Building your employee value proposition: is it possible in 8 weeks?

Everyone believes developing a compelling EVP is critical for attracting and retaining key talent but the prospect of where to start and how to get to a meaningful conclusion can feel quite daunting! 

But it really doesn’t have to be. By following a structured process, and using the key learnings from it, you can identify your employer brand and build an employee value proposition that will help attract and retain the kind of people you want in your organisation within 8 weeks!!

Creating a magnetic EVP

Your employer brand is all about what the authentic employee experience is, and what it’s like to work at your company; employer branding is how you market these messages about who you are and what makes you unique. Closely linked to all of this is your employee value proposition, or EVP for short: essentially, the set of benefits, rewards and positive experiences which employees receive in return for the skills and experience they bring to your company. 

Examples of areas that an EVP should aim to convey include training and development opportunities, pay, bonuses, and benefit details, along with some of the less immediately tangible elements like the company culture. Think of your EVP as the magnet that will attract and retain the best talent on the market… 

The discovery phase

The process can be broken into six smaller steps: Discovery, Construction, Alignment, Articulation, Deliverables and Measurement. In this article, we’re spending most of our time on the initial discovery stage to explain more about what you can do to get underway with identifying your company’s EVP.

The discovery phase is all about understanding what the authentic employee experience is – and that means exploring views from right across your organisation. You can capture opinions in a variety of ways depending on what suits your company – so it could be through a series of interviews, focus groups, workshops and surveys for example. 

There’s no avoiding the fact that the discovery phase will take time and it also means being prepared to take opinions and views on board that don’t reflect your own and might even be uncomfortable to hear. But you need to encourage as many representatives as possible from a cross section of your organisation at all levels to sign up to the process and to be willing to contribute honestly. A good EVP clarifies where you are now, but it also helps to reveal where you need to move towards for the future.

Engaging your leadership team in this process is vital, to help understand where the organisation is now, and the direction it’s heading in. The kinds of questions that are useful to ask include:

• Where is our organisation heading strategically?
• What will the next two years look like?
• How important is a diverse workforce to achieving our business goals?
• How will great people contribute to where we are going? 
• What actions are in place to attract key demographics into the organisation?

Once you have this, pull together key internal focus groups, including specific talent pools or new starters, to try to get a real sense of the day-to-day workings of the company. This can be really insightful: helping you to understand, for example, whether your diversity and inclusion activity is having the right impact or whether a wellbeing initiative is having a genuinely beneficial effect.

Useful questions include:

• What’s your current employment experience like?
• What things would you change to make this experience even better? 
• Do you feel you are treated equally compared to others?
• Do you feel engaged and recognised?
• Who do you see as role models in this business? 
• Do you feel you are growing personally and professionally?
• What makes this organisation attractive as a potential employer?

And finally, review the competition to understand any key differences that could mean great talent is choosing their company over yours…

Questions to ask include: 

• What stands out in competitors’ external communications?
• Do they promote their values through their recruitment?
• How do your teams view the competition?

Moving beyond the discovery phase

From here, you can move into the construction phase to create your employer brand document, including:

• A long-hand explanation of your people value proposition – what makes you the sort of employer that attracts a diverse audience, and enables employees to grow and develop their talents? 
• Stories that evidence employees’ experiences and the elements they would change to increase their sense of pride and engagement.
• The communication pillars that will guide how you go to market and how this could flex to target different personas and audiences.

These EVP building blocks then feed into the rest of the process all of which with discipline and planning can be completed in a matter of weeks: 

Alignment: Check that the value proposition is real and recognisable to the organisation

Articulation: Create the branded assets online and offline to represent your EVP

Deliverables: Bring the EVP to life on your website, during onboarding and through all recruitment advertising activities 

Following the delivery of the new EVP put in place key measures of success to monitor the impact over time on retention, talent pool reach, and candidate awareness and experience.

Could you benefit from help identifying your EVP?

JVP Group works closely with companies to help them directly attract the best candidates on the market using the power of their employer brand. If you’d like to find out more, please do get in touch.