Comment by johnnyanmac
4 days ago
The GP said the quiet part out loud. They are so worried about lawsuits that they'd rather make the job market worse for everyone (including themselves) than risk a lawsuit over the most basic feedback. The product of a low-trust society.
This isn't really a low trust society, it's a litigious society problem.
These lawsuits aren't a myth, if you hire a lot of people it'll eventually happen, even if you're not violating any laws. The lawsuits, even when you win, waste time and money. Giving reasons, especially customized "human" responses is absolutely going to increase your chances of being sued.
Low trust means assuming any and all reasons given out will result in lawsuits. It's precisely a symptom of a low trust society. A not-low trust (doesn't have to be high trust) society wouldn't assume legitimate feedback would be litigatable, and likewise candidates wouldn't be in such bad situations that they'd need to sue every rejection.
As you said, lawsuits take a lot of time and money. Individuals don't have that and would prefer to settle things privately. But if they don't trust institutions to do that, then the only thing to trust is the contract of a lawyer.
Individuals without jobs have a lot of time since they don't have a job, and can find lawyers willing to work on contingency.
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I thought the threat of lawsuits was a lame excuse, so I tried to give good feedback to rejected candidates who asked.
It did not take long for one of them to try to turn it against me with threats. We would have easily won the case, but having a lawsuit hanging over my head and a target on my back as a liability for the company was not a good feeling.
I no longer give specific feedback.
Yeah, that's the product of a low trust society. It's not any single person perpetuating it, but it affects us all. A higher trust society would write it off as a bad outlier and keep going. A low trust society wonders when's the next time you get another person that causes an undue burden.