Josh TolanWe asked Sarah Connors from WinterWyman to speak about overcoming objections from candidates when you’re trying to recruit them into a role with a client who has bad reviews on sites such as Glassdoor. Here’s the full transcript of the video.
The biggest challenge I run into when sourcing candidates for a client that’s had bad reviews is just, making them stop and think twice about it. Why do they have bad reviews? What was it about? Has the leadership changed since then? Is it something that was a problem for someone else, but not for you?
Ask about bad reviews
I always think about, you know, Amazon. I’ll be shopping for something and 80% of the people loved it, but 10% of the people hated it. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a great product for me, it just means that for someone, it didn’t fit what they were looking for.
So then when I approach the situation to attract candidates for those clients, I just stop and ask them all of those questions. I go, why don’t you just stop and see for yourself? I definitely remember a time when I had a candidate with exactly that situation. He was like “oh, you know I’m not interested.” So, I asked him why because this one seemed like a great fit and he said “you know, I’ve just heard bad things about them.” I said have you seen for yourself? Have you talked to who’s over there now? Or, is it something where you can impact a change?
Find candidates that want to impact positive change
You know, for an HR and recruiting or someone in a management role, it could be something where they’ve had all these horrible issues, they’ve had turnover, they haven’t worked on morale and it’s something they’re really focused on now.
So, if that’s something you want to focus on in your next role, don’t let a bad review scare you off because you might want to be the one that get’s to go in there and impact that and you’ll talk about it in your next interview saying “oh my gosh, it was crazy at the time.” But, to get to see better engagement surveys, to get to see morale improve, it’s going to be one of the biggest accomplishments you get over the course of your career.
Does the company still offer what they want?
And then otherwise, some of the biggest highlights, I say for other staffing pros to highlight for candidates is just to ask those questions. What’s the specific negative feedback? Is it something that’s a deal breaker for you? What is important to you? Does this client still offer that? And then just find out for yourself. Go into the interview, meet people, ask questions. Just like they’re interviewing you, you’re going to be interviewing them.
Good luck!
We encourage you to connect with Sarah on LinkedIn.
