In a recent article about Facebook’s “diversity”, a major news publication reported their employment as 69% male, 57% white, 34% Asian, 4% Hispanic  2% black and 3% other ethnics.  There was no mention of age or religion, or other important “protected” demographic categories. Their global head of diversity at Facebook said “we have a long way to go.”  Toward what?  Maybe Facebook hires a lot of Asians because, as a group, they stand out as performers in math and technology.  Maybe they hire a lot of Asians because their office is in a geographic location with high concentrations of Asians in the workforce, thus reflecting local demographics.

Should Facebook’s labor force reflect the percentages of these protected categories in the entire population (or the global population or in their local geographic location)?  Facebook said it is trying to generate more hires for “underrepresented groups” so I take it that achieving population distributions is their goal, though the value of this is not made clear.  If we apply the same standard to all other businesses, including 6 million small employers with an average of 10 employees, the cost of achieving the “desired” distribution and the implications for the quality and productivity of the resulting workforce become serious concerns with questionable benefits.

Consider an NBA team. Its small number of players (about 15 on a team) hardly represents the population distribution. I see no seniors, no short people, relatively few whites, Asians and Hispanics, and I would guess not many of Jewish persuasion or many other religions. Shouldn’t they be held to the same standard as Facebook or any other business?  The NBA hires based on skill and performance, it probably doesn’t care much what you look like (even if owners have personal views that are disagreeable, they hire based on skill).  Any firm that purposefully does not hire the “best” workers it can find for the jobs it has regardless of what they look like or believe will underperform (as would an NBA team that hired people my age to play).

A “Stanford fellow” observed “Clearly Facebook has to step up now and so something about these numbers.”  Really?  Well, I can barely use my cell phone, but I am available for one of the “senior” slots in their new demographically correct labor force.  Pressuring firms (or requiring it as some wish to do) to structure their labor force to match some politically determined distribution will diminish the productivity of the work force and the performance of our economy.  Firms must be able to hire the best workers available if we are to get the most out of our resources.

This article was written by William Dunkelberg from Forbes and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Learn more about SmartRecruiters, your workspace to find and hire great people.

Small businesses added 75,000 jobs in January, according to payroll company Automated Data Processing. If things have been looking up at your organization, you may be eyeing a few new potential staff members as well. If you’ve been on the sidelines in the hiring game these past few years though, you might want to take a few moments to review some best practices for your expanding team. Here are seven tips for effective hiring at your small business.

1. ‘Measure’ passion. Skills and talent are important, but you must also take into account whether candidates are passionate about going to work for you. Did they do pre-interview research to inform themselves about your organization? Are they enthusiastic during the interview? Do they illustrate their talents and passion with stories of previous experience? It’s answers to these types of questions than can help evaluate whether or not potential employees really want to work for your company, or are simply looking for any old job.
2. Utilize established relationships. Often, you can find employees just by contacting folks you already have relationships with. Dial up some of your business colleagues or post an update on LinkedIn informing your contacts of your hiring needs.
3. Offer incentives to team members. Your current staff represents a goldmine for finding new employees. Institute a referral program in which team members can earn cash rewards for referring a new hire. Just make sure you advertise the dollar amount as “after-tax” — there’s nothing worse than employees thinking they just made $1,000 only to find out that a good chunk of it is going to Uncle Sam.
4. Institute a “day in the life” program. Consider creating a program where potential hires come in and shadow one of your employees for a day. This familiarizes candidates with your day-to-day operations, plus it gives you an idea of how they function with your existing staff. If you’re hiring freelancers or virtual employees, schedule a Skype meeting with a current staff member to discuss duties and responsibilities.
5. Search social media. When using social media to find candidates, LinkedIn should be your first stop. After that, check any potential hires for inappropriate Facebook postings, as well as negative or offensive tweets. Be sure that you do not factor any protected class information into your hiring decisions (gender, race, religion, age, disability, origin or pregnancy).
6. Interview like a pro. Whether in person or over the Internet, make sure you get the interview right. Show up on time, be positive, and diligently address any red flags you may have found on a resume. There are good and bad answers to any issues — interruptions in work history, for example — so make sure you ask all the right questions and let candidates respond accordingly.
7. Consider hiring older employees. Older workers can bring a certain level of experience to your organization that younger bucks just don’t have. Plus, if they work out, they can help mentor younger team members. They also tend to give better attention to detail and are typically more organized.

Now that we’ve talked a bit about best practices for hiring, let’s discuss pay. If you’re not willing to loosen up the purse strings a bit when a stellar candidate comes along, you may not improve your team’s quality by much. If you’re not familiar with average pay rates for the position you’re hiring, check out websites like Salary and PayScale to ensure you offer fair compensation. Hiring the right folks for your small business is important, but paying them appropriately can keep them around for a long time.

Are you doing any hiring this year?

This article was written by Andrew Schrage, co-owner of the MoneyCrashers.com, from Forbes and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Learn more about SmartRecruiters, your workspace to find and hire great people.

Additional Reading on Forbes: “How Small Business Can Hire Better – And Faster”

Who’s the hottest hire in Silicon Valley today? No, it’s not the data scientist, mobile app engineer, or digital marketer; it’s a user experience designer. Today, if your enterprise app isn’t beautiful, simple, elegant, and easy-to-use from day one, your company has little hope of becoming a billion-dollar business. Design is everything.

Data from jobs website Glassdoor showed that, in early May, 2,260 companies nationally were hoping to hire user experience (UX) designers.That compares to 975 companies trying to hire big data engineers, another “hot” hire. Jobs for user-experience designers are expected to grow 22% over the next 10 years; in the San Francisco Bay Area, epicenter of the current tech boom, Glassdoor reports the average salary for a senior UX designer at about $114,000, as of last month. The head of one New York-based startup recently told me he’s now paying UX designers two times what he pays other types of equally experienced designers, compared with just 30% more a few years ago. This CEO is actively recruiting UX gurus in Europe — despite the visa costs — because of what he sees as a pronounced shortage in the U.S.

Having been an entrepreneur and investor in enterprise software companies for 20 years, I’ve seen a huge shift in the last few years toward creating a stellar user experience. Remember when software companies like Oracle, Microsoft, and SAP sold massive, costly, complex applications that took months to learn? IT administrators spent several months installing and learning how to use the new software. Then, employees sat through training courses and muddled through complicated screens to figure out their new “productivity tools.” Ironically, the applications were so poorly designed that they hampered productivity; many end-users were so confused, they avoided using the apps all together.

Next-gen SaaS companies like Salesforce.com made rolling out software faster and cheaper, but the user experience is still pretty dreadful. Well, no one will put up with that now. IT administrators—and employees accustomed to using beautifully designed products like Apple’s iPhone–want to instantly “turn on” Web and mobile apps so employees can grasp new enterprise tools within minutes, with no formal training. In fact, some of the best designed applications are consumed by the employees directly with no training or involvement from IT whatsoever.

A few years ago, SaaS companies such as Box, Dropbox, Atlassian,and Zendesk led the charge to create elegant and easy-to-use enterprise apps. Today many enterprise startups like Captora, Any.do and SumAll (Battery Ventures is an investor in SumAll) are also baking design into their DNA. In each case, a UX designer was one of the first five hires, and product design was core to the company’s product strategy. This is in stark contrast to traditional enterprise software companies like Oracle, SAP and Salesforce, where design was an afterthought.

Let’s look at some examples to see how far we have come.

Box vs. Sharepoint 

Zendesk vs. Remedy

So, as an enterprise software entrepreneur, what does a design-driven world mean to your company at a practical level?

• First, make sure an experienced designer is one of your first five hires. This will ensure design is prioritized early in your company’s culture.
• Second, aim to hire one designer for every three to five engineers. This ratio may sound high, but remember that design is a competitive advantage over time. Better product design typically yields higher product engagement, quicker sales cycles and higher customer lifetime value.
• Third, consider making UX a VP-level role. It would not surprise me to see more enterprise companies elevate the design function to a senior status. One recent example of this is Trifacta, where two of the company’s senior executives have “Experience” in their title – Jeff Heer, cofounder and chief experience officer, and Tutti Taygerly, VP of user experience. Once designers see your company has a VP-level design role reporting directly to the CEO, they’ll be more likely to accept job offers, as they know their contributions will be valued.

Of course, large enterprise software companies aren’t about to give up on the design race without a fight, and companies such as IBM have publicly announced initiatives to hire thousands of UX designers. But startups have an edge in the “race to simplicity” because it’s far easier to create an elegant product from scratch than it is to fix a clunky and complex one.You can put lipstick on a pig (digitally), but it’s still a pig.

This article was written by Roger Lee in the My Say Column by Forbes and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.  Photo Credit ChrisLaBrooy. Learn more about SmartRecruiters, your workspace to find and hire great people.

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.