When it comes to chain and franchise restaurants, one of the most important ingredients for business success is a dependable team.

Running a franchise restaurant is more than creating great food, it’s creating an enjoyable environment that consumers will rave about. 

This is achieved by cultivating a welcoming ambiance, a layout restaurant staff can easily navigate, and coordinating a well-organized team. Of course, in order to achieve a well-oiled machine of a team, great staff is needed. 

This article will act as a guide to staffing franchise restaurants, listing every employee needed and nine tips to help build the best restaurant staff for your establishment. 

What Types of Employees Does Your Restaurant Need?

To run a restaurant efficiently, diverse skill sets are required in the front and back of the house. 

Every restaurant employee is vital to ensure daily operations go off without a hitch; below outlines each staff member needed to create a smooth-operating restaurant.  

Front-of-house restaurant staff

The front-of-house restaurant staff works predominantly with customers.

Floor Manager(s)

Floor managers ensure the front end of your restaurant is running smoothly. They are in charge of staffing and scheduling, bookings, and dining room prep. Floor managers hire, fire, and train front-of-house staff and provide exquisite hospitality to customers. The floor manager works with the kitchen manager to track inventory and deal with suppliers. 

Skills:  

• Well-organized
• Experience in business management and hospitality 
• People management experience
• Strong leadership abilities 

Server(s)

Most restaurants require some sort of server(s) in order to operate. The servers of your restaurant have the most customer interaction of any front-of-house staff. They offer great hospitality to customers through recommendations, taking orders, and relaying feedback and special accommodations to the floor manager or back-of-house staff. Servers are the faces of your brand who customers will remember and review. 

Skills: 

• Customer service experience
• Ability to multitask and work well under pressure
• Memorization and communication skills
• Enjoys working within teams

Food Runner(s)

Food Runners deliver the food that has been ordered and prepared. Food runners sort tickets and deliver food to the right tables to relieve servers from the added stress of taking orders and running them out simultaneously. Food runners work with the front and back of the house staff.

Skills: 

• Ability to work in a fast-paced environment
• Strong attention-to-detail
• Customer service skills

Busser 

Similar to food runners, bussers work with the front and back restaurant staff. However, bussers have less customer interaction than any other front-of-house position. Bussers clean tables and reset them to keep the dining room prepared for quick table turnovers. 

Skills: 

• Ability to work in a fast-paced environment
• Strong attention-to-detail and ability to anticipate customer needs 
• Willingness to get hands dirty

Host 

The host is the first person who interacts with a customer, being the first to welcome them in or speaking with them on the phone. The host seats guests and must have a good comprehension of the reservation booking system and seating layout. They coordinate takeout orders and attend to customers in the waiting area. Hosts wear many hats, helping to prepare the dining room and cleaning as well. 

Skills: 

• Great customer service skills
• Quick-thinking and decisive
• Adaptable
• Friendly and personable

Bartender

Bartenders create, and often serve, drinks to customers. They also manage the bar inventory, make knowledgeable recommendations and interact with customers. 

Skills: 

• Mixology training and experience
• Customer service experience
• Strong attention-to-detail
• Memorization skills

Back-of-house restaurant staff

While the front-of-house staff deal directly with customers, the back-of-house staff provides the main reason many customers go to a restaurant – a clean establishment to eat great food. 

Chef

The chef conceptualizes the restaurant menu. In addition to inventing delicious dishes that will keep your customers coming back, chefs request inventory and train cooks. The chef works closely with the kitchen manager to communicate all kitchen needs.

Skills: 

• Well-organized and creative
• Culinary experience
• Leadership skills

Kitchen Manager

The kitchen manager works closely with the chef and floor manager to ensure the front and back of the house are all in sync. They ensure the back of the kitchen is running smoothly from the chef and cooks to the dishwashers. Additionally, they manage and order inventory at the chef’s request and schedule, hire, fire, and manage back-of-house staff. 

Skills: 

• Strong attention-to-detail and well-organized
• Management experience 
• Leadership skills

Line Cook

Line cooks assist the head chef in preparing delicious dishes for customers. Each line cook is stationed at a particular prep post and works repetitively preparing the same product to help create a complete dish. 

Skills: 

• Back-of-house experience 
• Ability to concentrate on repetitive work
• Strong attention-to-detail 

Dishwasher

Dishwashers clean all dirty dishes, silverware, napkins, kitchen equipment, and floors. Dishwashers speed up the dish cleaning process, cleaning and drying dishes quicker than an actual dishwasher machine.

Skills: 

• Willingness to get hands dirty
• Ability to concentrate on repetitive work
• Ability to work in a fast-paced environment

9 Tips for Building a Great Restaurant Staff

Now that you have a list of each restaurant staff member you’ll likely need, we’ll cover nine tips to help you find the best restaurant staff. 

Job Board Sites

Job board sites are the most common place people look when searching for a job, because they are easily filtered and well-organized. Posting on a job board is one of the best and easiest ways to be seen in today’s market. 

Make sure you add filters into your job listing and outline what the role requires. Additionally, write an inspiring restaurant mission statement that will make job seekers want to join your restaurant. Share who your business is, giving a better idea of your working environment. 

Referrals

When a new position opens at your restaurant, one of the best ways to find good prospects is to ask employees to refer someone that they think would add value to the team. A referral means that your employee vouched for that person and believes they will be a great addition to the staff. 

Create List of Must-Have Qualities

When searching for a new employee, know what you are looking for in someone applying for the position. Create a list of qualities that you require for someone to succeed in this position. Include a shortlist of these qualities in your job listing to show job seekers what you’re looking for. 

Prepare Interview Questions

Going into an interview, the interviewee and the interviewer should be well prepared. Consider the must-have qualities and job details and work environment – build specific restaurant interview questions that will allow you to better judge whether a candidate will be a good addition to the team. 

Have a Quality Onboarding Process

Once you find the perfect candidate(s), having a quality onboarding process is important to train your new employees and prevent errors that can impact customer reviews. 

While quality onboarding positively impacts business, it also creates a more enjoyable work environment for new employees who are likely nervous. This creates a great image for your restaurant as an employer – and who doesn’t want that?

Repeat Your Restaurant’s Mission

Ensure every employee knows your restaurant’s mission and is on the same page as you and the rest of the staff. In order to maintain a consistent restaurant brand and fulfill long-term and short-term goals, every member must do their part and work to achieve those goals – maintaining your mission. 

Lead by Example

As a restaurant owner or manager, you are the team leader and the rest of the staff will look to you and follow your lead at work. 

For example, if you always have your phone on you, your host may find it okay to have theirs on them too. Show your staff appropriate work behavior by being an example of that behavior yourself. 

Invest in Your Staff

It costs more to hire new employees than to invest in current employees. So, invest in your staff with training programs, employee wellbeing initiatives, and social events. 

The more appreciated a restaurant employee feels, the harder they will work and the longer they will stay. Investments big and small matter to your employees and make you a better employer. 

Have Respectable Pay and Benefits

The restaurant industry is known for its minimal wages. Even if you can get away with paying restaurant employees minimum wage, be realistic on their worth to your restaurant. 

Offering fair pay and benefits to your employees decreases employee turnover and, again, makes your restaurant a better employer. Having a bad employer reputation will make it harder to find the best quality staffers. 

Staffing Your Restaurant 

Staffing a restaurant is not easy – it requires extensive research and employee vetting to ensure your restaurant employees will constantly uphold your restaurant’s mission. 

When staffing your restaurant, this ultimate guide should act as a starting point to help your restaurant find ideal candidates who will be happy to join your team and stay for a while.

Nancy Altobello is a big fan of millennials.

Altobello, Vice Chair of Talent at EY, shared her thoughts on the changing global professional landscape and how companies can attract and nourish top talent–particularly among recent college graduates–at Universum’s Employer Branding Conference this morning in New York.

Talent, and recruiting it, aren’t just on the minds of campus reps and college seniors, says Altobello, noting that in a world where everything is increasingly more complex, talented, skilled labor is more important than ever before–and there’s less of it.

“Talent is now being viewed as an important resources by executives and by boards,” Altobello told Forbes. ”The dichotomy of talent being more important and less available has invented an executive issue.”

Below are Altobello’s observations about how to recruit and hang onto top-notch millennial employees.

1. They’re not all running for the door–if you can keep them interested. 

Data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says that millennials only tend to stay in each job an average of 18 months. Altobello says this doesn’t have to be the case.

“We’re starting to hear from a lot of people who’ve had two jobs in three years and want to stay somewhere,” she says. “But the work has to be interesting, they don’t want to keep doing the same thing.”

2. When it comes to compensation, cash is still king.

In this way millennials are just like professionals at every other stage of their careers; the best way to attract and keep the best and brightest is to pay them well.

 3. To younger professionals, flexibility is almost as important as salary.

Altobello says in this context flexibility means millennials want choices about how to deliver a job well done. With the understanding that deadlines and client needs must always be met, they want options about where and when they work–and they want their managers clearly on board.

“People are looking for approval around flexibility.”

 4. Millennials want to be regularly evaluated and advance quickly–but they’ll do the work to get there.

It’s a regular drumbeat about millennials: They want to be constantly told how they’re doing and see the payoff.

Altobello says managers need to understand that this is a population accustomed to “quick knowledge”–they grew up contacting their parents over cell phones with a single question, or consulting Google–and to view this as an opportunity. A yearly performance review is simply not the right approach.

“They want the trophies,” says Altobello, “but they’re very willing to earn them.”

5. On-the-job training is essential. 

According to an annual survey by Accenture of soon-to-graduate college seniors and graduates of the classes of 2012 and 2013, 80% of 2014 graduates expect to be formally trained by their first employer, but 52% of professionals who graduated from college within the past two years say they received no training in their first job.

Altobello says the best way to meet your company’s demand for skilled labor is to invest in developing current employees.

“So many skills are teachable and coachable. Most important is on-the-job training. Move them fast through a lot of experiences.”

Follow me on Twitter @KathrynDill. This article was written by Kathryn Dill from Forbes and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Learn more about SmartRecruiters, your workspace to find and hire great people.

The typical job ad is a horrifying anti-marketing message to the talent community. When you read a job ad, you should immediately get a sense for why a smart person would want the job. The job ad should focus less on what the Selected Candidate Must Possess, and more on answering the question “What’s so great about our company, and about this job?”

We market to customers. It’s time for us to apply a marketing mindset to the recruiting side of our business, too. If we don’t, we’re encouraging the sparkiest and most-valuable people who read our job ad to skip it and go on with their lives. What talented person with normal self-esteem wants to read 1000 words of corporate drivel that drone on and on about what the perfect candidate requires? That’s putting the marketing cart ahead of the horse. If we remember that the best job candidates — the kind we’re marketing to, if we care about talent in our organizations — won’t keep reading a job ad that turns them off in its first few lines.

If the whole focus of the ad is on the job requirements, you’re artificially depressing the caliber of the candidates who’ll respond to it.

It’s easy these days for a job-seeker to read a typical job ad and have the reaction “The people who wrote this job ad are high on their own exhaust fumes. Why would I want to grovel to convince them I have something valuable to offer?”

The more talent-repelling your job ad is, the lower the quality of candidate you can expect to respond to it. When I say ‘lower the quality,’ I’m talking about marketability. The more in-demand a job-seeker’s skills and experience are, the less he or she needs to spend hours filling out tedious forms in a corporate or institutional Black Hole (also known as an Applicant Tracking System). Here are ten easy tweaks that will dramatically increase the quality of responses your job ads get. Why  not try a few of them with your very next job opening?

Tell Us Who You Are

We need to know where the organization came from — is it a new spinoff of a larger company we know, or is it a joint venture between the Metropolitan Museum of Art and NASCAR, or what? Give us the backstory. “Massive Boring Industries is a leader in plastic extrusion” might be great branding for potential investors, who are going to do lots of their own digging if they’re smart before they put a dime into anything.

For job-seekers, you have to bring your branding to ground level and tell us what the company does and why anyone would care. If you yourself don’t know why you do what you do apart from the fact that you’re already doing it, that’s a vision-and-strategy problem that needs to be solved before you hire anyone new.

Lose the Zombie Voice

We don’t have to talk down to our job applicants in zombie-language job ads that read like government manuals: “You will performs tasks and duties in accordance with the Central Task and Duty Allocation Procedure outlined in blah blah blah.” There’s no reason for that kind of language ever to appear in a job ad. Its only effect will be drive anyone with a pulse away from your job ads and your organization.

Speak To Us Directly

We don’t speak to our customers in the third person, a la “The Appropriate Customer at 7-11 is a person with the following qualities.” We don’t specify what our customers must have. If they have a need for the stuff we sell and they have money, they’re perfect customers for us. Get any third-person language out of your job ads, too. The most common one is “The Selected Candidate will possess….” That’s insulting. It’s like you’re saying to the reader of your job ad, “This stuff we’re talking about is the stuff the Selected Candidate will have  — not YOUR sorry ass.”

Nuke The Bullets and Tell a Story

Bullet points are the opposite of conversation. They don’t tell a story. Use your job-ad real estate to tell us what the job is about, instead. Tell us the story of the job, like this:

Acme Explosives has just received clearance to ship our modular dynamite sticks through UPS and the Postal Service, and our e-commerce business is exploding! We need an E-Commerce Operations Manager to run interference between Marketing (who manages our website) and Production (who make the stick dynamite) to keep our online business running smoothly, and growing. If you love the back end of an ecommerce site and working with Marketing to merchandise and promote our online offerings to customers around the world, this could be a great spot for you and the next place to grow your career. 

How Do I Fit In?

Use a sentence in your job to explain how the open position fits into the overall organization. Here’s an example featuring the E-Commerce Operations Manager at Acme Explosives:

In this role you’ll report to the VP of Operations, Don Drysdale, who reports to our CEO Chuck Jones. You’ll work closely with our Marketing, Production and Inventory teams. 

A sharp job-seeker is going to read those two sentences and jump on LinkedIn to see who Don and Chuck are and where they’ve been. The more we can tell job-seekers about who they’d be working with in the job, the more appealing your ad (and your opportunity) will be to the people who can help you most.

What’s Fun About The Role?

You’ve got to tell the job-seeking community (made up of every working person, let’s be honest) why this job would be fun and enriching for them. If you can’t explain why a person would grow his or her flame in the job, then you’re saying “Come for the money,” except the money is never enough. If you’ve got anybody on your payroll who is doing it for the money, you’re shooting too low in the talent-acquisition process. Here are two sentences that give a prospective Acme Explosives E-Commerce Operations Manager a reason to apply:

One of your first priorities will be to look at our site’s usability to make whatever changes will make the buying experience more pleasant. You’ll come to our CustomerSlam 2014 global conference in San Francisco and meet our biggest customers. You’ll be the principal voice for e-commerce inside our company, and right in the middle of our strategic planning conversation.

Direct Us To A Person

If you’re going to take the approach I’m talking about here and that we teach, called Recruiting With a Human Voice, you’ve got to give job-seekers an alternative to the soul-crushing Black Hole recruiting portal. To put a toe in the water, take one job ad and try this new approach for that opening. Use a human voice in the ad, and take the other suggestions we’ve listed here. In that job ad, use a human being’s name and email address rather than a sterile website address.

Whomever has the least risk aversion on your HR team is the perfect person for the assignment! Let job-seekers write to your designated Talent Liaison rather than pitching resumes into the void. Watch the level of engagement and quality of response zoom up!

Give Us An Assignment

If you’re worried about your Talent Liaison getting crushed with resumes, don’t panic. Give the talent community an assignment to fulfill, right in the job ad. Ask them to send you a Human-Voiced Resume and a 300-word essay on a topic you choose. Choose a topic that will allow the best candidates to show you in a few sentences why they should be high on your interview list. Sad to say, most job-seekers will respond to your ad without completing the assignment. That’s an automatic “no thanks,” so your Talent Liaison is unlikely to work any harder using this process than he or she did before.

Since you need candidates eventually to get into the Black Hole database if you’re going to interview them, you can ask only the folks you interview to fill out those forms, once they have a reason to expend the energy.

Here’s the assignment that appeared in the Acme Explosives E-Commerce Operations Manager job ad:

If this sounds like a good fit for you, send us a 300-word reply that explains why this job and your background are a great match. Tell us how you’d approach the role and how Acme could support you best in building an e-commerce operation to support our global customer base. Send your reply plus your Human-Voiced Resume to Declan McManus at declanm@acmeexplosivesizdabomb.com.

Tell Us Why You Need Us

Lastly, save a line in your job ad to tell the brilliant, creative, funny, energized and passionate people who are evaluating you as an employer what their presence would do for you. Most job ads have a voice embedded in them that makes a job-seeker feel like the company thinks it’d be doing him a favor by interviewing him. Why would we ever do that? We need our employees. They make our engine go. They delight our customers and our shareholders and frustrate our competitors. Your employees are your company.

There is no shareholder value, no new product pipeline, no accounts receivable, nothing of any value without them, just a pile of PCs and boring beige cubicle walls.

Tell us in the job ad why you need us, like this:

“We’re excited about our e-commerce opportunity and excited to meet the person who will take us a big step up in our operation. If that’s you, we can’t wait to meet you!”

Like Liz Ryan’s worldview? Follow her on Twitter (@humanworkplace)! Send Liz a LinkedIn invitation at liz@humanworkplace.com. 

This article was written by Liz Ryan from Forbes and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Learn more about SmartRecruiters, the only platform managers and candidates love.

Every few years we get a new crop of business buzzwords to slog through. They waft in on the breeze, and all of a sudden they’re on everyone’s lips and marketing collateral. During the first internet boom we had ‘end-to-end solutions’ and ‘full-service provider’ coming out our ears. Now it’s hard to get through a business meeting without someone using the words talent, community or engagement — sometimes all three in the same sentence.

It’s easy to talk about talent, and about building community at work. The problem is that talent and culture and community are words that don’t mean anything if they aren’t put into practice. If you and I each had a nickel for every corporate recruiting brochure and annual report that uses the words “We Value Talent” in them we’d be on the beach in Grand Cayman right now, but just talking about talent doesn’t make a talent-valuing culture real.

It’s sad that anyone would think that you could get great people in the door at your company and keep them there just by flinging around the words “We value talent.” That defies everything we know about human behavior, specifically the observation that actions speak louder than words. If you truly value talent in your organization, it’s easy to show it. If you take just a few of our eight suggestions below you’re going to get better hires in the door faster, and you’re going to keep the people you’ve already got on board happy and (wait for it!) engaged.

1. Put a Human Voice in Your Job Ads

Use a human voice in your job ads. Great candidates are not going to care that your company has an Immediate Need. They won’t respond to job ads that talk right past them using the third person, like “The Selected Candidate will possess five years of Blah-di-Blah and speak Ancient Greek.” Awful third-person boilerplate like “The Selected Candidate will…” says to your valued future employees, “That Selected Candidate we’re referring to is obviously not YOU.” If you want people to care about your Immediate Need, talk to them as humans.

2. Remove the Electrified Fence

The best job candidates, people who could help your firm the most, won’t suffer the indignities of Black Hole recruiting. I’m talking about the electrified-fence Applicant Tracking System that stands between your talent-hungry managers and the brilliant people outside the wall who could help them. Take down the Black Hole system and replace it with a human recruiting process if you want worthy contributors to consider joining you.

3. Hire Adults and Unleash Them

Years ago I heard at a business conference that the administrative cost of managing an existing policy, no matter how trivial, would dwarf the cost of whatever problem the policy had been drafted to address within a few years. That makes sense — the more bureaucracy in your shop, the less effectively your sales-and-production engines can run. The remedy is to hire thinking adults and take the shackles off them. Reduce the number of policies, increase the latitude of everyone on your team from the front-desk receptionist up, and focus on the important stuff.

4. Put Culture First

Every day I talk to frustrated CEOs and VPs who say “We talk about all goals all the time, but we don’t hit them.” Expecting to hit goals because you talk about the goals is nonsensical. People already know what the goals are. If your environment doesn’t lend itself to frank and constant discussion about what isn’t working, or if it’s discouraged or forbidden to mention any aspect of the Emperor of Your Business’s naked state, then you can talk goals until you’re blue in the face with no improvement. Your culture is the whole shebang. If the trust level isn’t high enough to support truth-telling at every level, the words “We Value Talent” fall flat.

5. View Recruiting as a Team Sport

Companies that get and keep great people are companies that make recruiting a continual activity and charge everyone in the organization with cultivating contacts. Can you imagine a Procurement Manager saying “Gee, I hope none of my current suppliers goes out of business – I don’t know what I’d do!” They have backup suppliers on hand, and backups to the backups. Recruiting works the same way.

Every manager and every HR person should have a robust and vibrant network and connections throughout your industry and locale. Recruiting viewed as a wave rather than a set of particles becomes a cultural value in itself.

6. Market Your Jobs Like a Marketer

How do marketers get the word out about their products? They don’t splash ads all over creation and then complain that too many of the wrong leads came in. They take responsibility for their marketing efforts. You can do the same thing in recruiting. You’ll let the closest-in members of your tribe know about new job opportunities first. That means your employers, suppliers and customers.

If you need to spread the net more widely, you’ll let fans and followers of your company know about new jobs available. Throwing ads out into the void is just as bad as a job-seeker spraying the landscape with his resume. If you value talent, use your community in your talent-snagging efforts!

7. Build a Talent Community

Anyone who interacts with your company is a conduit to your next hire, if not your next hire him- or herself. In 2014, launch a talent community to keep your fans and contacts close at hand. It is easy and fun to start conversing with the folks who appreciate your company, use your products or want to work with you some day. Get them on a newsletter list or a LinkedIn Group, keep them informed and chatting about your company’s news and future plans and stop running job ads, once and for all!

8. Talk about Fear and Trust

All the motivational posters in the world and even the most alluring bonus plans won’t change the talent-valuing equation unless you talk about the energy in the room at every opportunity. Corporate, institutional and startup cultures can all get tight and tense when the fear level goes up, and your best employees won’t say a word. They’ll just give notice and move to a competitor.

It’s easy to show your team and the folks outside the palace walls that you value talent beyond the lip service level, if you do. Start with our list of action steps, and then invent your own!

Like Liz Ryan’s worldview? Follow her on Twitter (@humanworkplace) and Facebook! Send Liz a LinkedIn invitation at liz@humanworkplace.com. 

This article was written by Liz Ryan from Forbes and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Learn more about SmartRecruiters, the only platform managers and candidates love.

Many of us in HR and Leadership circles – I am among them – bemoan the negativity that springs up during the process of recruiting employees, affecting positive candidate experience and your employer brand.  One would think companies would have a stake in ensuring candidates, whether they are hired or not, have a positive experience with the hiring company and your recruiting process. Others might point out that not getting the job is in itself enough to sour the candidate on the company if he or she is passed over. Yet studies have shown even unsuccessful applicants retain a positive experience of the company, if a too-often-overlooked link is maintained: clear, unambiguous communication.

Most people just want to know they’ve been heard. We need the organizations we engage with – as consumers, as personal brands, as parents, as just about anything  – to be clear, to set or correct expectations, and to do us the courtesy of responding. There’s even an annual award for companies that maintain a good candidate experience, the Candidate Experience Awards. I’m proud to be on the council for this organization because it’s such an important cause. The most recent awards report, issued in 2013, highlighted 63 companies that excel at creating a positive candidate experience. Before you roll your eyes and say ‘ugh, another vanity report,” let’s consider the following:

• Nearly 60% of survey respondents (candidates at surveyed companies) feel they have a relationship with a company before they apply for a job. In the Internet age, what recruiter or company would expect anything less? Most people research a company before they decide to apply, using social media, career pages, LinkedIn and networks of acquaintances and friends who work for the target company.
• A staggering 75% of candidates who apply for a job never hear back, according to a recent CareerBuilder survey. Yes, this is staggering and not good. This is unacceptable.

How can any rational Leader or HR team justify this? How can any responsible company decide it isn’t worth the time to respond to an applicant? We’re not even talking constructive feedback here: we’re talking common courtesy. Even an auto-generated email, followed up with a note or call, would be 100 times better than dead silence.

There’s tremendous risk in ignoring applicants, even unqualified applicants, when sites like Glassdoor and blogs are so easy to access – and so simple to use to leave anonymous critique of an employer.

And criticism of an employer brand does not begin and end with a spurned candidate. Your own employees are looking at those sites too. The more often they see their employer called out for shoddy recruiting practices, the more likely they are to decide it’s not a company they want to work for. Then your recruiting problem morphs into a retention problem.

So what’s the solution?

Communication. It’s that simple, and that hard. You must respond and acknowledge applicants, even if it’s via an automated response from an HR software package. If you can provide direct and constructive feedback, so much the better.

Why does communication matter so much?

A 2013-2014 study (download the PDF) by Towers Watson proves the link between ROI and effective communications.  Quoting directly from the report summary (emphasis is mine):

• “Companies with high effectiveness in change management and communication are three and a half times more likely to significantly outperform their industry peers than firms that are not effective in these areas.
• The most effective companies build a differentiated employee value proposition (EVP), and are three times more likely to focus on behaviors that drive organization success instead of focusing on program cost.”

That last point bears repeating: “focus on behaviors that drive organization success.” It’s simple, elemental, and utterly dependent on good communications. To be a successful company, you need to focus on behaviors that foster a culture of success.  Communications is one of those behaviors. Towers Watson reminds readers of its report, quote, “Cultivate a culture of community and information sharing.” Within and without, with employees and candidates, the key to success – and attracting the candidates who will help your business grow – is good communications. There’s just no substitute.

So I’ll throw down a challenge for HR practitioners and Leaders everywhere: tell me about how you communicate successfully. Share how you communicate progress – with job applicants? Where does data fit in? How do you create a workplace culture of open and honest communications with employees, so they recommend your workplace to their peers? What tools do you use – software, back of the envelope, or other – to remind yourself daily that good, honest and direct communications are fundamental HR and Leadership skills?

Let’s close the gap between candidate experience and communications, even if it’s one applicant at a time. Let’s be good communicators, more than just stewards of process and regulations. Let’s take back good HR and Leadership that drives a better culture, before it’s taken away from us. What do you say?

This article was written by Meghan M. Biro from Forbes and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Learn more about SmartRecruiters, the only hiring platform managers and candidates love.

I turned 54 a couple of weeks ago. That makes me more than old enough to remember the frenzy to automate virtually every business process in the nineteen-eighties and -nineties. What cracks me up thinking about those days is the mantra, repeated a hundred times a day: “Garbage in, garbage out.” Before you automated a process, every business analyst and programmer told us, it had to be a sensible process on its own.

If that were true — if we had really followed that wisdom — we wouldn’t have the mess that we have in recruiting today. We took a craptastic 1940s process, the job-application-screening process used by factories probably since Henry Ford was building Model Ts, and we simply threw the sucker online. We didn’t change a thing. If any of the vendors who built the first Applicant Tracking Systems had spent ten seconds thinking about that process, they would have designed it intelligently, using normal human logic to create a funnel that would simplify the process of separating wheat from chaff in the selection pipeline. That’s not what they did, though.

When you fill out an online job application, it asks you where you worked and for how long, and it asks for your job title. Any reasonable person can extrapolate your major duties from the job title, but every ATS I’ve ever seen goes ahead and asks for the tasks and duties you performed, anyway. Tasks and duties! It’s 2014, but you’re asked what tasks and duties you performed, as though the list of items in a job description is more important for your next employer to understand than what you actually accomplished on the job.

A friend of mine is an elementary-school principal. She got halfway through completing an online job application in a recent job search and gave up. “It’s so stupid, I couldn’t even finish it,” she said. “When the form asked me for my last position, I typed in ‘Principal.’ When the next field to complete was ‘Tasks and duties,’ I wanted to type in ‘Don’t you guys know?’”

If you think about the smartest, most switched-on person you’ve ever worked with, and then think about the biggest slacker and do-nothing person you’ve ever worked alongside, the contrast between those two people is obvious. Yet no ATS in the world could distinguish between them, as long as the two people worked at the same job in the same company at the same time. Applicant tracking systems don’t inquire about what you learned at a job, what you left in your wake or what you view as your greatest accomplishment. Our selection mechanism is stuck in 1940, interested only in the tasks and duties and tools you used, as though those things out of context could have any significance to your next boss at all.

It’s not just the choice of fields in Applicant Tracking Systems that makes them so loathsome, and I say that as a twenty-year corporate HR chief. They are built on bad logic at their core. They are based on the notion that the central problem in recruiting is to screen out and dismiss unsuitable candidates, making a business function (and an expensive one at that!) out of the vetting process, whereas in fact the problem in recruiting is that it’s hard to find great people, and we should be selling them throughout the process if we want them to consider joining us.

Ask any CEO how s/he feels about the availability of talent. It’s a global problem, and not only because job descriptions are so often fanciful-bordering-on-delusional. It’s hard to find employees who are not only smart and plucky but also good communicators, flexible and reliable. When you’re facing a shortage of talent — not job applicants, mind you, but the proactive and self-directed subset of those applicants who can make a difference for your firm and its customers — is your first thought “Let me make the job application process as off-putting as possible?” Not if you understand Thing One about human motivation, it’s not.

Any employer’s recruiting priority is to get great people into the talent pipeline and keep them there.

And what says “We love you!” more than forty pages of fields that must be filled in, boxes to check, and mind-numbing tedium just to fill out a job application?

When the terse auto-responder helpfully shoots back a snippy “Your application has been received (passive voice!) — if there is interest in your background for any position, we will let you know,”  talented job-seekers with other options — the very people we should be wooing with all our hearts – conclude that their bread is best buttered elsewhere, and bail. Can we blame them?

Applicant tracking systems are Black Holes for job-seekers. You lob a resume in, and nothing comes back. If you’re lucky enough to get a response, it’s likely to be a different (but still terse) auto-response demanding that you complete an aptitude test or an honesty test. The honesty tests employers use are actually intelligence tests, because if you’re not smart enough to figure out the ‘right’ answer on those things (“If you saw an employee stealing, what would you do?”) you’re not smart enough to have a job.

I’ve been in HR since 1984, and I have never seen the state of corporate and institutional recruiting at a lower point than where it is today. We treat job applicants like dogmeat at every stage of the process. We drive them away when we should be welcoming them into our corral. There’s no business justification for it, and our shareholders should be up in arms. Maybe they’ve drunk some of the same toxic lemonade that so many others have tasted, the kind that says “It can’t be helped — there are so many job applicants, we need a mechanical system to sort them all out.”

That’s a lie. We can market to talent as thoughtfully and narrowly as we market to customers. Marketers learn in a flash that when you market to the wrong people, it costs your company money in the qualification process. It doesn’t work differently in recruiting. We don’t have to blast our job openings out to the whole wide world, but we do, and then we complain that we can’t read all the resumes that come back to us. We can be smarter than that. We can evolve past Black Hole recruiting to treat each job-seeker like the valued collaborator he or she is. Our customers need us to figure out how, and so do our shareholders, and so do our communities.

The ATS vendors that will survive to 2020 and beyond will be the ones that figure out how to humanize the selection process. Luckily, it isn’t complicated. An ATS that were oriented toward engaging job-seekers rather than intimidating and repelling them would be a good start. Once we make contact with a job-seeker, that contact should be human.

It isn’t complicated to do, but it takes a shift in perspective. In the mid-nineties without benefit of ATS technology (which is nothing more than big, dumb database technology anyway) we hired two or three hundred people a month without difficulty in our growing tech firm. Any organization can do the same thing, but in order to humanize a recruiting process you first have to think like a human.

Every hiring manager and every HR or Recruiting person should be cultivating their networks all the time. Recruiting isn’t an event, but a process that never stops. We’ve tried so hard to make particles out of waves in the business world, and the way we recruit new employees is a perfect example. If we can just evolve past the ridiculous way we hire people now — screening resumes, for instance, on the basis of obviously irrelevant job-spec bullet points — it can only be good for us.

A CTO said to me “I have three openings on my team. I need a software architect, a manager of hardware design and a project manager. Since I have three openings, I can be flexible — but not according to our company’s policy.” “How so?” I asked him. “Well, I could hire a stronger hardware manager, for instance, and get a project manager with a little less experience. If I got a very senior software guy, then the other two positions could flex toward someone a little more green. But the job requisition system requires me to know exactly how many years of experience each new hire needs to have, and exactly what I’m going to pay each one. That’s stupid! Hiring happens in context, like everything else in business.”

We have a lot of work to do to humanize recruiting, and that’s not just for the benefit of the people being recruited. It’s simply good business to get out of the hyper-mechanical world we so love to inhabit at work, and bring recruiting back into the squishy, juicy, warm and human realm where it belongs.

Like Liz Ryan’s worldview? Follow her on Twitter (@humanworkplace) and Facebook! Send Liz a LinkedIn invitation at liz@humanworkplace.com. 

This article was written by Liz Ryan from Forbes and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Learn more about SmartRecruiters, the only platform managers and candidates love.