From a distance, AI and Employee Value Proposition are not immediately obvious bedfellows. The former clearly being all about the artificial, the latter steeped, ideally, in authenticity. Whilst we want to understand the absolute genuine lived experience of working for an organisation, we grimace at some of the more wooden and stilted incarnations of AI. Surely, there can be little in the way of overlap?
There’s irony too in that the more an organisation harnesses AI, the less need it will have to hire. The likes of Klarna has been very public about drawing a halt to recruitment, suggesting that AI can handle the vast majority of the office-based tasks it asks today of employees. Google, Microsoft and Salesforce have also made high profile redundancies, whilst, at the same time, boosting AI investment.
The more AI is embraced, the less need, particularly as regards recruitment, for EVP. As well as doing the same to large swathes of its employee base, will AI make EVP redundant? If an organisation is no longer recruiting and is entirely happy for its existing people to leave, without replacement, what is now the function of EVP?
We might question the impact of such initiatives on employee morale and engagement within organisations which have ceased hiring or replacing. However, are such employers simply first movers, occupying the sort of position that most organisations will have adopted in the next three to five years?
But, for now, let’s assume we have need for both EVP and AI. What influence should the latter have on the former?
How do we characterise our relationship with AI? For me, there is growing acceptance, intermingled with a sense of both suspicion and apprehension. But anyone who has had even the most passing of acquaintance with AI can see its vast potential.
So, how should AI influence and enable EVP today?
If we focus initially on the discovery phase of EVP, AI can do a lot of the heavy lifting. It can analyse the competition at speed, creating real-time clarity around what your talent rivals are doing and saying in terms of their attraction messaging. And anything that can add pace and urgency to the EVP discovery process is a positive – everything influencing EVP, including markets, competition, an organisation itself, is changing at speed. If such discovery is not executed quickly, then the narrative looks backwards rather than forwards.
Your organisation will have a lot of quantitative data – engagement surveys, for example, or even bespoke data created to support a new EVP. Again, AI can make short work of analysing what this data is saying and what the comms implications might be.
A lot of time can be spent writing up from qualitative research during the construction of an EVP. Again, we can increasingly make use of specific AI tools in order to transcribe such discovery phases – and other tools to start making sense of what is being said and discussed within an employee base.
It is also very straightforward to make use of AI to start clustering the key themes coming out of both qualitative and quantitative research findings – including focus groups, interviews, workshops and surveys.
Without getting too meta, the way AI is being used internally is also itself likely to be influencing the hearts and minds of employees. Any organisation ignoring AI will appear luddite, lacking ambition with its corporate head in the sand. The polar opposite would appear to be organisations such as Klarna, effectively minimising the input and importance of its people. So, the discovery findings from an organisation’s employee base will increasingly be influenced by their organisation’s adoption of and attitude towards AI.
And if the creative executions of AI are still being delivered via a human touch, will that remain the case for much longer? Just spending a little time on AI produces ideas which aren’t about to win any RADS nominations, but which demonstrate a knowledge of the field and the creative parameters. (It will be interesting to see when award nominations have to state categorically that no AI was involved in their development).
Quite rightly, employee stories are central to the successful delivery and landing of such EVP messaging. Candidates and employees alike want to see and hear from people they recognise as having similar challenges, backgrounds, opportunities, careers and choices. Even if many such employee stories today feel formulaic, generic and lacking both interest and credibility. A sensitive balance needs to be achieved here. If candidates suspect that the stories on your careers site are AI – manufactured and inauthentic – then it is hard for them to imagine themselves within your business. Your messaging clearly needs to be polished and professional – but too much of that removes the personality.
The speed and responsiveness of AI is incredible. Provide it with an EVP and ask it to come up with headlines to help carry that central message and five seconds later, you have any number of options and choices. Don’t like what you see? Then, prompt it to refocus on a particular element or to adopt a particular tone. I like the sense of responsiveness that AI can provide. Although we want consistency from our EVP and its messaging, we are clearly at the mercy of events. Events such as competitor activity, tariff announcements, stellar/woeful business performance, M&A activity. It can often be both complex, time consuming and expensive to respond to such events with messaging. However, the absence of any response can appear tin-eared and lacking awareness. Again, AI is there to subtly and speedily evolve your EVP messaging to reflect what the outside world is throwing at your organisation and the career proposition it provides.
The relationship, too, between AI and your ATS is fascinating. Progress is clearly happening all the time, and there is clear candidate suspicion of an overly-automated process – despite the fact that many candidates are making liberal use of AI to make such applications. And the candidate experience is a clear acid-test of your EVP. If the proposition you are delivering to candidate audiences is being contradicted and negatively impacted by AI, then your EVP is going to suffer.
Organisations increasingly have real-time access to channel performance and its ATS impact. They will have a much clearer and much more immediate insight into what media is performing and whether messaging and/or channel choice needs to adapt.
If AI is giving employers more ownership of and capacity to adapt messaging and to analyse channel performance, what does this mean for employer branding agencies?
As we run through the many and diverse elements of EVP that AI can facilitate, it’s worth considering the technology as a glue, creating cohesion through what can be a potentially disconnected process, touching discovery, research, creativity, channel choice, performance analysis, etc. If we think about the current approach to EVP, it involves different stakeholders, often with different takes on the outcomes. Whilst some people will be constant throughout the process, others come and go, dropping in and out of the project, as their particular area of responsibility begins and ends.
There’s little point mid-way through 2025 arguing whether AI should have a relationship with EVP, because that’s exactly what’s happening. And will continue to happen. AI can make a hugely positive difference to the way an EVP is constructed, landed and managed. And management is a key word here. AI can create huge efficiencies, speed up processes, enhance agility, responsiveness and nimbleness. At the same time, it can also make you appear wooden, impersonal and, well, artificial.
The relationship between AI and EVP is both fascinating and fast evolving. There may well be a point in the future where AI renders EVP redundant, a more likely immediate scenario is AI functioning as the connective tissue creating EVP cohesion.
Getting to the heart of your employee mindset 