What is an employee value proposition?

Employee value proposition (EVP) is the unique and compelling reason for why people love to choose you as their employer. It’s the value the company creates for its employees in return for their contribution at the company - it encapsulates pay, benefits, training opportunities, an employee’s career path in the organization, their work environment, workplace culture and so on.

Employee Value Proposition

 Employer Value Proposition vs Employer Brand

Employee Value Proposition - the WHY

It’s all the reasons you give an employee to join you in the first place and then stay with you. You first understand what your ideal target audience perceives as valuable and then offer it to them throughout your interactions with them. 

Employer Brand - the WHAT

Your employer brand tells your candidates and employees who you are and what’s your story. If they like it and they buy it, nothing will stop them from pursuing you. Unlike a value proposition, a brand will form on its own if it’s not intentionally chiseled. In fact, your brand is a more aggressive and creative expression of your underlying EVP. 

Both EVP and a sound employer brand are crucial to hiring success and employee happiness and retention.

The importance of having an EVP

Gives you a competitive advantage

 With both potential candidates and current employees, it gives you a competitive edge. It shows your employees unambiguously why it’s a privilege to work with you, making talent attraction and talent retention much more swift.

Impacts performance and productivity

 Unconsciously, when people have a sense of pride in working for you, it reflects in their motivation to perform, produce and innovate. It also shows in their relationships with other colleagues and even customers.

You make free employee advocates

When your employees believe in you, they will talk to their friends and family about you, their social media streams will have a love for you - a blessing in disguise when you are trying to drive employee referrals.

The elements of a good employee value proposition

Compensation

The compensation component covers the financial rewards your employee will receive for their services. You can ask yourself questions such as these:

Taking the time to have an upfront conversation about such things with your employees can steer clear of any confusion and give them the confidence to choose you.

Perks and benefits

Alongside the compensation, companies provide employees with other benefits such as time off, maternity leave, insurance, food coupons, transportation facilities and so on. Some of these are offered by default based on local governmental guidelines. There is however an array of other benefits from which organizations can put together an attractive, statement-making benefits package for their employees - Childcare, mental health programs or support, fitness facilities, retirement plans, etc. 

Clear career path

Beyond financial rewards and thoughtful benefits, employees want to see a future at your company - a career path - they want to know if you have a growth plan for them. Employees experience an atmosphere for growth or development through leadership programs, company sponsored certifications, planned mentorship programs, opportunities for promotions, opportunities to work on projects they like or projects that challenge and enhance their skills and expertise, etc.

Work environment

People spend up to 8+ hours with colleagues for approximately 5 days a week. Their work environment hence weighs into their life.

Your people should love to come to work - and to do that, they should enjoy who they work with, what they do and where they work at. That’s why it’s highly important to build a positive work environment which quietly becomes a part of their everyday life. 

Workplace culture  

Your workplace culture is the shared beliefs that manifests in everyday work, relationships and achievements of employees in an organization. It’s the responsibility of the leadership to define this, when they don’t, a culture forms on it’s own which may not be healthy to the organization's success or growth. You can start of with the following questions,

Creating a compelling employee value proposition

What’s your current EVP? Assess! - You can start by running an employee survey or having discussions with your employees and then your leaders. Exit interviews might be a good place to lean in and listen. You can use the EVP component list in this page to understand how you fare against each one of them.

You can go one step further and also include your past employees in this list.

What’s the EVP you would like to have? - After the initial assessment, define what you want and don’t want in your EVP. You can base this on the feedback from your employees and the target group of candidates you would like to attract. For example, if you are looking at fresh-out-of-college candidates as the dominant recruiting strategy for the year, focus on defining career paths they can’t say no to.

How do you plan to communicate your EVP? - A fabulous one liner on your career site won’t do! You need to reinforce it throughout your employee’s life cycle, which is right from the day you first contacted them to their last day at work. The following are some great places to highlight your EVP:

- Career site
- Social media campaigns
- External job postingsa
- Communications during the interview process
- Pre-onboarding and onboarding communications
- Internal social platforms
- Brand ambassador programs

What’s the impact of your EVP? - How is your target audience responding to it? Do you see an increase in the number of applications? Is there a difference in the quality of candidates that are applying? Is your team noticing any difference in the overall retention rates in the organization? Do you see an increase in referrals? - These are some questions to get you started but there are easily more for you to explore.

Since everyone loves real life examples


 

A Glassdoor review! Now that’s a statement in itself about a Hubspot employee’s relationship with her employer. It paints a vivid picture for any reader to see, feel and experience.

 

 

Have you ever walked into a Hamleys store? If you have, then you have probably been touched by the joy they promise to spread. And, who wouldn’t want to be a part of a mission like that, especially in a world that’s falling apart in so many ways, right?

 

 

A highlight from Pinterests’s careers page - What you emphasis is what you attract! If you are looking to attract people who steward values like integrity, ownership, craftsmanship, courage, or anything else that matters to you, you need to emphasise them, call them out.

 

Look at Huckletree! What a thoughtful bunch of benefits! Like they say it’s the thought that matters. If you can put together a mix of benefits that makes your employees feel you invested yourself in it, there’s nothing like that.

Employee Value Proposition is communicated through LITTLE and BIG things. It’s more than a lifeless statement on your careers page. If you really have deep-rooted care for your employees and press on to make their lives better, it will inevitably radiate into everything you do for them. That’s the key to attracting amazing people and giving them a reason to choose you again and again.

About Freshteam:

The Freshteam recruiting software enables rapidly growing businesses to attract  and onboard competitive talent. It empowers recruiters to source like pros, and steady the hiring process with smart interview scheduling, candidate management, scorecards, all leading up to business-impacting hiring decisions right from day 1. It’s on the hiring strategies list of 5000+ businesses around the world. Freshteam also enables HR to create, enforce  and manage time-off policies, the central HRIS database and other critical HR processes.