RA position doesn't give feedback on rejected application I recently applied to an economics pre-doctoral RA opportunity at a North American research university. I was asked to do a 7-hour empirical exercise, which I did (took me closer to 10 hours). Unfortunately, I was not asked to proceed in the interview process.
I did ask for feedback (or just the solution set for the empirical exercise), because I wanted to figure out where I went wrong and how I can do better the next time around, but the hiring manager informed that they aren't able to provide any kind of feedback.
I found this to be extremely frustrating and somewhat annoying -- I don't care that I didn't get the job, but I think it's wrong to ask applicants to perform many hours of uncompensated labor and not even provide an answer key! Is this the wrong way to think about things?
Really appreciate any insight or guidance you might have.
Thanks!
Unfortunately for applicants, academic job environment is very competitive: there are tens, hundreds or sometimes thousands of applications per post. The employers (Universities) are often overwhelmed with the number of applications. Their recruitment processes are designed to optimise their own convenience, not the one of the applicants. To put it bluntly, they have too many people who want to work for them to care about the feelings of those who is not successful this time.
Universities often make it clear that they won't provide feedback for candidates who were not shortlisted for the post (i.e. not invited for the interview). You could assume that they are supposed to provide feedback for those who bothered to prepare and attend the interview at least --- but in practice it happens less often than not.
Even though this behaviour is common, you are right in thinking that it is wrong. It is very frustrating to spend 10+ hours preparing the application, several days preparing to the interview and actually attending it -- just to never hear from them again. The good news is (at least) that if this place has a selfish and unfriendly attitude to candidates, you probably don't want to be there anyway.