Responding to Reviews: 5 Stages of Grief

I’ve been working at Glassdoor for three years now. I spent my first year and a half in sales, working with companies to promote their employer brand and recruit using Glassdoor. The last year and a half, however, has been spent building the sales development organization here. Recently, I received my own negative interview review from a candidate. While many of our clients have received negative reviews and dealt with those in the past (and I’ve even helped them through this process), it was the first time I received negative feedback through Glassdoor. In short, my experience felt a lot like the five stages of grief. In the end, I learned a lot about myself, my team and my company. About me In the 18 months I’ve spent building our SDR team, I’ve averaged about five to six phone screens and four on-site visits each week. These meetings are on top of my regular job, which includes training my team, working with other departments and building processes to scale quickly. I’ve been fortunate enough to lead 25+ high-performing SDRs, LDRs (Lead Development Representatives) and two amazing managers. By my rough estimation, I’ve conservatively interviewed over 350 candidates and read through at least 3,500 resumes. About four months ago, I received negative interview feedback from candidates on Glassdoor. While I’ll talk more about this later, I definitely learned to take full responsibility for this criticism. Here are my five stages of grief when dealing with Glassdoor reviews: Steps 1 & 2: Denial & Anger I’m combining these steps into one because they happened so quickly. The first negative interview review I received was in January 2015. My first thoughts were, “Oh, that’s a one-off” and “It’s not me, it’s them.” Denial at its finest. Shortly after this first review, others started rolling in. At this point, I quickly moved into the anger stage – I felt personally attacked. These reviews were directly about me, after all. At this point, I actually thought, “Even if these reviews are true, it’s not my fault! I’m expected to hire the best team and hire fast – how can I be expected to provide a great candidate experience, too?” For me, this was the most intense stage of dealing with reviews. I had no idea just how deeply personal Glassdoor reviews could feel. We tell employers every day to handle these reviews professionally, but that’s harder than you think. In this stage, I officially found myself in the same position that I can safely assume many hiring managers and recruiters have found themselves in. Step 3: Bargaining The next stage took me to a place where I was looking to regain control. I thought of all the things I could have done better and all the things I could have fixed earlier. “If only I had better delegated more of the recruiting process to my team, or placed more emphasis on the interview experience or just caught myself sooner… these reviews never would have happened.” This exercise was helpful for me to understand my issues, but in the end I still hadn’t really done anything yet about the reviews or improving the candidate experience. Step 4: Depression Now the ramifications of the reviews started to hit me. It wasn’t just one interview review, it was many. I started to question everything – how are these reviews going to affect recruiting in the future? What will my 25+ member team think of me now? This stage was also incredibly hard because I started to get called out by co-workers. Transparency is great, but it can also be embarrassing. I received emails asking me to do something about the reviews and what they were all about. This definitely stung, as I was already dealing with how bad it felt to receive these negative reviews in the first place. Also, I definitely thought to myself, “We’re Glassdoor. How could I let this happen?” Step 5: Acceptance Acceptance is the most important step in this process. Finally, I had no choice but to accept that my interview process had flaws – everyone’s does. But I also know that this process has helped us find the two dozen people on my team who are kicking ass. While I realized that some things can, of course, improve, I needed to stop being so hard on myself and learn to accept the things I can change. At Glassdoor, like other companies, most candidates who interview won’t get hired. But it’s still important that our SDR interview process provides job seekers a great experience even if they aren’t the right fit. Why? In the end, these people are going to talk about their interview process whether we like it or not – so it’s in our best interest to give them something great or at least satisfying to talk about. Responding to reviews After acceptance, I knew it was time to actually respond to my negative reviews. Glassdoor clients and non-clients alike have the ability to respond to reviews about their company. We can preach that employers should take this crucial step all we want, but it’s still not easy nor without some trepidation. I feared I would respond to my own interview reviews and sound defensive. Or respond to positive reviews and sound fake. Also, I knew that any review I wrote would be very public – not just to candidates, but to all of my co-workers. Again, nerve wracking. To put things in perspective, it took me two hours to respond to my first interview review. First, I read about responding to reviews on our company’s blog and even talked to our PR director about how to best handle these reviews. In the end, my best resource was actually one of our clients, Zillow. Spencer Rascoff, their CEO, responds to almost every single Glassdoor review, good or bad. When I read through them, I learned how to respond to negative and positive reviews while sounding authentic and real. Then, I started responding! I also asked my current team to provide their own account of our interview process – good or bad. I knew their opinion would be unique. After all, every one had successfully passed through our candidate experience. Plus, because I value their feedback, I had to have it. In the end, I learned that, while feedback is generally overwhelmingly positive, there are some areas to improve upon (like our training process, for example). All this feedback has helped me respond to reviews and make our team stronger. What responding to reviews taught me I’m going to be honest – responding to reviews is scary. Dealing with negative feedback can really hurt. Going through this process taught me quite a bit about what companies and our own clients deal with on a daily basis. I also learned how grateful I am to work at a company that is helping people find jobs and companies they love – and helping employers find the best talent. While dealing with negative reviews is tough and I’m glad I don’t have to do it often, it’s crucial in building the best possible team and company. One of the reasons my team has grown and excelled as it has is because of critical or constructive reviews and the changes we’ve implemented since receiving them.