If you've been through a competitive job search, you've probably noticed the same pattern: multiple rounds, real effort invested, then a polite email telling you nothing. No explanation. No indication of where you fell short. Just a soft rejection and silence.
This isn't an accident or indifference. It's the result of several structural forces that make feedback difficult, risky, or time-consuming to give — and understanding them helps you get around them.
The most commonly cited reason companies don't give feedback is legal exposure. Written feedback about why a candidate was rejected creates a document trail. If that feedback is poorly worded, subjective, or references something that could be characterised as discriminatory, it becomes a liability.
HR and legal teams at larger companies have historically advised against written candidate feedback as a blanket policy. This guidance — often overly cautious and applied far beyond the circumstances that warranted it — spread across the industry and became the default. In the UK, where discrimination law is clear and criteria-based feedback is straightforward to give and defend, the concern is usually overstated. But the policy stuck.
The average UK job posting receives over 200 applications. A well-run hiring process might involve 10 to 15 candidates in interviews. Writing personalised, useful feedback for every unsuccessful candidate takes time that most recruiting teams simply don't have, especially when they are running multiple roles simultaneously.
Without dedicated tooling, feedback becomes a nice-to-have that gets deprioritised the moment another task appears. And it almost always does.
The person who interviewed you is often not the person who sends your rejection email. Interviewers submit their notes internally. A recruiter or coordinator synthesises the decision and communicates it. The specific, useful detail about why you were rejected often doesn't survive that handoff in a form suitable for sharing externally.
Candidates receive vague rejections not because the company has no specific thoughts, but because the specific thoughts exist in a format that was never designed to be communicated outward.
Loopback was built specifically to address these barriers. Instead of asking recruiters to write feedback — which requires time, care, and legal review — it sends a 60-second structured form. The recruiter rates the candidate across five dimensions by clicking a score. No free text. No paragraphs. The legal exposure is minimal because no subjective characterisation is required.
The result is a response rate above 70%, compared to an industry average well below 30% for unstructured requests.
Even without any platform, you can improve your odds significantly.
Ask within 48 hours while the recruiter's memory is fresh. Make the ask easy by keeping your message short and not requiring a long written reply — ask a specific yes/no or short-answer question rather than a general feedback request. And frame your request around learning rather than challenging the decision. Recruiters respond more readily when the request feels low-effort and purpose-driven.
If you're ready to remove the friction entirely, Loopback sends the request and form automatically. You focus on the next application while the feedback process runs in the background.