The main thing on the list is the potential liability. This is why rejection letters are extremely short and they never call on a rejection. You never know if your talking to a lawyer who is trying to build a case against you by developing a pattern on your rejections. This is why certain topics even inside of companies concerning hiring are completely taboo. The few times I've heard any manager even utter any of the "protected class" words EOO words, (race sex religion etc. etc.) they have been reprimanded and the thought of putting anything like that in an internal email is unbelievable. A manager who did that would certainly be close to being fired.
The rest of the stuff isn't that important - there's plenty of managers and HR people out there who don't mind spending calories on rejects. If someone asked me point blank how they came off in the interview I'd tell them - and in fact, if you are in an interview and you sense that it's gone sideways or that it's not a fit, I encourage you to ask what do you think of me? I did that once and they told me point blank that my last paycheck stub (which I had bought, as insurance) was higher than what they were planning on offering. That was one of those positions advertised without a pay scale back in "the olden days". I think they got "schooled" that day. But that's what you get when you advertise a position without a pay range. And I'm also very skilled at answering the phone and giving the caller 5 seconds no more to explain what they are calling about and if I decide it's not worth my time to listen to their pitch I politely say "not interested" and hang up. Even when they are in the middle of their "I appreciate it but there's one more thing you should consider" foot-in-the-door spiel. That's an executive skill any good manager has to develop. They aren't being abrupt, they just recognize there's no more value to the call so they end it to quit wasting their time and yours. As for tuning an LLM, they can turn the most glowing Resume/application in that's as tuned as possible to get it past all the filters if they want. I'd actually consider that a plus in a candidate that they figured out the rat's maze to defeat the robot overlord. (Although I personally would never use LLM to filter and I've explained why already that a good manager would not) But securing the interview is just the first step you still got to prove yourself in the interview. And there's no point in putting a huge amount of effort into securing interviews and none into the actual interview process. Unless your goal is to sort of collect interviews like medals. The automated tools make rejecting candidates take very little effort. The candidate applies online, puts their contact info in online, if they aren't greenflagged and forwarded for a screening interview (ie: a phone call from HR asking "are you a real person or not") the rejection comes back automatically - with no activity on a prospect after a few weeks the software just closes the file and issues the rejection automatically. "There is whole industry of asking job candidates to generate resumes for training or for sale - essentially for free, just by advertising a job opportunity." I assure you, nobody does this anymore. The number 1 reason is as follows: https://www.hrdive.com/news/pay-transparency-law-tracker-states-that-require-employers-to-post-pay-range-or-wage-range/622542/ Notice that backwards Oregon is NOT on the list. I encourage you to write your representative on this issue. Back in the bad old days, when nobody advertised pay scales, the only way a company HR department could do research on market rate was by offering fake job opportunities. Then during the screening interview they would say "this job is offering a range of X-Y" and see if the candidate said OK. If they did, that was too high. The next candidate they screened they would lower the offer. And they would keep doing this until they started getting candidates saying "that's too low" But today, there's a whole list of states that require disclosed pay scales by law. And trust me, ANY employer in any of those states who lists a job and does NOT do that - they WILL get reported - by hundreds of job seekers. And the state employment divisions just LOVE fining employers for this kind of stuff. So, to do a market pay study nowadays is really easy you just look at the listings in those states and toss the border markers and you have your scale. And for the Fortune 500 they often are drawing upper staff who they WILL pay relocation for and they don't know where their candidates might be coming from and they simply don't want the hassle. A company like Walmart for example is in all 50 states if they advertise a manager position in Oregon for sure candidates in Washington State are going to see it and even if they could squeak by the law by not putting a pay scale in and claiming it was an Oregon advertisement - they will incur the ire of State of Washington's labor department who can easily make trouble for their Washington operations (hmm, it's been a while since we've inspected your Vancouver operations) So once enough states started passing these disclosure laws, the large corps caved in and started putting pay scales on ALL their positions - which of course put tremendous pressure on the small Mom and Pop operations to disclose THEIR pay scales since if your going to pay Indeed to list a job your wasting your money if nobody applies - and nobody will apply if you are the only employer in the list that isn't listing a pay range in your job posting. Your still going to see the occasional posting lacking a pay scale but only someone looking for their first job should be applying for those. This is one of the areas that young folks have a huge advantage over what us old codgers had to deal with. Ted -----Original Message----- From: PLUG <plug-boun...@lists.pdxlinux.org> On Behalf Of ken...@tuta.com Sent: Monday, July 28, 2025 6:40 AM To: Portland Linux/Unix Group <plug@lists.pdxlinux.org> Subject: Re: [PLUG] Ghosted? I think Tomas summed it up perfectly, while also addressing a few things about job searching that I was aware of(It's been a while since I had to hire). Thanks | おおきに / ありがとう | Kiitos | Merci | Gracias | Obrigada | Grazie | 谢谢 | Danke | Wado | спасибо, 賢進ジェンナ「Kenshin, Jenna」 "You should be as alive as you can until you're totally dead!" - Dylan Moran 2025年7月27日 13:22 差出人: tomas.kuchta.li...@gmail.com: > I can think of a few reasons: > * There is no value in spending any calories on rejected candidates > * Potential liability > * Potential for extra arguments, hassle and follow up > * It is proprietary knowledge, many applications are generated and > almost all are screened by a LLM - so giving feedback would let the > generating LLM/human to tune for success. > * Work load - they maybe rejecting many candidates for a few > positions. Not necessarily because of a particular reason > * There is whole industry of asking job candidates to generate resumes > for training or for sale - essentially for free, just by advertising a > job opportunity. > > Applying/searching for a job is no fun, especially on saturated labor > market, that is for sure. > > -T > > On Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 17:59 James Tobin <jamesbto...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> Why do you think that is? >> >> On Fri, 25 Jul 2025 at 21:55, <ken...@tuta.com> wrote: >> > >> > Yes, but I also know that employers in the U.S. generally don't >> > want to >> admit why an applicant was refused or passed on. >> > Thanks | おおきに / ありがとう | Kiitos | Merci | Gracias | Obrigada | >> > Grazie | >> 谢谢 | Danke | Wado | спасибо, >> > 賢進ジェンナ「Kenshin, Jenna」 >> > >> > "You should be as alive as you can until you're totally dead!" - >> > Dylan >> Moran >> > >> > >> > >> > 2025年7月25日 11:57 差出人: jamesbto...@gmail.com: >> > >> > > Hi, if you were represented by a recruiter (headhunter, >> > > recruitment consultant, agent, or whatever they prefer to call >> > > themselves) for a potential job with an employer, would you >> > > expect them to do everything possible to get feedback on your >> > > resume, skills, experience, overall application, and suitability >> > > directly from the employer after you'd been presented? >> > > >> > >>
