There are serious legal risks to giving feedback of any kind, let alone feedback that is neither “constructive” nor “easy to understand”. I found this book on U.S. employment law to be an accessible introduction to legal restrictions around hiring with good citations (though it is written in an alarmist, of-the-moment tone).
We might hope that candidates with an EA mindset wouldn’t sue after getting feedback, but not all candidates will have strong EA ties, and even people with strong EA ties sometimes do surprising things.
Other difficulties with feedback include:
Making it harder to implement work tests in the future (Open Phil tells me I didn’t do X on their test, so I do it next time and tell my friends to do it next time and everyone’s natural ability is now a bit murkier)
Creating arguments with disgruntled candidates (“that’s not enough justification for not hiring me, I’m going to send you nasty emails now”; “you told me I didn’t have X, but I actually do and accidentally left it out of my resume, you’d better hire me now”)
Creating a sense of bias/favoritism (person A is a really strong candidate on the cusp of getting hired and gets detailed feedback; person B is a really weak candidate and would be much less useful to provide with feedback; person B hears that person A got feedback and is angry)
Personally, I love feedback, and I appreciate Ben West of Ought for giving the best feedback of any org I applied to in my last round of job-hunting, but I can understand why organizations often don’t give out very much.
There are serious legal risks to giving feedback of any kind, let alone feedback that is neither “constructive” nor “easy to understand”. I found this book on U.S. employment law to be an accessible introduction to legal restrictions around hiring with good citations (though it is written in an alarmist, of-the-moment tone).
We might hope that candidates with an EA mindset wouldn’t sue after getting feedback, but not all candidates will have strong EA ties, and even people with strong EA ties sometimes do surprising things.
Other difficulties with feedback include:
Making it harder to implement work tests in the future (Open Phil tells me I didn’t do X on their test, so I do it next time and tell my friends to do it next time and everyone’s natural ability is now a bit murkier)
Creating arguments with disgruntled candidates (“that’s not enough justification for not hiring me, I’m going to send you nasty emails now”; “you told me I didn’t have X, but I actually do and accidentally left it out of my resume, you’d better hire me now”)
Creating a sense of bias/favoritism (person A is a really strong candidate on the cusp of getting hired and gets detailed feedback; person B is a really weak candidate and would be much less useful to provide with feedback; person B hears that person A got feedback and is angry)
Personally, I love feedback, and I appreciate Ben West of Ought for giving the best feedback of any org I applied to in my last round of job-hunting, but I can understand why organizations often don’t give out very much.
+1 to Ought giving great job-search feedback.