The 6 Mistakes You Need to Fix When Creating Your Employer Value Proposition

The Employer Value Proposition, popularly known as EVP portrays how the talent and employees perceive the values an employee gains by working in a company. It is a creative platform that communicates the “what’s there for me” of working at your organization. And it is nicely composed of, but not limited to, your company’s culture, values, mission, approach to getting things done, and a lot more.

Many companies may have ineffective EVPs or find it hard to maintain authentically. Some may be comprised of meaningless attributes while others may be generic and fail to differentiate from competitors. And yet others may have a significant gap between the promise and reality, leading to disengagement in the form of reduced employee commitment.

Creating an EVP is one of the most critical steps in successful Recruitment Marketing, as it acts as a guiding star for how you approach recruiting, candidate, and employee communications across the board and through every step in the process of talent acquisition. .

If you feel you have made some mistakes while creating your EVP, don’t worry. Here are common mistakes and the pro tips to ensure you get back on track.

1. Not Having Your EVP in the First Place

If you don’t have your EVP in place before tackling employer brand projects, your organization is driving in dark in terms of strategy. You won’t have a clear picture of where to go and what factors to emphasize as you describe job opportunities to your prospected employees. Whether you are creating a career site, job description, blog post, or a new social media ad, they should align with the tenets of your EVP.

2. Not Having an Authentic EVP

When it comes to the employer value proposition, it must shape perceptions and help your prospected employees to understand why your company is the right fit compared to other employment options. If you are finding it hard to understand your competitors’ EVP, you are risking:

• Not knowing where you can stand out from the competition.
• Becoming a me-too employer brand.

Your employer brand will be negatively impacted by either of these approaches. Your recruitment marketing collateral might get lost in the sea of similar content. Candidates might gravitate towards more unique posts touting the advantages of opportunities with your competition.

Go through a competitive audit and scan the EVP of your top competitors. See where you excel and create a much rewarding and unique EVP for your current and potential employees.

3. Having a Localized EVP or Recruitment Marketing Strategy

Do you have an idea of what your targeted personas value by role type and region?

The type of content and messaging that appeals to a salaried hire is likely to be different than that of hourly hire. The same thing can be said about communicating with medical professionals as compared to software engineers.

On similar lines, what appeals to someone in New York is likely to be different than what appeals to someone in Sydney. This is because of changing lifestyles and values from place to place. Office culture can vary even within the same company, from team to team and from location to location. For example, the way your employees operate and what they value in the workplace might be different in your company’s Las Vegas office as compared to the New York office.

So, it becomes important to conduct market research, see if your EVP is aligning with what different job roles and regions value, and then modify your framework accordingly.

To ensure that your EVP is as accurate as possible, make sure that you take into account such differences while defining your EVP and communicating with prospected employees in different locations. One of the greatest ways to tell employee stories is by creating EVPs of different teams. You can create a sub-set messaging for important teams.

4. Putting the Perks First

Your EVP should be much more than an unlimited vacation policy, free lunches, and a nice gym. While employees and candidates like these perks, so many companies in your competitive set offer them that they no longer remain a differentiating factor.

Perks and benefits are certainly a part of your EVP but should reflect a bigger value that employees and candidates will get working in your company.

5. Creating a Top-Down EVP

If you want to create an authentic Employer Value Proposition, it’s important that your primary input comes from employees across different levels and locations – not just leadership. Your C-Suite should not dictate what your EVP should be. You must advocate for your employees and explain why a top-down EVP is likely to fail.

You must remind leadership that employees will broadcast their real experiences on social sites like Kununu, Glassdoor, and other job review sites, making it important for EVP to emerge directly from employee feedback.

6. Not Taking the Product or Challenges into Account

It is tempting to solely focus on your company culture while constructing your EVP, factoring in your product, and challenges it solves is a good idea. It gives a bigger and better picture to the candidates of what they will be working on, who they will be helping, and what challenges they will be solving.

The additional benefit you might reap is finding dedicated candidates who care about more than just the perks. Remember, customer reviews of your product also influence candidates and product review sites can be a critical touchpoint for some candidates’ journey.

The Bottom Line

Hyper-competition in the labor market demands a powerful EVP. The employer value proposition portrays how the labor market and employees perceive the value employees gain by working in a company. Many companies find it difficult to maintain EVPs while most of them are just ineffective. Some might fail to differentiate from competitors while some comprise of wrong attributes.

So, it becomes important to look at different scenarios, do proper research on your competitors and what’s trending, align your newly crafted EVP with the company’s mission and goals, and promote it through the right recruitment marketing efforts.