But brief feedback is probably more likely to result in pushback / being sued by candidates, since candidates will feel like you didn’t properly consider them.
The sad truth of the situation is that all the incentives for a company point in the direction of giving no feedback at all. This isn’t because hiring managers are sociopaths.
See after just having through 3 rounds of recruiting over the past three years, I don't think the ghosting is intentional from most companies. I would say 60% of companies give a "not continuing" response after 1-2 months from application, while ~25% seem like they have a configuration/software mistake that causes it to send the rejection 6 months - a year later, which people in the meantime think was just ghosting. Not sure why this is so common
I think there's something wrong with a hiring process where it takes 1-2 months to decide whether to proceed to next step (screening call, or interview, or offer) with a candidate, not to mention the fact that a well qualified candidate isn't going to be waiting around that long - they'll be applying to other jobs at the same time, and if good will be snapped up.
The time to send the "Sorry, not continuing" email is as soon as the company has decided that, and if that really is 1-2 months later, you may as well have just ghosted the candidate.
I think part of it may be they're not saying no until someone else is actually hired just in case they need a fallback, so everyone else gets to wait however long it takes for the role to be filled, most likely...
The line is between saying something brief and saying nothing.
Somehow, it has become standard to say absolutely nothing instead of telling people a simple no.
I've even had situations where people said they wanted to keep talking to me, and then went completely silent.