> If your company can not show the candidates why they were not hired, you are doing a very bad job.
You sound like you've never had to deal with telling a candidate they weren't chosen for a position. There's a reason rejection letters are usually canned responses - it's not that HR teams are unanimously evil people, it's because any bit of information could open up the potential for a law suit, even if in good spirit. Someone gets a rejection letter saying "they aren't a good fit"...oh well it must be because I have different colored skin, right? It's a slippery slope from there.
That is the usual stated justification, and may actually be the motivation where it's become accepted as conventional wsdfom, but it's implausible on its face as a real justified concern, because it's just as easy for a rejected subject to infer ill intent from a refusal to explain as from an innocuous explanation.
The real reasons for such policies send to be a combination of:
(1) Regardless of organizational policies, hiring managers will still sometimes use directly prohibited criteria, and some of them will clumsily reveal this (perhaps in ignorance of the prohibition) if they provide explanations. A clear blanket corporate no-explanation policy doesn't prevent the bad acts, but prevents the bad acts that slip through other corporate policies from being announced to victims, and
(2) Hiring criteria that aren't directly prohibited may be prohibited indirectly due to disparate impact. Providing honest explanations for negative decisions makes it possible for people who gain access to the explanations given to multiple candidates to discover disparate impacts, and take action against them, and
(3) People attempting to give honest explanations will sometimes explain things poorly in a way which indicates a prohibited (directly or indirectly) criteria was used, either positively (which might be evidence in other cases)) or negatively.
> because it's just as easy for a rejected subject to infer ill intent from a refusal to explain as from an innocuous explanation.
Sure, you can infer all you want, but I'm talking about whether there is grounds for legal proceedings. There is a higher probability that a defense lawyer would take a case where the rejection letter says "you weren't a good culture fit" vs "you didn't get the job". Companies simply do not want to even open themselves up to litigated, even if they've done nothing wrong. Further, there is no commercial incentive to tell the candidate anything other than "you didn't get the job", so why bother?
> People attempting to give honest explanations will sometimes explain things poorly in a way which indicates a prohibited
That's precisely my point. It's very difficult to explain to someone that they've been rejected for a position even in the most sincere and nicest way possible.
You sound like you've never had to deal with telling a candidate they weren't chosen for a position. There's a reason rejection letters are usually canned responses - it's not that HR teams are unanimously evil people, it's because any bit of information could open up the potential for a law suit, even if in good spirit. Someone gets a rejection letter saying "they aren't a good fit"...oh well it must be because I have different colored skin, right? It's a slippery slope from there.