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In candidate-short markets, companies are in constant competition for top talent. This often takes the form of lucrative salaries, comprehensive benefits packages, and enticing perks.
But if money and perks were all that mattered, wouldn’t candidates only flock to the largest organisations with the deepest pockets?
When it comes to the best, the food and rations (i.e., comp and bens) alone aren’t enough to capture their attention. Whether it’s a strong career path, engaging work, the chance to make a meaningful impact, or whatever it may be, people are looking for more convincing reasons to join a company.
This is the role of your employer brand and employer value proposition: to highlight what truly sets you apart and why the best should choose you.
Your employer brand is the perception and reputation of your company as an employer. It involves your company culture, values, work environment, and the overall experience you offer to employees.
On the other hand, an employee value proposition (EVP) is the unique set of benefits, rewards, and opportunities that someone working for you can achieve. It includes both the tangible and intangible aspects of the employee’s personal experience.
Both work together to create a perception of your organisation that should appeal to your ideal candidates. Simply put, your employer brand gets people to the table, while your EVP is what makes people want to join and stay with your team.
Your employer brand and EVP are about who you are and what you offer as an organisation. It should reflect where you’re currently at and where you aspire to be.
Fleshing that out will involve conversations between the people who most intimately know your company, as well as feedback from people from both inside and outside the organisation.
To get started, bring together members of your leadership team to get their perspectives and gather feedback from their teams. We’ve found that a structured workshop is the most effective way to facilitate the conversations that will help develop a unique employer brand and EVP.
Many companies claim they don’t have an employer brand — but the truth is, there’s always something. People joined for a reason, and they’re staying for one too. The key is uncovering what that “something” is, and that takes honest, ongoing dialogue.
That’s exactly why we created our LABS workshop: to facilitate these conversations and surface the real perceptions shaping your employer brand. If you want to lead a similar workshop for your organisation, here’s the framework we use to guide the process.
The conversation begins with getting clarity on where your company is right now. Here, we ask:
The goal is to identify and define your over-arching goals to make sure everyone has an aligned understanding of the company’s strategy and vision.
Next, study your competition’s employer brands and messaging and compare it with your own.
Competitor Analysis
How are other companies in your space attracting talent?
Through a competitor analysis exercise, look at the top brands in your industry and study their messaging to understand what best-in-class employer brands look like.
Once you have a better grasp of what the leading brands look like, assess your current messaging and collateral.
Remember, even if you don’t have a formalised employer brand, you’ve successfully made the case to your current employees about why they should be part of your team. Investigate how you’ve done so in the past to identify what you’ve used as collateral.
Defining your ideal candidate persona
If you could describe your perfect hire, what would that person look like? Where would they come from?
You can use this worksheet/guide to help you clearly define your ideal candidate persona:
[coming soon]
Where you are vs. where you want to be
Once you have a good understanding of the type of people you want in the business, revisit your current recruitment practices.
Does it fit what your ideal candidates would likely respond to?
If not, you may want to evaluate which areas of your recruitment process could be updated to better attract the people you want to be part of your team.
Now it’s time to take a deeper dive into your recruitment process to understand areas for improvement.
Evaluate your recruitment practices
Review your current candidate journey and experience to see how things are happening from start (opening a vacancy) to finish (onboarding a new hire). Go through the recruitment policy and procedures every step of the way.
What is working and where are improvements required?
You want to evaluate the alignment between your recruitment practices and how they contribute to attracting the ideal candidates for your organisation.
Understand resource planning
If you say, “I want to grow my team by 10%,” do you know how you’ll get there? How are you evaluating future hiring needs? That’s where resource planning comes in.
Rather than reacting to gaps as they appear, you can take a more proactive, strategic approach to growth.
Along with the exercises you’ve completed so far, this will help lay the groundwork for future recruitment by ensuring you can develop an employer brand and EVP that keep you top of mind for the right talent – even when you’re not actively hiring.
(you can learn more about Resource Planning here)
Piece together everything you’ve discussed into the makings of an overarching strategy. It could be as simple as a one-page document, but it should include first drafts of:
This will serve as a starting point for aspirational messages and creatives that will be developed as part of a more comprehensive employer brand and EVP.
At this stage, you should have everything you need to start developing new messaging and materials for a refreshed employer brand that you can start using to attract the right candidates. This can include imagery, video, and copy for recruitment-related activities.
As you create these, keep gathering feedback from the leadership team to ensure everything aligns with how you want to present the company to candidates.
And remember, this should not be a full rebrand. It could just be tweaks to highlight the takeaways from the workshop. Just make sure the changes remain consistent with the company’s overall brand identity.
If you want to take it a step further and really build out your EVP, you need to expand on the themes you’ve uncovered from the initial workshop with additional feedback from different sources.
Ask candidates what it is they value. Did they think this was something your company could provide?
Gather all the information you can to pull out key data points about your recruitment outcomes and turnover. Use internal surveys and exit interviews and dig deeper into why someone is leaving to see how you can enhance your EVP.
In many cases, the leadership team already has a strong sense of how the organisation is perceived. Use one-on-one interviews to draw out those perspectives and explore how they can inform a more persuasive EVP.
Just like with your employer brand, keep the leadership team involved to ensure alignment. And if you’re making significant changes to your EVP, be mindful of how the new messaging might impact current employees.
With your updated employer brand and EVP now aligned with the leadership team, it’s time to roll it out across the wider business.
Create engaging employer brand assets that bring your refreshed identity to life. Use this collateral to embed the messaging across your organisation and make it part of the everyday experience.
Externally, make sure your employer brand and EVP are integrated into key touchpoints such as interviews, onboarding, and other candidate-facing processes. Collaborate closely with the teams involved to ensure your brand is consistently represented and reaches the right people.
Keep an eye on recruitment performance and feedback from both candidates and your team. It’s rare to get everything right the first time, so use the data to fine-tune and improve your approach.
While your employer brand messaging is aimed at candidates, it shouldn’t contradict how you present your brand to customers. There needs to be a clear connection between what you communicate to different audiences.
The messaging won’t be identical, of course, but it should all be grounded in the same mission, values, and goals.
An employer brand and EVP won't solve all your recruitment challenges, but they enhance each stage of the process.
By clearly articulating who you are and what you stand for, you naturally attract candidates aligned with your culture and values, while also empowering those who aren't the right fit to self-select out. Whether or not a candidate ultimately joins your organisation, a strong employer brand ensures they have an experience consistent with the company philosophy you aim to represent.
Through our LABS workshops, we’ve helped many organisations uncover what makes them the employer of choice for their ideal candidates and use that to develop more effective unique employer brands and EVPs.
One of them was an airline that, at the time, was struggling with low engagement among its Cabin Crew and in specific locations. With rapid growth on the agenda, attraction was a natural focus. Equally, retention and employee satisfaction could not be ignored.
We initially heard that the company wanted to sharpen up its messaging and engagement, predominantly from an internal perspective. People needed to be brought back on board. However, the conversation soon developed many different threads:
1. Their employer brand was not cutting through compared to their competitors.
2. They needed an EVP that highlighted the opportunity they could offer candidates (in their case, rapid career progression) that others could not.
3. They required a directional framework that would allow for freedom to express the message they wanted to get across but also ensured alignment with shared goals and values.
By collaborating with the company’s UK senior executive team, we presented a brand golden thread, directional framework and digital collateral. This included ideal profiles for their target candidates, an EVP that fosters internal engagement, and creative concepts.
All of this was designed to elevate both the consumer and talent brands, while also enhancing regional presence and reach through targeted channels (Facebook, Instagram and TikTok).
This resulted in the successful recruitment of Cabin Crew that fit the career-minded and results-focused professionals the company needed to attract their desired customers and to achieve its ambitious growth targets.
