I once casted volunteer actors for short movies. It costed me literally nothing to write: "Deadline for application is $DATE, you will hear from us within X days. You will either get a rejection or an invitation to a casting on $CASTINGDATE1 or $CASTINGDATE2."

And on the casting I personally guaranteed for a date when they will get a result. Rejections included feedback that helped candidates understand our decision and improve their craft.

This is in my opinion how you do things when you have a shred of respect for the people on the other side. Actors greatly valued how we did things.

If you can't live with the insecurity of knowing whether you're able to keep those dates, just make a pessimistic guess and add a few days on top. It is really not that hard.

The problem is - that’s unlikely to be true. If we make a miss, or the candidate(s) pull out we don’t want to re-list and re-funnel. So we keep the job open while we’re hiring. Usually we close it out once we have anyone at the final stages of 5-6 people in the interview loop.

But every job posting I’ve set up, I’ve configured an auto response template. It’s just a generic “sorry we decided to proceed with someone else” but it’s at least closure. We used to provide a few templates until someone demanded (including multiple emails to the hiring manager directly) looking for more information after we had send them a “sorry but we didn’t think your skills were a good match to the role”. It’s not perfect but at least everyone gets an answer from me.

It’s not worth a lawsuit for the reason to turn someone down. It’s also not worth hearing them argue back “yah I know JS you just asked bad question XYZ”… just not worth it