How do you craft a compelling EVP for your target talent pool?

You should pinpoint exactly what the company culture needs to be and what the values it reflects. When you’re defining your values, think about the real heart of the company. Your EVP should align with your mission, vision, and values. It’s what the organization is about. So, make sure the vision is workable and inclusive – considering all employee’s different needs and challenges.

Crafting a compelling employee value proposition (EVP) is essential to attracting and retaining the right talent in today's competitive labor market. By clearly articulating what sets your organization apart, including exclusive benefits, professional development opportunities, and a supportive work culture, you can effectively engage your target talent pool. It's critical to align your EVP with the values and aspirations of potential candidates, ensuring the authenticity of your message. As you refine your EVP, consider ongoing feedback from current employees and market trends to remain relevant and engaging.

Setting up goals clearly is the first step need to craft all goals so that we can work to achieve those, this include Recruitment goals to attract top talent along with diversity in talent pool. Engagement goals to enhance employee engagement improve retention along with strengthening company brand. Ensure salary package are competitive in industry. Offer benefits like health insurance, paid time off wellness program. Provide opportunities for professional growth through training program, create career path advancement opportunities. Foster positive inclusive collaborative workplace culture. Communicate company mission impact employee. Implement formal informal recognition programs. Create concise summary of EVP, use stories testimonials

A good way to start is interviewing your current staff. Why do they love working for your company? This is a great starting point to crafting an authentic EVP. Doing this continuously will provide an ongoing feedback loop, to help you adept and evolve your EVP over time.

Want to attract the best people? You need a killer EVP! First, figure out what your ideal employee wants in a job. What makes your company special? Be honest about what you offer and keep it simple. Show, don't tell! Use real examples of why your company is awesome. And don't forget to ask your current team what they love about working there.

If you want your EVP to drive talent results that sustain and scale, it should be built on a structural framework (and a brand device) that moves and adjusts according to each audience you’re seeking to engage. It’s likely that you have many talent audiences, who are all very different to each other. Think about your different business areas, then the various roles within each area, then how things change depending on location, then all the many different types of individuals within each of THOSE segments! The answer isn’t to create many separate EVPs. It’s about having the process and the expertise to develop an overarching EVP that moves and flexes to be meaningful and compelling for each audience segment. Not easy but so powerful.

In my knowledge, researching your audience is essential for crafting a compelling EVP for your target talent pool. Start by gathering detailed data on their demographics, career aspirations, and values. Use surveys, focus groups, and social media insights to understand their preferences and pain points. By tailoring your EVP to align with what truly matters to your audience, you can create a message that attracts and retains top talent effectively.

Top of the list is to embrace the fact that it is unlikely you have one target talent pool. You will have several and they will have unifying and differentiating factors. Understanding both is critical to build your EVP messaging framework and use it to develop a targeted content and channel strategy. Don’t just split your audience by roles….think about lifestage and other factors like parents and not to ensure your create an EVP that addresses their holistic needs not just their work persona. Treating each employee holistically is imperative to depth of engagement and retention

The best way to build an EVP is to start with what is easiest, but not always obvious: listening to our people, those who already work with us. These should be the ones to point out, as a first step, what the ambitions, conditions and expectations are for carrying out a role or teamwork.

Understanding the target audience may well be the most crucial part of building a compelling EVP. It is of essence to understand who we will hire the most in the coming times. The organisation today may be full of millennials, but we will be hiring Gen Z for the times to come. Similarly, we may have service-age employees as our core today, but the organisation is now transforming into a digital one, and most of the new talent we hire will be information-age employees. This is also a place where building the correct pillars for the EVP will ensure that we do not end up misaligning the internal and external communication efforts.

"Several" ? Yikes. Maybe 3 or 4. :)) Clean, dynamic, true, and absolutely catching the pulse and spirit of your organisation. Avoid overused phrases and buzzword bingo.

In my opinion, defining your pillars is crucial for crafting a compelling EVP for your target talent pool. Start by identifying the core values and unique benefits that set your organization apart, such as career development, work-life balance, and company culture. Ensure these pillars resonate with the aspirations and needs of your ideal candidates. By clearly articulating these pillars, you create a strong foundation for an EVP that attracts and engages the right talent.

Where did this dogma around pillars come from? Leveraging pillars is A way of building a brand, but aren't in any way necessary for defining what makes your company different in the eyes of your target audience.

Simple steps which I have followed many a times: 1. Gather Insights: Focus groups to surveys with current employees, alumni to identify what they value most about working at your company. Talent perception mapping is quite underrated but super important. 2. Analyse Data: Churn out those themes. 3. Found your key pillars?: Selecting four to five core pillars representing your company's unique offerings and values works. But don’t forget the USP you have vs. other organisations. 4. Align with Business Goals: Make them relevant for a long time. 5. Communicate Clearly: Articulate these pillars in a clear and compelling way across all employer branding materials to ensure consistency and recognition.

Relevance > Differentiation. YES, we need to know what makes us different. But we need to find what's relevant to candidates first - then, we'll make sure that this is distinct. Example: Graduate studies show that "growth opportunities" rank at the very top of what students are looking for. So all the brands have this in their EVP. So, should we leave it out? No! We need to find the angle how that is different in our company. At DHL, we run all of our 600,000 employees through a "certified" program. All of us are certified logistics professionals / certified international specialists. You can get a passbook stamped with all of these trainings. That's unique. And it doesn't matter that other company claim growth opportunities too.

The "brand" can take many many forms. What matters is that it is Specific (not value), Attractive (rather than just blandly pleasant), Different (so as to force a choice) and Real (because "spin" is so 2012). Make a poster. A tagline. A manifesto. A haiku. It doesn't matter, so long as it is specific, attractive, different and real.

Firstly, you don't *need* a statement. You don't need a few paragraphs that sit on your careers site doing not much else. What you do *need* is a clear understanding of your strengths & weaknesses, and a plan of how you are going to amplify or address them, respectively. Your statement should change over time, it should shift from 'we are going to' to 'we have done', and it should be both a commitment to your people and candidates to articulate who you are and who you want to be. But it should also keep you accountable to your plan and strategy. It's more important to have a robust framework, evidence and strategy, than to have a statement.

Ensure your EVP reflects the true experiences of current employees. Authenticity builds trust and sets realistic expectations. Avoid jargon and overly complex language. The message should be clear and easily understood by your target audience. Identify and promote what makes your organization unique. This could be your mission, impact, innovative projects, or unique workplace practices

Write a short and authentic EVP statement involves understanding your existing employees' needs and showcasing your organization's unique attributes. It should authentically reflect the company's culture, values, and the tangible and intangible benefits offered to employees and also potential candidates. The EVP must be clear, engaging, and align with the company's strategic goals, highlighting opportunities for growth, development, and the overall employee experience. I always believe that it's also essential to involve various stakeholders in its development to ensure it is representative and inclusive.

It should effectively convey the core of your pillars and highlight the advantages and emotions associated with working for your organization. It is important to use plain and straightforward language, steer clear of industry jargon and overused phrases, and emphasize your distinctive selling points.

Launching an EVP is not an easy, one-and-done process. It should be well thought-out, include stakeholder alignment and buy-in, and take into account cultural differences so that your EVP pillars are true and resonate locally. Data is your best friend, from crafting the EVP, to launching, to evolving it.

In my view too many employers focus on the insight and EVP development phase and not enough on launching and activating the proposition both within the organisation and externally. The EVP needs to be projected across all touch points for existing and potential staff. And whilst I'm on my soapbox, please, please put in place mechanisms to measure the impact of their EVP. Very few organisations do, making it really hard to justify the original and continued investment.

I feel there are two groups of people who can be used effectively while communicating evp: Leaders of the function - Advocacy from leaders will get the attention of talent pool. Those leaders will have an active network of experts belonging to a certain function. For example, a data science leader will have a network of experts belonging to data science. When that leader talks about organization's EVP, you will have the attention of abovementioned experts. Hiring managers- When someone is hiring, there is a lot of attention directed towards that person feom the talent pool for the duration of hiring. Using this hiring manager's team and their collective network will be an impactful way to communicate your EVP.

Crafting a Compelling EVP for Your Target Talent Pool - 1. Understand Your Audience: Research what matters to your target talent. (Example: Tech firms focus on innovation.) 2. Highlight Unique Benefits: Showcase what sets you apart. (Example: Patagonia’s commitment to sustainability.) 3. Incorporate Employee Voices: Use testimonials for authenticity. (Example: Salesforce features employee stories.) 4. Align with Company Culture: Reflect actual work environment and values. (Example: Google’s focus on collaboration.) 5. Communicate Clearly: Use simple language and engaging visuals. 6. Regularly Update: Keep your EVP fresh and relevant.

There is no one right way to build a brand or EVP. But to create the results you really want, every company could spend more time defining and communicating around what the candidate wants to know rather than what executives think they should say.

Alright, here's a crazy idea: Your consumer marketing colleague's brand new campaign with Influencer X in channel Y for product Z suffers the same law as any (media) campaign: The law of diminishing returns. That means, reaching the last few consumers for the nth time is just soooo much more expensive than, let's say, collaborating with YOU to create an employer branding angle with that influencer and reallocating a small media budget to push the employer branding angle in a fresh target group. Now, imagine the both of you selling this idea internally as the most innovative cross-functional collaboration and no one will care about the "lost" contacts of the original campaign. Sounds too good to be true? Just go ahead and try it out!

Analogy: The features and attributes of products or services are the same for any customer. Arguably, the benefits are, too, but the experience delivers the value! Does this sound like recruiting and employee experience? It is, and it isn't. There are two types of value for all career attributes—tangible and intangible—messaging vs. lived experience. Take unlimited PTO. It's part tangible (the time itself) and part intangible (the culture, feel, and logistics of taking time off). The intangible part is where you can differentiate value! A good EVP story forms if the culture truly encourages taking time off. Map the two sides of value attributes, unique or not, and you can communicate differentiated value for any audience, anywhere.