Leveraging your EVP in a competitive talent market

The Good Guides Series

To attract and retain the right talent to deliver on your organisational objectives and stand out from competitors, you need to be clear about what you offer your people and if you’re consistently delivering on that promise. That’s where Employee Value Proposition (EVP) comes in – EVP is an articulation of the offerings, experiences, and rewards that you provide your team in exchange for their skills, capabilities, and experience. In other words, your competitive edge.

Why now?

It has never been more important for organisations to demonstrate what makes them stand out. The current talent market is tough - candidates and your current employees are assessing you just as much as you’re assessing them, and organisations are struggling to keep up with the inflating pay scales and post-pandemic expectations of employees. Attraction and retention is now a competitive sport so businesses have to be strategic, transparent, and play the long game.

Considering this pressure on the current talent market and shifts in the future of work, it’s crucial to take a look at your EVP to see how it’s performing, determine if it’s still fit-for-purpose, and develop a new or revised promotion plan.

Promoting your EVP

To get started, tap into the most powerful source of knowledge and the end users of your EVP, your people. Talk to them to understand what’s working well and where the gaps and opportunities are before jumping in to designing solutions. Once you have a handle on your current situation and have identified where your focus should be, move to the design phase and collaborate with stakeholders to come up with ways to effectively promote your EVP.

The solutions you design will differ for each organisation depending on what’s authentic to you, and remember the promotion of your EVP doesn’t stop when the attraction and recruitment process has finished. To get the creative juices flowing, here are some practical ideas we have come up with:

• Tell the story about what it’s like to work for you; use videos or social media posts to show the culture and EVP, run a campaign with interviews of the team talking about what it’s like to work for you, or include ‘here’s what we offer’ on your LinkedIn or website careers page. Here is an example of something we have done at Humankind.
• Review your recruitment ‘woo’ process; identify impactful experience points from recent recruits and make sure these are included in interviews going forward, offer an experience like a shadowing day instead of a traditional interview, share the story of what it’s like to work there and how the company started in interviews.
• Build capability to enable hiring managers or recruiters to effectively communicate and leverage your EVP in the recruitment and onboarding process.
• Review the language and imagery used in your external comms and advertisements. Is it aligned to who you are and the story you want to tell about your organisation?
• Regularly highlight and promote the benefits you have on offer. From employee discounts to wellbeing bonuses, don’t leave it your employees to take them up, actively encourage them to access their benefits and provide examples of how they can use them.
• Utilise recognised holidays and change of seasons to celebrate with each other and promote what you have on offer i.e., coming into winter - free flu jab, coming back from summer holidays – buy leave policy, mental health awareness week – mental health and duvet days.
• Build your team leaders capability to support growth and development for their people, empower them to; recognise and maximise on-the-job learning opportunities, support access to formal training on offer, and encourage secondments and other growth opportunities that are available.
• Your remuneration review process doesn’t have to be just focussed on salary. Highlight and speak to the total package your people receive.
• Review what you need to further enable your flexible working practices. Are you clear about expectations, have you built in moments for connection into your practices, what are your ways of working for effective communication in the hybrid environment?
• Your culture comes from the values you nurture, build rituals to elevate and celebrate your core values, share stories of your employees living the values at your meetings, or hold an award ceremony to highlight outstanding achievements.

If you want a little more detail on how to best run an employee-centred design approach, then check out our previous Good Guide on Tips for Successful Co-Design.

Don’t get complacent

It’s easy to get complacent and assume your EVP is alive and well, but if your EVP is the ‘promise’, there is a need to ensure it continuously matches the ‘reality’ - your employee experience (EX).

The link between EVP and EX

Employee Value Proposition (EVP)
The promise: What an organisation offers that attracts people to work there and motivates them to stay.

Employee Experience (EX)
The reality: The perceptions employees have about their workplace.

You should be constantly talking to your people, listening to what’s important to them, and truly understanding their employee experience. Utilising tools such as Surveys and Stay Interviews are a couple of ways you can regularly remain connected to your employees and understand what’s unique to the experience you provide.

We’re happy to share our experiences in leveraging your EVP in a competitive talent market, so feel free to reach out!

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