The notion about lawsuits is basically the answer.<p>I&#x27;ve interviewed and hired hundreds of people and the real reasons are usually pretty banal, e.g. not a good match between skills and requirements, wants too much money, etc. so in cases where somebody <i>does</i> hear something and they hear &quot;not a good fit&quot; that honestly is usually the case. It&#x27;s hard to provide more specifics because interviews don&#x27;t really uncover deep specifics about candidates.<p>On occasion I&#x27;ve rejected people for less common reasons also, e.g. behavior problems during the interview, poor attitude, etc. and we have to keep those things pretty confidential from the candidate because it <i>would</i> be used in a lawsuit even if it&#x27;s not an example of discrimination. All the &quot;culture fit&quot; notions in startup-land would be other examples of this kind of rejection.<p>There&#x27;s of course all kinds of discrimination in hiring and companies hide behind these practices all too often. I&#x27;ve never been part of this kind of thing thankfully, but I can imagine.<p>tptacek&#x27;s old company has more rigid hiring practices that produce what I would guess are strong metrics that help them find good candidates but <i>also</i> might protect them in the case of a lawsuit.<p>I&#x27;ve <i>also</i> been on the receiving end of rejections of course. Before the second dot-com boom&#x2F;bust companies used to actually contact you back with a &quot;not a good fit&quot;. After that you usually just don&#x27;t hear anything unless you really press the recruiters.<p>On occasion, when the recruiting department isn&#x27;t as well put together as might be expected, real reasons will leak out and those are also surprisingly interesting:<p>- salary demands are too high and exceed even senior execs. I don&#x27;t make all that much out of the ordinary for my experience level and position, so that brought a lot of insight into how they function as a company<p>- bad culture fit - depending on the company I actually felt relieved by some of these rejections and perturbed by others.<p>- the weirdest one was where the company&#x27;s internal hr processes were so broken, and they had some sort of internal clock on candidates, that they were not able to process me through the interview rounds in a timely fashion, so they rejected me because it was taking too long to process me. I can say that the interview and hiring process was a real shit show so it didn&#x27;t surprise me at all, but I found it impressively annoying. I <i>did</i> think about suing them, but then I thought about what I wanted out of the lawsuit and decided not to bother.