Many companies aren’t willing to do this, but I spent some time this afternoon emailing candidates we didn’t hire. Since they made it through the final interviews, I wanted to give them specific feedback.

Designers often spend many hours preparing case studies, researching prospective employers and interviewing. At the end of it all when they’re not selected, the typical response is something like “we’ve decided to move forward with other candidates.” I get that this reduces risk and those canned responses reduce employer effort. However, people deserve better.

We were fortunate enough to have some incredibly great candidates. In the end, almost all of the feedback I could give was simply what they did well. It’s not that hard to give that kind of feedback. In some cases, I also gave some specific feedback which should help them on future interviews. Sure that might introduce some risk, but I would rather take a little risk being helpful to someone than simply turn a cold shoulder to someone with no explanation.