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Do You Tell a Job Candidate How Badly They Did?
skelter asks: "I have been lamenting with friends in the industry about interviewing woes and the candidates that we find. Consider a hypothetical job candidate comes in after some how making it through screening. In the team technical interview they prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that not only is he (or she) not as adequate as he thinks he is, but has demonstrated that he is a danger to any code base. Do you tell them? Quietly step away, usher them out and say nothing? Play with them on the whiteboard the way your cat plays with injured mice? Should you leave them as their own warning to others? Is there any obligation to guide them to gaining real experience? Can you give them any advice or is it all liability?"
If I decide against a candidate, I've arrived at saying nothing beyond "Thank you for your time, we've decided not to extend an offer." Anything else, and I've had people keep bugging me with things like they can change, or give them another chance, or would I...
Second, from an employer's perspective, it may in the narrow self-interest of the company for such a person to go be a drain on its competitors. Where's the rational economic incentive to discourage that?
How about "I don't wish my shareholders to go to hell for owning shares in an evil company". ?
You can have self interest and still not be a dick. You lose very little, while this other person may get helped a lot. Furthermore, maybe the person will actually improve themselves and reapply for the job and you'll have a good employee then. Or, the person will work within the given industry and not bad mouth your company. The more good workers are in the economy the more services can be provided to each other and quality of life of people can improve.
Companies need to be better at telling someone what they're doing wrong or what they need. It took me nearly 18months to find work after getting out of college. I was pretty close to suicide at one point. The always optimistic, never tell you anything bad attitude of the human resources people was probably the worst thing. Negative feedback is far more valuable, and is actually far more comforting than a HR person continually telling you that things are in process, that there are more candidates to consider, then getting a letter dated from a week earlier telling you that the position has been filled.
When companies did tell me what I was lacking, it was always work experience, never education. I was really left wondering how on earth I would ever obtain experience as none of them were willing even to give me an entry level position. Of course, part of that is that an entry level position today is not what an entry level position was a decade ago. The real entry level positions have been farmed out to Asia, and the ones left tend to require 5 years of experience or more because of the glut of people with 20years who are unemployed. I really lucked out, I happened to be at my class reunion when an old teacher of mine happened to wander in, asked me how school had gone, and what I was doing now, and then told me that he was now the CEO of a little software company and that he could use my help.