The rejection email they'll thank you for.

Only after a real interview, and only if you can be specific and respectful. After a resume screen, skip feedback. You don't have enough signal to be useful, and generic feedback feels worse than none. After a phone screen, one sentence is fine. After an on-site or final interview, candidates have invested 4-8 hours and deserve one or two concrete observations they can act on (e.g., "The systems-design portion didn't quite get to scale considerations we needed at our stage"). Never give feedback that could be construed as discriminatory. If you wouldn't say it on the phone, don't put it in writing.

Silence is the industry norm but it's not OK. Candidates spend 30-60 minutes researching your company and tailoring a resume. A one-line "thank you but we're moving forward with other applicants" email costs you 30 seconds and protects your employer brand. Glassdoor data shows ghosted applicants are 3.5x more likely to leave a negative review. A short, warm rejection sent within 7-14 days of the resume submission is the minimum bar. Auto-rejection emails from an ATS count too, as long as they're sent within a reasonable window.

Tuesday through Thursday, mid-morning local time. Avoid Monday mornings (overwhelming inbox), Friday afternoons (the candidate sits with the rejection all weekend), and the hour before a known company-wide announcement. For final-interview rejections, send within 48 hours of the decision. Longer waits feel like avoidance. For resume-screen rejections, batch them and send within 7-14 days of the application, never longer than 30 days. Whatever you do, never reject on a Friday at 5pm.

For resume-screen rejections, yes. A single warm template with merge fields works fine and is much better than silence. For phone-screen and later, no. Candidates who reached an interview talked to humans at your company and invested hours; using a copy-paste template for them is the source of most "this company is cold" Glassdoor reviews. Past the first interview, every email should include at least the candidate's name, the role, and one sentence that proves a human wrote it. Templates with these merge fields (and optional feedback) are how you scale without losing humanity.

Respond. Don't ghost a candidate who follows up. That's worse than the original rejection. Keep it brief, factual, and forward-looking: one or two specific observations from the interview, no comparisons to other candidates, no speculation about "fit". Avoid anything that could read as a protected-class reference. If you genuinely can't share specifics (legal policy, NDA, executive search), say so directly: "Our policy is to not share interview-level feedback, but I appreciate you asking, and your performance on X was strong." One honest sentence beats a long evasive paragraph every time.