companies are (rightfully) worried about litigation related to providing feedback to rejected candidates, that's all. it's a standard thing and i wouldn't worry about it. if an employee accidentally let slip something related to protected labor rights, you now have a case for hiring discrimination. instead, they just omit any feedback at all to be extra safe.

From what I understand if they omit discriminating feedback it still means that they are discriminating

perhaps, but can you prove something which did not happen in a court of law?

It sounds like there was a sentence prior to this in the letter that might offer some context?

No, not really:

Thanks for taking the time to send us your CV.


Unfortunately, at this time we won't be moving forward with your application.


While we aren't able to offer personal feedback, it helped us evaluate whether 
this role would be the right fit for you, your profile, and <>.

It's just one email. Doesn't matter.

is it possible that it's just too costly to have an HR or hiring dev compose dozens of "personal feedbacks"?

> compose dozens of This comment from some time ago has some good context: https://clojurians.slack.com/archives/C0KL616MN/p1714675797506239?thread_ts=1714420704.840619&cid=C0KL616MN

Ah, so the "it" is your application in this case. Not an interview. Then I think it's to head off people requesting more information about why their CV (resume) wasn't good enough to get an interview.

Ah, so the "it" is your application in this case. Not an interviewThere was no first interview, correct. From what I understand the sentence could mean that they have the feedback in a file somewhere but they aren't going to share it. But I also think that this is probably a typo and they don't understand what they send. And volume of applicants may make these typos easier to create.

I think the most likely explanation is what I said: to discourage rejected candidates from trying to follow-up and ask "why?" because that causes extra work for them - and they'd only respond with "we aren't able to offer personal feedback" away...

A year ago, after four coding sessions, I got this:

Unfortunately, we debriefed and decided it didn't make sense to continue the interview process.

Another thing is, some companies simply "fish" to see what measure of candidates are in the field before investing in a technology, ie can they hire people if they need to.