Professionally Unprofessional

There is a strange phenomenon going on that seems to be plaguing America's corporations. Some companies are failing to take the time to contact the candidates they have interviewed. Why is this? Why is it that so many companies are leaving many of their potential candidates wondering what happened? Does the extra 30 seconds to call or send an email to say "we picked someone else" or "you're not a good fit" really that difficult?

I've had a few people tell me stories within the last week related to this. In fact, it happened to me earlier this year. They go a little something like this (names have been changed to protect the offended):

Story 1: Jane interviewed with a large global financial company and received a phone call two weeks later from the representative who stated "we are still deliberating and plan to call you with results this coming Friday". This coming friday turned into....never. The candidate called about 3 weeks later and the same representative said "Didn't I talk to you already?" (clearly not otherwise Jane would not have called back). She continued to say" I'm sorry, I don't know where my head is these days. We decided to pursue other candidates". What would have happened had Jane decided not to call back?

Story 2: Bob also interviewed with a large corporation and received a couple of interim
phone calls stating that Bob would be notified shortly. The notification never came. In fact Bob sent a follow up email asking about the status of the position and also asked about a weather incident that occurred in that location. He received an email response about the weather. But no response about whether or not he got the offer. In fact, he has not received a response about it to this day (and this was 2 months ago).

Story 3: At the end of Peter's interview, the representative told him "you did a very good job! You should expect an offer. But we'll get back to you". The company never called Peter back. Peter called back 3 times to check on the status of the position and each time they said "We're still working on it but we will call you as soon as possible". Mind you, peter is expecting to get an offer based on what was told to him at the end of his interview. Peter ended up receiving an offer from a different company and before accepting it, he wanted to see if the previous company would still make him one. Peter contacts his friend who works in the department that he interviewed for, only to find out from the Senior Manager that they did not wish to make him an offer. Poor Peter...he had to find out from his FRIEND that he was rejected.

These are true stories and I am sure that there are several others out there like this. And granted, not every company behaves unprofessionally in this way, but It seems as though I am hearing a lot of complaints about this these days and would really like to understand the rationale behind it. If any of you work in recruiting or some HR/ managerial function please comment and help me understand why companies do not have an extra 2 minutes to simply say "no".