Employer Branding Stories | How to define your Employer Value Proposition (if you don't have any budget)

First thing you need to know when you start building your Employer Branding strategy is your Employer Value Proposition (EVP). You can of course do something without it, but it won't be as efficient.

If we simplify things, the EVP will help you understand what your company’s strong points are and find the answer to a key question that will help you with your internal and external engagement strategy. 

What’s that key question? Here it is: What makes people happy in our company? 

Being strongly connected to your values and culture, the EVP is the basis of your Employer Branding and Employee Experience strategy. It drives the way you communicate and it acts like a compass for all your people related projects and practices. 

That’s why, if done right, it has impact within and outside of a company. 

There are two main ways to define or update your Employer Value Proposition: 

1. If you have a budget, you can choose a vendor. I was lucky to have some, so we worked with Universum and they did an awesome job. There are others we met with, but I chose them for their research expertise. And it was a good decision. I will write the story of this project some other day. :) 
2. If you don’t have a budget, you can do it yourself. As we like to say at UiPath, it’s scrappy, but it can work like magic. 

As the first option is the ‘easy’ one, let’s focus on the no-budget one. What can you do to get to know your company’s strong points in this case? 

• Use any data you have from Employee Engagement Surveys, Stay Interviews or any Pulse surveys. Find out what are the areas you excel in as a company. What are the areas to improve on?
• Have a quick talk with your HR Business Partners or any other people who are responsible for Employee Engagement or Employee Experience. What did they notice from their experience talking with the employees? Are there things that multiple people talk about? 
• Use any data you have from Exit Interviews or Exit Surveys. Why do people leave the company? Is there something you can change? Would they consider coming back?  
• It’s also good to have discussions with your Senior Leadership team to understand their vision for the future of the company. In the end, your Employer Value Proposition needs to also be aligned with the company strategy.
• Create a survey to understand what people like about your company, what they would like to change, the NPS score, if they have plans to leave in the near future etc. To avoid survey fatigue, if you sent out an Employee Engagement survey in the last 5 months, you can skip this step.
• Survey your new hires to understand what attracted them to your company in the first place. You can also ask your candidates the same thing. We use Survale, but you can create your own survey or see if your ATS has this functionality. 
• Check out sites like Glassdoor, Kununu or Blind for extra feedback. 

For all the surveys above make sure to have a representative sample of your employee population before taking them into account. For example, for our EVP research, we sent out the survey to 1200 people from our 4 main hubs and we got a total of 860 responses, getting an average of 60% of each hub’s employee base. Don’t be afraid to wait until you get your numbers right. In this case, quality data is more important than delivering something fast. 

If you’ll go through all the steps above, I guarantee you you’ll have a ton of interesting data. Analyzing it you’ll see things that come up again and again. Let's call them patterns. These are the first clues you have of your Employee Value Proposition. 

In our case, we found out that the main things people were happy about around the globe were the fact that their work had an impact, the freedom of choosing the way they did their work and the fact that making mistakes is seen as a good thing. 

These patterns will be quite helpful in the next stage of the process.

You now have both quantitative and qualitative data. Congrats! Now it’s the time to get creative.

One important thing to have in mind at this stage: you might not have your final messaging at this point. And that is ok. You can work with bullet points until you’re sure you are on the right track.

• We'll start with some questions. How would you respond to ‘What’s in it for me to stay or join this company?’ in one sentence? What is the secret sauce of your company? This is your overarching message. Try to avoid falling into the same pitfalls as other companies. Find words that are not that overused - a lot of companies use words like impact, innovation, etc. Here are some examples from other companies of how this might look like in the end:

• Then let’s respond to ‘Who are we?’. Most probably there are some things that were repeated throughout the process - those patterns we talked about earlier. You can group them if they are related to each other. They will be your pillars. At this point they might sound like ‘We learn a lot of new things in this company’ or ‘We enjoy working with the best of our industry’. Try to explain what they mean for you. In the end you will have some paragraphs describing all of that. I'll use our pillars as an example for this one:

• When writing these, also have in mind your potential candidates. Why are they attracted to the company? Blend that into your copy and try to test it externally with your candidates.
• Make sure you validate it again with your Leadership and your employees. Do they resonate with it? Does it paint a realistic picture? Would they change anything? Is there a balance between what is true today and what you aspire your company to be? 
• You can talk with your colleagues and ask them what they think about what you found. Organize 1:1 discussions or focus groups and encourage the conversation. How do they feel about your findings? Do they have examples to sustain them? 

As a best practice and depending on your expertise as a moderator, the number of people in a focus group should be around 10-12. And depending on your employee sample size, you’ll need to determine the number of focus groups. We organized 5 in different locations, each with 12 people. 

It's ok if you don't get everything right from the first try. You might need to rewrite it. Maybe more than once. And that’s ok. Believe me, we’ve done that at least 5 times before presenting it as final. It is more important to get it right and make sure your employees will support it, than getting it fast. Feedback is good, it shows people care about it. Use it. 

1. If you are a global company, make sure to involve people from all around the world in this process. We need to be mindful of cultural differences and create an EVP that is flexible enough.
2. You probably have more target groups. Make sure your EVP is broad enough to include all of them. Include employees from those target groups in all stages of the process.
3. Make sure you walk the talk. Infuse your EVP in your employee journey. If there is no consistency between what you say and what you do, you’ll lose your most important advocates: your employees. I am working on that as we speak, so I'll get back to you on this topic too.

In the end, I'll leave you with this: Have the courage to be creative, and let data and culture guide you. And if you are just starting this process, enjoy it. It will be great, I promise!