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.

By now we’ve all seen the 2013 Gallup report on employee engagement, The State of the American Workplace. Words that come to mind when I re-read the report:  bummer, disheartening, bad news.  But I also wonder: what exactly did we expect? Look around you, managers, and you’ll see disengaged employees with the Zombie stare, some with the sour look of the disappointed, a few with the overly positive, can-do smile, trying desperately to make things work. A lot of this is the fault of a poor connection between managers and line-of-business employees and it inevitably trickles into a broken recruitment and communication process with potential candidates. The good news? We can change these statistics. It’s in your power to take control of your recruiting process and employer brand. The truth is most job seekers are looking for more than salary when they decide to apply to work at your company.

Can employee disengagement and bad branding be prevented? Can HR and Leaders learn to bring people back to productivity? Absolutely. Will it be tough? You know it. Will it be worth it? Yes, a thousand times. How do you start? Let’s take a closer look at employer brand.  Are you true to it in your hiring and recruiting process? How your employees represent the company’s mission and brand is as important as anything Leaders or HR says in the hiring process. Make sure the stories align well and is accurately reflecting your current brand and the overall mission.

Then look at the employee experience – What employees do everyday, the actions they take, and how they perceive the actions of their managers and top management.  As Blue Ocean Strategy Institute co-directors W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne suggest in this month’s Harvard Business Review, focusing on the acts and activities of management and employees is critical to understanding how a company operates. Actions, as our moms have told us, do speak louder than words, and in the world of work they separate good managers, and great companies and truthful branding, from the mediocre. My latest piece on Dice.com provides more information on just how much technology is changing in the world of work for leaders and hiring practitioners around the globe.

Then look at how you’re hiring: think candidate experience.  Do you force job seekers through a maze-like microsite for career opportunities, then fail to acknowledge their applications with an email or letter (spoiler alert: approximately 70% of hiring companies are in this camp)?  Do you put people through tests and five phone screens, then never follow up? If so, you’re doing damage to your brand. Smart companies know better: they’ve begun to adopt new technologies to streamline the hiring process: video, digital interviews, social recruiting and more.

A few more things can make or break employer brand and candidate experience:

Communicate throughout the process. If you do a phone screen, give feedback.  If a candidate comes to your career site, acknowledge the visit with an email explaining your hiring process. Technology is available now to make these steps easy; there’s no reason not to do it, unless you want to damage your brand.

Think like a candidate. Another timeless reminder: treat others as you’d like to be treated. This Golden Rule is especially important if you want to ensure good candidate experience. And why wouldn’t you?

Be a person first, an HR manager second. People want to deal with people. Make your hiring process as personal as you can. You’re not dealing with robots (just yet at least).

Set expectations. This is part of the communications process but it deserves a call-out. Don’t leave people hanging; let them know what your process is, when they can expect to hear back, how quickly you’re planning to make a decision.

Candidate experience is a two way street. Make sure yours is good and true to your brand, or you are setting the brand up for damage both upfront in the recruiting process and to your internal employees and stakeholders. It’s easier to maintain a good reputation than it is to rebuild it. Employer brand and candidate experience are linked, and they matter greatly to recruit and retain your talent.

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 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.