they write you back, it’s a computed generated BS polite rejection letter.
I asked one of them how many candidates they considered and why they rejected me, but that only made them send me another computer generated letter.
I’d like to know how close I was and in what ways I can become a more interesting candidate, but nobody is going to give me a realistic answer.
It sucks having to need them more than they need you. And I should consider me lucky, because I have a job, but jesus christ, I feel for those who have to do this without stable income or a family that offers them a place to stay…
There are a few benign-ish ways this happens, based on my experience from working on “the other side”. They reflect shittily on the hiring manager, but not on you:
You got no immediate rejection because they did consider you valid for the position, just not first place. Then they got a match on the first place and stopped giving a shit about the applicant backlog.
They got too many applicants and threw half in the garbage.
Upper management put a freeze, or reduction, on hiring right as they put an ad out.
They have a person already picked for the position, but they will get in legal or corporate or PR trouble if they don’t pretend to do a proper hiring process.
Their application process, human or computer, lost your CV.
I have never once been told I wasn’t hired, let alone told why.
I’ve been to probably a thousand interviews.
No one has time for that.
Imagine as a manager, you interview 100 people. Now you expect them to write a rejection letter, pass it through HR and the lawyers, for 99 people?
Imagine the time that would take, and what does the company get for that time? Nothing but risk.
As a hiring manager for nearly 4 years straight, dealing with way way more than 100 applicants for some positions, I know it takes minutes at most.
All hiring systems have ways to send batch emails to rejected candidates.
If you don’t have a hiring system for some reason, it’s still just hitting reply/ctrl-v/send to each applicant you move out of the “possible candidate” inbox.
Giving a reason “why” tends to hit people badly if they didn’t specifically ask, so a stock response is not only easy to give, but the best response. Whether and how to respond in more detail to people asking for “why”, is a less easy decision but good if you are able to.
Not OP, but just a boiler plate response would be fine for me. “Sorry [insert name here]. You are no longer being considered for this position. (Optional) Good luck on other applications”. Could even have it set up to sends those out automatically.