Should You Bother with an EVP?

Oct 28

EVP stands for employer brand proposition, and yes, you need one. It’s not a secret sauce that draws applicants in buckets or locks in your best employees. It’s just a tool, and it will make employer branding easier, so it’s worth putting careful thought into.

Your EVP informs your employer brand messaging, your recruitment and retention campaigns, and it can even help you design a benefits package and write job descriptions.

Your EVP answers the questions: Why should someone want to work at your company? What’s in it for them?

The answer must be more than a paycheck or the prestige of the company name. Think bigger—it comprises the full package of working with you. Compensation and reputation matter, but so do company mission, career opportunities, the work produced, and company culture.

As you start scribbling ideas, let’s pause to note what an employer value proposition is not.

An EVP is not:

Money. You’re an employer. That you pay your employees is a given. But nice try.
A list of company benefits. Similar to compensation, full-time employees expect basic benefits like health insurance, paid leave, etc. Your EVP gets at something deeper than that. More on what non-FTEs should expect later.
A restatement of your company mission. The mission of your company is consumer- or client-focused. The EVP should appeal to the employee. But the two aren’t unrelated: Your EVP may be the way your employees contribute to your company mission.
A list of company values. Your company values will inform the employee experience and thus your EVP, but they aren’t the whole of your EVP.
What you hope your EVP will be some day. Your value proposition should be a statement that’s true now, not a wish list. In other words, if it says that yours is a diverse team, your team should already be diverse. Your EVP is not a goal you hope to achieve one day.

But here’s the catch, your employer value proposition is all of these things. Company values and great benefits are often what’s in it for workers, and you’ll see really successful employer value propositions explicitly state some part of the company mission or list a few differentiating benefits or even cast an ideal vision for their future workforce, but nothing on this list constitutes an EVP on its own.

Differentiation

Perhaps the most difficult part of writing your EVP is differentiation. An employer value proposition takes into consideration what your competition offers. What can you give workers that your competitors cannot?

Differentiation requires specifics. A lot of companies say they offer career growth opportunities, but how? We like this this portion of P&G’s rather lengthy EVP:

We hire based on the potential we see in people, so here, you’ll be trusted to dive right in, take the lead, use your initiative, and build billion-dollar brands that help make everyday activities easier and make the world a better place. You’ll be doing meaningful work that takes your career places you never imagined.

Who gets left out

Don’t forget about non-full-time employees when writing your EVP. If you’re not giving someone health insurance or paid time off, what is in it for them? This is one reason your EVP is more than a list of benefits and perks, it’s about what those associated with your company will get in return. So as you form your value proposition, ask yourself how all types of employees will benefit.