Just ten years ago, the top concern of any business was getting the sale — the war for customers was on. Now, the battle is on for talent, for the best employees…and the battlefield is brutal.
In this battle, your most effective weapon is a solid and attractive employer brand.
That’s your reputation as an employer. It’s what you communicate through your benefits packages, corporate culture, and recruitment communication and efforts. In short, it’s what your employee value proposition (EVP) projects out into the job market.
A solid and well-thought-out EVP allows you to stand out in the job market and saves you money in the long run:
Source: Gartner
The employee value proposition is a set of associations and offerings provided by an organization in return for the skills, capabilities, and experiences an employee brings to the organization.
Your EVP is both that and the optics of what you offer to your new and current employees and how well you communicate that through your recruitment advertising, employee advocacy, and employer branding social media campaigns.
“Your employee value proposition is a compellingly clear answer to the burning question that’s on the mind of every candidate at the top of their professional game: ‘why should I work for this company?’ You need to know how to answer this without immediately defaulting to money or benefits. This is your brand’s promise of who you are as an employer — there should be more to it than fat bonus checks and corporate lunches." — Koen Stevens, CEO, Ambassify
Remember that money and perks don’t play much of a role for most candidates (especially millennials) compared to the other four categories that shape the EVP.
Yes, EVP can look like a lot of extra work, especially if you’re already swamped with more pressing HR obligations.
After all, you advertise a vacancy, get through a couple of interviews, and poof… someone gets hired. But, are you hiring the right person for the job (and the culture)?
Fine-tuning your EVP now will save you time and money in the future because it’s going to remove that ambiguity from the equation. Every time you hire someone, you’ll be 100% sure that you’ve made the best possible choice in a barrel-full of qualified candidates.
The benefits of a strong EVP are:
Now that we’ve discussed why your EVP is important, it’s time to take a look at how you can build one that will work for your organization. Generally, you’ll want to follow these five steps (especially if you don’t have a codified EVP right now):
When you don’t create an EVP (and the kind of workplace that attracts the people you’re looking to hire) from day one, the first step is to identify where you stand with your employer brand.
Start by going through the five EVP categories mentioned above: rewards, work, organization, opportunity, and people. Take a hard, long look at all the components, create a checklist, and self-assess.
Give yourself points for those components you’re crushing, like having an above-average compensation and benefits plan that keeps your employees satisfied and happy. That said, don’t forget to factor in negative points for the components you’re missing or not doing enough to ace (like not offering paid leave or not continuously training your line managers).
Also, don’t skip current and past employee interviews during this process. Often, management feels they’re doing relatively good in some areas, only for those to turn out to be wildly unpopular with employees. Interviews will quickly set the record straight. They’ll give you a chance to ask more probing questions to see what’s motivating your top performers to stay and what caused past employees to leave.
Essentially, the profile of your ideal candidate is like a blueprint of the person you would hire in a heartbeat.
They can more than handle their job responsibilities; their values align with company values; they’re a perfect match for the company culture and your current employees. When creating a candidate profile, the more personal you get, the more valuable it will be.
This means not focusing purely on demographics and education but also figuring out what your ideal candidates like, how they think, and what makes them tick.
As you’re mapping out the qualities of your ideal candidate, think about where you can usually find them. Are they hanging around in Facebook groups, advising industry newbies? Or are they rubbing elbows with other professionals at industry conferences? Knowing this will help you when the time comes to market your employee value proposition.
Now that you know your current EVP and outline your ideal candidate, you can start reconciling those two things. Keep an eye on the information you’ve gathered in previous steps when answering the following questions:
Once you have the answers, see how closely you can match your EVP to candidate expectations. At a minimum, match career growth, development, and work environment expectations since younger candidates value those more than money or benefits (but make rewards a non-issue by staying within industry averages)
Keep in mind that you won’t be able to check all the boxes; that won’t matter as long as you focus on improving those components that your target audience values the most.
Distilling your EVP to a single sentence is tricky, so don’t even try to do it. Stick to saying as much as you need to speak to get your message across.
When hiring for specific positions, segmenting your EVP is often the key to attracting the right candidates. You’ll still want to stick to your overall theme and tailor your messaging to resonate with those audiences that would be the best fit for the role.
So you’ve analyzed your current employee value proposition, identified where it falls short, and made changes that bring it more in line with what your ideal candidate expects. Your next step is to promote the heck out of it by taking a two-pronged approach:
Once you’ve gone through the lengthy process of creating a new, targeted EVP, create as many touchpoints with it as possible throughout your recruitment process. You want it to be visible to passive job seekers, potential candidates, and current employees because that visibility will make your company more recognizable and attractive.
Every time your company publishes a job opening, the race is on. Who will your ideal candidate choose — you or one of your competitors? And will your opening even register on their radar?
It all comes down to how strong your employer brand is and how much thought and effort you’ve put into building up your employee value proposition. And when it comes to promoting those two things (both internally and externally), there’s a way to supercharge your efforts.
That’s where Ambassify comes in: with Ambassify’s built-in employer branding features, you can keep everyone informed about current job openings, create a tight-knit community of employee advocates who are active on socials, and quickly share brand-building information and initiatives by tapping into your advocates, which will allow you to reach deeper into the job market, and attract the best talent.