Recruitment

Employee Value Proposition: A Recruiter’s Best Friend

Have you ever heard of Employee Value Propositions (EVP)? Probably not, but you should have one. All companies should.

Organizations, today, want to attract top industry talent, as this is necessary for the growth or survival of any organization. But there’s often a problem: Most top talents already have a lucrative job, are interviewing with top companies, or have other interesting options on the table.

Not every company is as tempting as Google, SpaceX, etc. So how can an organization without huge resources at its disposal add top talent to its workforce? This is a question that forward-thinking HR personnel and business owners try to answer every day.

But there’s a solution – Employee Value Proposition.

An Employee Value Proposition (EVP) can be defined as the benefits that accrue to an employee as a reward for the skills, capabilities, and experience they bring to an organization. It is a reward system commensurate with the employee’s performance.

Why is an Employee Value Proposition important?

The creation of an EVP is necessary for organizations that want to attract top industry performers. An EVP focuses on the major reasons people want to work in an organization – workplace culture, study leave, motivational vision, and a sense of inclusion and community. When correctly implemented, a good EVP will help an organisation attract top talent. An EVP is not only for luring top talent from outside an organization, but it’s also useful for retaining those within the organization and preventing high employee turnover.

Employee satisfaction involves more than an attractive salary and paid leave. Numerous reports prove the reason people stay at their jobs often transcends money, and a properly formulated EVP will go a long way to help management prioritize useful HR policies, create a strong and respectable brand, and build a happy and content workforce.

How to create a great Employee Value Proposition

If you want to create a compelling and unique EVP, there are few things you need to focus on.

Data – Generate, compile and analyze them

Everything strategy or plan should start with analyses of data you collected. First, you must look inward and try to understand what your current employees think about your organisation.

When collecting data, try to ask questions like:  What made the company attractive to them? What do they like the most about their job? Why do they leave? Why are they still with you? etc. This information is easy to collect, as it can be obtained from employee surveys, focus groups, and exit interviews, feedback from previous employees, retention metrics, onboarding surveys, Etc.

Second, you should compile these data and analyze them for patterns and themes. Do any comments seem to pop up in exit interviews consistently?
Exit interviews are an interesting source of tips on things you can improve.

Look into the key theme and talk to employees

This point is vital to the development of your EVP. Involve the key people from your company. Groups should consist of members from the HR team, management, marketing team, people from existing staff, and even potential employees. Combine Marketing and HR team. The role of the HR team will be to engage internal teams and key stakeholders, while the Marketing team will bring skills in insight generation.

Stakeholder engagement is critical for creating the right EVP, and you should include deliberations with stakeholders, when trying to identify the key themes of your EVP. Since an EVP strategy is focusing on your employees, rather than a marketing strategy where the marketing team defines the brand and sells it to the public, care should be taken to involve existing employees in the decision-making process, because you are trying to create an environment where you honor your employees and where you take care of them.

Balancing the “Give” versus “Get” for employee and employer.

Create your unique EVP

Now that you have feedback from existing and prospective employees and the data you generated, you need to draft your unique EVP. It should be a compelling statement that embodies the essence of your employee experience and employer brand commitment. During the creation of your EVP, focus on key areas of your proposition. It’s great work culture, employee growth, work-life balance, management development, community service, and ongoing employee recognition. Focus on your strengths. Finally, ensure your EVP supports your HR strategy and practices. Without the collaboration of both, your EVP will not deliver on its intended promises.

Get the word out

Your EVP should be implemented from the recruitment stage to onboarding, career development, and even the exit stage. Now that the EVP has been developed, it’s time to implement it. The EVP’s message should be delivered through all channels. It’s also important to measure the success or failure of the EVP. This will enable management to track its value, ROI, and financial implications to the company. Don’t forget; the way you’re communicating your EVP matters. If you fail to communicate it properly, it will never reach its full potential.

If you want to be sure your EVP generates maximum returns, build it around attributes that genuinely engage, attract, and retain the talent you seek.
Promote your corporate brand from the inside out and don’t focus on outside HR marketing/Employer branding activities, just because it’s trendy and everybody is doing the same thing. Don’t forget that great things always begin from the inside. 
The Benefits of a strong EVP for Recruiting

There’s no doubt that developing a compelling EVP will require an investment in time and engagement, but the potential payoff is massive. The reasons are not far-fetched. A well-formed EVP will attract the top talent in the industry, because it will outline attractive employee policies, rewards, and a benefits program that will prove your organization’s commitment to people and management development. The marketing team will ensure this message is communicated through the company’s website, job ads, and employment letters. If the HR personnel do a good job of ensuring the EVP practices are adhered to, the employees will become advocates and brand ambassadors, who represent the brand and its evangelist. Prospective employees are more likely to trust information obtained from an organization’s existing or past employees than what they obtain from its website. This means the company will stand a better chance of survival and excelling in its space if it has a well-developed and executed EVP program than when it doesn’t.

Having a strong EVP on paper or a strategy on how to improve it is great, but you also need to implement it and live it. Don’t forgot to promise and deliver. If you state in your EVP you offer the best learning possibilities in the market, you need to deliver on this promise. Also, try to review your EVP annually; it’s a great way to ensure it still reflects the employee’s changing experience.

In conclusion, it’s important to state that every employee’s career and professional goals should be considered in the EVP program. Why? Because when an organisation’s EVP matches what an employee values in their work, the program will become 100% successful. That’s when an employer can say with confidence they have motivated and committed employees, who will go the extra mile to ensure the organisation becomes successful. The employee can tell anyone who’s listening that his/her job is fulfilling and rewarding.

The Employee Value Proposition is a great tool to help you attract and retain the right talent.

Last Updated on January 16, 2024