Attracting and retaining good quality employees is the most important piece to creating a healthy and productive workplace culture.

We find ourselves in an interesting mindset shift between companies and their employees. For employees, finding a place to work is becoming less about finding the fattest paycheck and more about finding a company that fits in with their values and way of life.

This Glassdoor study in 2019 shows that employees value a company’s mission and values over salary with 76% of people saying they wouldn’t work at a company that doesn’t have values that align with their own.

So how can companies attract the right people without having the biggest salary available?

Positioning.

Positioning is branding 101. The way you position your company in the minds of employees (current and future) is critical to fighting staff churn and attracting high-quality talent.

How you position your business to employees is called your Employee Value Proposition.

What is an Employee Value Proposition?

Your Employee Value Proposition encapsulates all the reasons why people choose to work at your company. Your EVP articulates the essence of your company. It gives people a clear idea of why it’s different from your competitors and why you have an inspiring or distinctive culture. IT should work with your overall brand but it needs to speak internally rather than externally.

Before you create your EVP

You need to understand the current perceptions from your employee’s point of view. This can’t come from directors’ or key stakeholders’ opinions. It is best done anonymously with staff at all levels to get a good idea of people’s thoughts.

Try and find out things like:

• What attracted them to your company
• How motivated do they feel there
• Would they recommend it to friends, why?
• What three things do they value most working there
• How would they describe the culture

What you are looking for is patterns. Patterns in things your current staff value and what they are missing. This gives a very raw look at what people think internally. This isn’t a time to get defensive. It’s the first step in learning what your employees want and value so you can start to design your EVP based on employees’ real fears and desires.

How to structure your EVP

A good EVP structure looks like this:

• Positioning line
• Employee manifesto
• Value 1
• Value 2
• Value 3
• Value 4
• Value 5

Why you need a positioning line

It’s a memorable phrase or line which succinctly encapsulates the core idea of why working with you is unique and attractive, make it snappy and alluring, this is a teaser so make sure there’s more behind the curtain once it has drawn potential candidates in.

Let’s look at two EVP position line examples:

Win as a team - Nike

Nike is obviously positioned close to the industry of sport but it also starts positioning itself as a workplace culture. It’s a simple inspirational line that draws you in.

They have a two-fold positioning strategy, one being ‘Move the world’ and the second, ‘Win as a team’.  Explore their careers portal here and see how it all comes together.

Join us. Be you - Apple

Apple’s EVP also links in strongly with the company’s overall positioning. For decades they have marketed their products for dreamers, the creatives and individuals. Their EVP backs that up by letting future employees know to come as who they are and to not change a thing.

This works on so many levels and is a really positive look into not only how they employ people but how they treat them once they’re employed.

It’s important to have a short snappy EVP so that your employees remember it.

You can dive deeper into their EVP here.

What is an Employee Manifesto?

A manifesto is the piece of the puzzle that explains the wider context of your positioning line. It needs to be motivating, interesting and inspiring. It should explain the way your company operates, what you believe and what keeps you going. These really do come in all different shapes and sizes so let’s take a look at how the two examples above come to life:

Win as a team - Nike

We believe in the inspirational power of sport to break down barriers, overcome differences and bring people together. To serve every athlete individually and completely — across the hundreds of countries where we do business — we need teams that truly reflect the diversity of our consumers, and a culture of inclusivity. We aim to foster inclusion and embrace diversity throughout our business, teams and culture to bring us closer to the consumer, empower our employees to realize their full potential and create breakthrough innovations for athletes. Our diverse, high-performing teams around the world share a singular goal: to make all athletes better. At Nike, we embrace different perspectives because we know everyone brings unique experiences and ideas to the team. No matter where we come from, a love of sport unites us. It teaches us to be competitive and to value collaboration.

Join us. Be you. - Apple

Values

If you’re looking at creating a powerful EVP then I’m guessing you have already gone down the road of creating company values. This is similar, and there can be some crossover but they are different.

Whilst your company values are around how you conduct business, your employee values are much more focussed on how you treat people internally and what’s valuable from an employee perspective.

These need to be honest and can’t simply be written on the basis of what you think people want. They have to back up what you do for staff.

How much should we spend on our employee branding and EVP?

This is different for every company, it mainly depends on what levels of staff you have, how many and what the cost is of recruitment.

One way to look at it is clearly defining the objectives of creating your EVP and how much money that will potentially save you in staff recruitment and churn and burn.

The objective of having a strong EVP is to keep and retain high-quality employees. So what you can do is look back and see how much your company spent in the last two years on hiring, re-hiring, headhunting and recruitment fees. These are all the things you should be doing less of with an effective EVP.  25% of that is a good start.

This is the easiest way to put a figure on it, but there are also benefits like motivation levels, staff well-being and productivity which all are benefits of having a clear EVP.

Conclusion

The simplest way to think about this is basic marketing. Just like you need to convince your customers that your company has the best products and service, you also need to sell your company to your future talent that your company is the best to work at.

The fundamentals of brand and marketing don’t change here, but your audience does. What your consumers want from your business is different from what your employees want. You just need to make sure that you have clear communication for both audiences.

Nail this and you will attract high-quality staff without poaching from competitors or paying large ongoing recruitment fees.