cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/52088358
I know the market is ass rn, I’ve been looking for a job since I graduated in November of last year with no luck. Every application I get a response like “you are great, your skills are great, you meet every criteria but we found someone better”. I recently decided to start replying to emails to ask why I wasn’t picked (I reply only to emails that aren’t from no-reply or if the say I can ask for feedback). So far I have not even received one reply. Am I wasting my time??? I feel like it’s just from automated systems and they don’t even look at it. Is everything literally a ghost job?? If you have ever asked for feedback have you gotten anything useful from it?
In some countries, including the United States, potential employers are not going to tell you why they didn’t hire you because they don’t want to open themselves to potential litigation. Any information they give you could be used if you decided to sue them for discriminatory hiring practices, even if they aren’t actually doing that. The less information you have, the safer they are. And it’s not a question of whether they would lose the lawsuit, but whether they would have to pay a lawyer thousands of dollars to fight it. So any smart employer will STFU.
Also, they have no duty or moral obligation to tell you anything. If you want to know why you didn’t get hired usually you can do so by talking to a friend or acquaintance who works in the field. Show them your resume and the job posting, and they can tell you if there are obvious weak points. If there aren’t any obvious weak points, either the job listing was vacuous or there were too many applicants. Or else the application process is set up like total shit in which case you don’t want to work for that company anyway.