There are a bunch of illegible factors involved in hiring the right person, though. If the reason for rejection is something like “we think you’d be a bad culture fit,” then it seems legally risky to be honest.
True, but what you can do is have explicit values that you publicize and then ask candidates questions that assess how much they support/embody those values. Then you can reasonably say “rejected candidate because they didn’t demonstrate value X” and have notes to back it up, or say “rejected because demonstrated ~X”. This is harder feedback for candidates to hear, especially if X is something positive that everyone thinks they are like “hard working”, but at the same time it should be made clear this isn’t about what’s true about the candidate, but what could be determined from their interview performance.
There are a bunch of illegible factors involved in hiring the right person, though. If the reason for rejection is something like “we think you’d be a bad culture fit,” then it seems legally risky to be honest.
True, but what you can do is have explicit values that you publicize and then ask candidates questions that assess how much they support/embody those values. Then you can reasonably say “rejected candidate because they didn’t demonstrate value X” and have notes to back it up, or say “rejected because demonstrated ~X”. This is harder feedback for candidates to hear, especially if X is something positive that everyone thinks they are like “hard working”, but at the same time it should be made clear this isn’t about what’s true about the candidate, but what could be determined from their interview performance.