The team at Recruitics believes employees are at the heart of any business. As employees become more and more engaged in their job and their company, the business thrives.
With a successful business, employees become dedicated and committed to give their best in their roles, allowing their engagement and productivity to rise as well.
Employee engagement is more than an intellectual connection between the employee and the employer, it’s an emotional one. Engaged employees feel their work is appreciated and valued, and communications from the company can be a huge driver of employee engagement.
It’s essential for companies to strengthen their relationship with their employees. This can be done by understanding their hopes, desires, wants, and needs of the workforce (also increasing satisfaction and retention along the way). The connection the company has with their employees and those they aspire to recruit should be present in all employer brand communications.
Therefore, a company’s first investment should be in developing a unique employee value proposition (EVP) as this will significantly increase talent acquisition and retention, providing a competitive advantage in employer branding. It simplifies talent management, even while attempting to recruit passive candidates.
What Is An EVP?
An employee value proposition (EVP) is the company’s mission, values, and culture – highlighting reasons why candidates and employees should work for a company. This can include tangible benefits such as salary, bonus, commission, company care, and intangible benefits such as organizational culture, work-life balance, career progression, and job security.
The EVP can also help with expectations from the employer and the employee, building expectations around what the employee gains when working at the company and what value employees are expected to contribute to the employer.
The EVP becomes the guiding principle for hiring professionals to help identify great culture fits in which candidates to hire, employees to promote, and which should move on from the organization. A well-established, well-defined, and strong EVP can directly impact quality candidate recruitment, employee satisfaction, and staff retention.
A company’s EVP serves as a strategic foundation, acting as a “North Star” and helping guide all future internal and external communications. The EVP should act as a filter to evaluate what the company is saying and how they say it. The consistency that this promotes drives clarity of purpose and organizational uniformity – which can help with building a reputation and attracting talent to a company.
How To Make An EVP
Recruitics employs a unique “Four Paths Process” to create an authentic, unique, and ownable EVP. The objective is to deliver an emotional and lasting statement of the mutual promise the company makes with its employees and vice versa.
This a rigorous analytical process using quantitative and qualitative research, employee roundtables, leadership interviews, and a pulse survey.
The Recruitics team combines this with a highly creative process – that takes into consideration the company’s culture, its people, the competition, the moment in time, and the societal impacts that affect the category in which it competes – to help build a communications plan to reach the targeted audience with the information and benefits they seek.
At the conclusion of the “Four Paths Process,” the EVP is now defined, and the team at Recruitics can build an insight-based creative brief that establishes the measurable goals of the assignment, defines what success looks like, the attitudes or behaviors to change, and deliverables to achieve.
What Is Employer Branding?
The employer brand is a company’s reputation as an employer. Specifically, it’s the product of how people experience, express, or define the relationship the company has with its people. Employer branding also showcases the value a company offers to job seekers, employees, and key stakeholders.
The smartest companies understand their employer brand and work hard to define it and position it in the most favorable manner – so a company can get the most out of its investment in people. In other words, once companies understand their employer branding, they can market their company to job seekers and employees – attracting and retaining top talent along the way.
Also, by positively managing the employer brand, companies can create a well-defined culture that is directed toward the business ambitions and aspirations. This will promote a stronger relationship with the staff and build a public reputation that is consistent and competitively superior to others in the space.
Candidates and employees need and want to connect in a meaningful way to where they work, and it’s becoming essential to feel they belong and like there's value in their work. An employer brand should be able to showcase this and why their culture is hard for a candidate to turn down.
Tip: The employer brand is how the audience views the company’s reputation, not what the company says the brand is. An employer brand is an evolving thing; it lives and breathes in the minds of current, past, and future employees. However, crafting a strong communications plan can help companies attract the kind of audience they’re looking for. Use it to show the audience what an amazing company it is.
Employer branding goes beyond just storytelling. Companies need to make a commitment to their promise and walk the walk. Communicating that the company’s culture is great, but actually showing how makes a huge difference.
Communicating The Employer Brand
In the current hiring market, companies have challenges connecting with their people and their prospects. This can be due to the natural distractions of everyday life and the numerous messages that hit candidates from every direction.
That’s why bringing both creativity and innovation to the storytelling of the employer brand can help companies reach their intended audience. The communications need to capture the job seeker and employee’s attention and imagination, and can invite them to participate and build a deeper relationship with the employer.
It also needs to showcase the company’s worth, motivating employees and job seekers to move forward with a company. This is why breakthrough communications can be a powerful factor in developing an employer brand and driving employee engagement.
Recruitics can help companies remain competitive by partnering to set clear and measurable goals, and then constantly measuring efforts for a program of continual improvement and ROI.
Tip: Some media can be controlled (like events, internal campaigns, advertising) and others that cannot (like the press, the community buzz, and the blogosphere) – making it essential for companies to take responsibility for navigating these two worlds to best affect the company’s reputation.
Following The North Star
By following the “North Star” of an EVP, a company’s employer brand can be shared – both externally and internally – through innovative and intentional communications.
The alignment between the EVP and employer brand showcases the company’s promises. It’s a huge part of how companies bring the EVP to life and how the employer brand is sharing the authentic employee experience to the world.
Moving Forward
The employee experience is an essential part of an employer brand. Candidates and employees want to work for a transparent, trustworthy, and authentic company. This is why aligning with current employees, strengthening their relationship with the company they work for, and expressing this relationship through a well-developed employee value proposition is crucial.
Whether attracting new talent or creating organizational communications to retain your best talent, improving your company culture, or increasing employee engagement, Recruitics brings the intelligence, process, tools, craft, and commitment to help companies thrive in the most challenging of times.
If your company is looking for assistance building your EVP and employer brand, reach out to Recruitics today!
