My experience has been the reason that I (and my peers) say nothing is because of a disconnect between knowledge and authority.  I&#x27;ve interviewed thousands of candidates in my career and I almost always know before I finish up the interview whether or not we are going to bring that person in for another interview (at which point the team votes if we offer).<p>More than anything else, the number one reason that an otherwise good candidate doesn&#x27;t get to continue is because of a disconnect around what the word &quot;Senior&quot; means.  Every company has a different bar set for what qualifies as &quot;Senior&quot;, but in most places I&#x27;ve been that bar is relatively high, so if we advertise for that position externally it means we don&#x27;t have someone internal who&#x27;s met the bar for promotion yet.  We can&#x27;t in good conscious hire someone in as a &quot;Senior&quot; that is not at least as qualified as the people we already have who didn&#x27;t make the cut for promotion.  Title inflation hurts because what happens is you might have been &quot;Senior&quot; at your last three employers but you don&#x27;t make the bar for &quot;Senior&quot; or sometimes even &quot;Mid&quot; where you&#x27;re applying.<p>As the interviewer there&#x27;s very little I can actionably provide you that addresses the above without getting into a conversation about the possibility of hire at a lower level, which I don&#x27;t have the authority to offer since I&#x27;m not the hiring manager.  Additionally, I try to do everything I can to respect the candidate and preserve their dignity during the interview process. If they&#x27;re bombing it, I don&#x27;t want them to feel like they&#x27;re bombing it.  It&#x27;s not possible to both do that and tell them at the end that they aren&#x27;t good enough to cross the threshold for the role.  This is especially difficult for me and many of my peers because we&#x27;re engineers and not really &quot;people persons&quot;, so we err on the side of saying nothing vs risk saying something that crushes someone.