By understanding that their world is vastly different than ours—and adapting to it.

How can your company become an even greater place to work—one that recruits stronger talent and drives higher employee engagement and retention than its competitors? By dramatically improving your candidate and employee experiences.

Forget about engagement. Think about experiences.

In HR, we often think of driving employee engagement before creating employee experiences. In this article, we’d like you to reconsider the cause and effect relationship between the two. It is actually better employee experiences that drive engagement.

Our focus, therefore, must be on redefining the experiences our candidates and employees have—especially for Millennials, who represent an increasing percentage of the employees we hire and promote—and taking inspiration from the companies who serve this generation best.

In a world with Alexa and Siri, experiences must reflect the times.

Let’s suppose that you are a Generation Xer or Baby Boomer, and you’re sitting at home in a room that suddenly feels too warm. What do you do? You get up and manually adjust the thermostat. You press a button and adjust a lever or dial. It’s what you do. The world you were weaned in with TV, radio, and oven dials trained you to respond in this way.

Millennials didn’t grow up in your world. They were weaned on the Internet, on smartphones, tablets, and innovative applications with capacitive touchscreens that took the place of outmoded buttons and knobs. Today, the thermostat experience that seems most natural to a Millennial, therefore, is app-driven. Enter the Nest Thermostat, a device that replaced the knobs on wall-mounted thermostats with touchscreen commands on a smartphone. To the Millennial, Nest was born out of necessity. In a world with Siri and Alexa, knobs and levers simply don’t belong.

The candidate and employee experiences we still create today were born in a world that predates the employees we need to hire, engage, and retain—and Millennials know it. They have been conditioned by their experiences as consumers to expect things like ease, transparency, control, and respect in any process in which they engage. So when they apply for jobs, what they find is a procedure that is acceptable to those who grew up conditioned to accept its imperfections. But to Millennials, it falls far short of their expectations.

Poor engagement and retention may be the result of a “psychic wound.”

When a Millennial hits a one-click apply button on ZipRecruiter, she expects a seamless experience and vital information to be transferred from the site (or LinkedIn) to her potential employer without any redundant steps. The technology exists for it, and that drives the expectation that it will be applied to this experience. So when she receives a follow-up email with a link to complete a traditional application on a site that looks like it was designed in 1999, her initial expectation of a reasonable experience ends in disappointment. She feels a sense of anxiety; something isn’t quite right with this relationship. She has experienced a psychic wound.

A poor impression won’t be easily overcome.

As employers, we often shoot ourselves in the foot in the experiences we create for our candidates and employees, but we’re often oblivious to our mistake and the penance we’re paying. At a time in which a device the size of a hockey puck can instantly tell our employees the weather in Spokane, lock their doors, feed their dogs, turn on burglar alarms, and even change the temperature, employee experiences cannot be out of step. We can no longer hire an employee, send a letter telling him that we are excited about his start date, and fail to communicate until that date arrives two weeks later. In that time, a psychic wound of resentment will fester, and he will start planning his exit in two years (as the average Millennial does) because of that first impression.

We may never even know how he feels. Alexa does, and she’ll be recommending his next employer.