How to uncover your organization’s employee value proposition (EVP): a 7-step process
Employer branding is the #1 focus area for recruiting teams in 2020, according to a recent survey conducted by the Talent Board. And as you may or may not know, one of the most important areas to turn your attention to when building out an employer brand program is your employee value proposition (EVP).
An EVP answers the following types of questions for candidates:
Why do people decide to come work at your organization?
What makes them stick around long term?
What sets your organization apart from hiring competitors?
The answers to these questions are then communicated through a compelling visual and text-based platform. This EVP platform should be the foundation for your company’s employer brand. It will act as your guiding star to inform your candidate communications on an ongoing basis.
Why is having an EVP so important?
Among other benefits, having an attractive and unique EVP can help by:
Facilitating talent attraction and hiring efforts
Supporting retention efforts by reducing annual turnover by up to 70%*
Lowering costs by reducing compensation premiums by up to 50%*
In other words, it’s definitely worth developing a strong and unique EVP for your organization, since it can have a range of positive outcomes from a cost savings and hiring perspective! If you’re looking to uncover or refresh your EVP, but aren’t sure where to get started, here is a seven-step process to follow:
Note: if you work for an organization that is large or complex in nature, we’d recommend a few additional steps to ensure your EVP is robust and aligned from a corporate brand perspective. Please get in touch with our team for more information!
7 steps to uncover your organization’s EVP
Step 1 - Conduct employee research
The first place to start on your EVP journey is with your existing employees, including your leaders.
Clearly you did something right to successfully hire these employees in the first place. It’s critical that you understand what that “something” is and communicate it across the candidate journey.
You should ideally implement surveys, conduct focus groups, and do 1:1 interviews to unlock the right level of insight here. And responses should come from a mix of employees across groups and levels so that you have an array of responses that span the breadth of your organization.
Here are some questions you can ask your team to find out what they value about working for your organization:
Why did you join the company?
What do you value most in an employment opportunity?
What are the most challenging parts about working here? (As per Charlotte Marshall and Bryan Adams’ Give & Get Employer Branding methodology, it’s important to highlight the full employee experience in your messaging to give candidates the full picture and let people opt out if the experience isn’t right for them)
What do you value most about working here?
How would you describe the culture?
How do you think we compare with our hiring competitors?
From there you’ll want to combine your employee research with insights pulled from employer review sites. Pull and analyze review themes from sites like Glassdoor, Indeed, Comparably, and Fairygodboss to get an idea of what employees are saying (and what candidates are hearing!) about your organization
This is important to include because you need to make sure that the way you position your EVP isn’t misaligned with the messages candidates are receiving on Glassdoor, and that you’re sharing the true story of what it’s like to work at your organization. This is important because if you’re saying one thing about what your company offers employees, but employee reviews are telling a different story, you’ll lose brand trust and your EVP will not work effectively.
Step 2 - Gather market research
You should also conduct external market research to see if there’s any data out there that talks about what a specific talent segment really wants from an employer, so you can make sure your final messaging isn’t out of line with candidate desires and expectations. After all, candidates in different role types and geographic markets value different things out of their employment experiences - and you want to make sure you craft an EVP that isn’t going to deter most of your primary audience.
If you work for a large organization with decent resources, you might be able to partner with marketing and conduct some specific external research. Otherwise, you could work with an external partner or rely on pre-existing data. Universum also has some great data sets that already exist for certain talent segments in different geographies. Stackoverflow has some research on developers too that could be helpful if you work in the tech space.
Step 3 - Identify common themes
Identify the positive and negative themes that emerge from your employee research and reviews. Use the positive themes to help develop your messaging, and use the negative themes to help you understand what needs to be improved and what you should avoid putting front and center in your EVP positioning.
There are many different ways that an organization can differentiate and stand out, so look for patterns that might arise in areas like your culture, policies, work environment, team rapport, and more. You can take a look at the infographic to the right for other areas to consider when it comes to identifying where your organization stands out.
If you find that the majority of your employees cite a specific reason for working at your organization, there’s a good chance that that same reason will resonate with similar talent on the market.
Step 4 - Do a hiring competitor scan
Before finalizing your EVP positioning, you’ll want to make sure you aren’t saying the exact same thing as your hiring competitors. While some organizations might have similarities in the value they offer employees, you need to come up with a different angle to tell your unique story to employees and candidates.
To ensure you’re differentiated, and to identify where you can separate yourself from the competition, research how your competitors position themselves in front of candidates. Go through every touchpoint in their candidate journey and note what messaging and visuals they’re using and what traits, benefits, perks, and other factors they are emphasizing to entice candidates.
Step 5 - Build out your draft EVP platform
Once you’ve identified the key themes and conducted a hiring competitor scan to know what unique factors to focus on, it’s time to actually create the draft EVP platform.
Your EVP platform should be composed of a messaging framework and set of visuals:
The messaging framework is typically composed of one EVP tagline and between two and five pillars that support the tagline and share additional information about what your organization offers to employees. This will be the messaging you use repeatedly internally and externally to bring your EVP to life.
Your visual framework will emphasize key components of the messaging and communicate them visually. Typically you’ll launch your EVP with visual examples that align with your tagline and each pillar sub heading, along with a set of guidelines that you can refer back to when developing future visual assets for campaigns, social media, your career site, and other spots that should communicate elements of your EVP.
Your EVP framework needs to be clear, concise, attention-grabbing, and inspirational. It needs to set you apart from all the other noise that candidates experience online in order to drive results. To produce this framework, it’s important to partner either with some of your colleagues internally in marketing (if they have capacity) or with an external agency (like The Employer Brand Shop, hi!) to produce the calibre of product you’ll need to drive outstanding attraction, engagement, and retention outcomes.
Step 6 - Test your draft EVP platform with employees
Once you have your draft EVP platform figured out, take the time to run it past some employees to ensure it resonates and feels authentic. Often the most effective way to do this is by conducting a series of focus groups with employees across different job types and locations.
If there are any red flags coming up across job types and locations uniformly, you’ll want to adjust your EVP platform before launching into the final step.
Step 7 - Socialize and validate with internal stakeholders and leadership
Now that you have your draft EVP platform in hand, the final step is to make sure that key stakeholders and leadership within your organization are aligned with the direction you want to take
Ideally your key stakeholders and leadership team should be in the know throughout the project. They should understand the approach you’re taking, the resources you will need, and when you’ll be coming to them with this draft EVP platform. This will ensure there are fewer surprises along the way!
Assuming this is the case, once you present the draft EVP platform, remind them of your methodology (so they know where the findings are coming from) and then ask them if there are any ‘red flags’ or concerns with going live with this approach.
If necessary, make any revisions and come back to them with a draft version 2.0 (or even 3.0, etc.) in order to get things finalized.
Once you receive the green light on the final EVP platform, you can begin to plan out how you will activate the EVP internally and externally to achieve some of your hiring and employee engagement objectives! Look for future blog posts from us that will explain how to do so.
The takeaway
Developing a compelling EVP helps you attract a higher quality and quantity of candidates, retain existing employees, turn employees into brand advocates, and ultimately save your organization money.
Following the steps above, or partnering with an agency like ours that can help you to execute on a custom plan for your organization, will allow you to uncover your authentic EVP and build out a creative platform for sharing your EVP with candidates and employees. This EVP will be your guiding star - helping you to get noticed and driving positive business outcomes.
Good luck on your EVP building journey and if you have questions along the way, our team is here to help!
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About The Employer Brand Shop
The Employer Brand Shop is a boutique recruitment marketing and employer brand agency located in Kitchener, Canada. Our team helps organizations around the world attract and engage talent using creative marketing strategies.
Source:
*https://www.gartner.com/en/human-resources/insights/employee-engagement-performance/employee-value-proposition