Spoiler alert – we’ve been approaching EVP and Employer Branding from the wrong direction. We tend to perceive it in terms of the outside candidate world looking in. I think we should take the opposite perspective – the inside world of an employer (and employees) looking out.
Because, right now, what we call an Employee Value Proposition feels much more like a Candidate Value Proposition.
And why do we do this? Because when it comes to EVP, we immediately think in terms of tangible initiatives and external activation. EVP can often be seen as a distress purchase. Something has stopped working, something is wrong and something needs to be done. That something might be reduced pipeline quality, competitor activity, premature departures, lower application volumes – and EVP can often be seen as an obvious solution. It is very real and very visible. Things are being done about the problem and things are being seen to be done. People busy themselves away on research, on project management, engaging with senior leaders, on delivering frameworks and ultimately creative outputs.
The process that goes to create an EVP engages with internal audiences – we sit down and spend time during focus groups with them or analyse the surveys they fill out. We might, too, extract some stories from those sessions in order to exemplify and garnish the EVP.
But this is often the last contact most existing employees have with a new EVP.
True, there may be an internal launch. Posters might appear, stress balls too. EVP champions might be chosen. But do employee audiences genuinely experience a new EVP? What impacts are they aware of internally with the introduction of a new EVP? The sorts of issues that are affecting their daily world of work – culture, belonging, purpose, mission, communication clarity – how are they improving with the advent of a new EVP? To what extent does it cut through internally?
Are they seeing behavioural change in terms of line management behaviours? Do they see senior management espousing the EVP? Are colleagues being praised, even promoted, as a result of living the new EVP and its pillars? And, from the other perspective, are actions which run contrary to the EVP being called out?
Or is there a sense that, regardless of the contribution they, their views and their stories have made to constructing the EVP, it appears as though it exists for other audiences. Those outside the organisation.
It is more Candidate Value Proposition than EVP.
Done right, an EVP should be a key tool in beginning to address many of the external challenges we have highlighted. It should provide a key motivation for candidate audiences to consider an employer. It should enhance an employer’s ability to stand out from the competition. It should provide candidates with reassurance, trust and association. They should be able to imagine themselves working for this organisation.
But what if that sense of differentiation, reassurance and clarity evaporates once an individual joins? What if the key reason they have made a significant career decision appears absent in terms of the senior leadership messaging and line management interactions they observe? What if the colleagues they are now working with have no understanding or recollection of the EVP and its messaging platform?
Little wonder, then, that such people conclude they have become an employee on the back of a Candidate Value Proposition.
Let’s examine two examples of organisations, one of which adopted a holistic view of the employee experience through its EVP and one which did anything but.
In 2021, more than 75 former BrewDog employees signed an open letter to the company’s leadership, and a further 45 suggested they did not feel safe enough to add their names. The letter took issue with BrewDog’s long-standing claim that it wanted to be the best employer in the world. The signatories suggested the claim existed largely to help it recruit. Their summary of the working reality was blunt: ‘being treated like a human being was sadly not always a given’. Perhaps most telling was the organisation’s response. BrewDog’s people team emailed current staff asking them to sign a counter-letter listing the benefits of working there. Internal communication, in other words, was mobilised to defend the external promise rather than to close the gap with it.
Heineken’s ‘Go Places’ took a distinctly contrasting approach. Launched in 2016 and reinvigorated three years later, its second phase was built around the stories of 33 employees from across the global business sharing their career journey experiences with the business. Most insightful, though, is what Heineken’s head of global talent acquisition at the time, Ben Clark, said at the relaunch: that increasing awareness and applications was ‘just the beginning’. The next challenge was how the EVP should help shape the interview and hiring process, how performance is managed, and how new joiners are set up to succeed.
This is about aligning the employee and candidate experience, not treating them as distinct entities. A Candidate Value Proposition prevents you from aligning an improvement in attraction messaging with enhancing your employees’ cultural experience. An Employee Value Proposition enables just that. Your EVP needs to survive the journey from candidate to employee. It needs to express itself as loudly and with as consistent a message to internal audiences as it does to external candidate communities.
