Most organizations spend a lot of time thinking about how potential customers perceive them as brands, how they see their products and services, and how well they think the company communicates information to encourage people to make a purchase.

Companies literally spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year trying to work out their consumer branding. But when was the last time you stopped to consider how existing and potential employees look at you as an employer?

Thankfully, some companies are making a real effort with their employer branding strategies to continually attract and retain top talent, developing what’s known as an Employer Value Proposition (EVP).

Employer Value Propositions Explained

In competitive industries where demand for talent is high but supply is low, you can bet candidates with the credentials you need know they have the leverage to be more selective with job offers.

Likewise, your existing staff all have opinions and ideas about what your company stands for and what it means to be part of the organization.

To make your company a more appealing place to work in, you need to spend time developing your EVP: the offerings, associations, and values your company communicates to existing employees and potential recruits.

Four Pillars of an Employer Value Proposition

Your EVP gives people a clear incentive to work for you by reflecting your competitive advantages, which can be broken down into four pillars.

1. Employer image and reputation – This refers to your unique characteristics as an employer, which can include your products and services, innovations, leadership, market success, and prestige, among others.
2. People, culture, and values – This refer to your company culture, friendliness of your work environment, availability of opportunities for personal growth and development, and respect for people, diversity, and gender equality, among others.
3. Remuneration and career opportunities – This refers to a competitive base salary, the reward of high future earnings, opportunities for career advancement and leadership, and other benefits involving pay.
4. Job description – This refers to the demands and details of the job, including the scope of responsibilities, level of challenge, availability of training and coaching, flexibility of work, and degree of team-based and individual work.

Why Your Company Should Develop an Employer Value Proposition

If you think about it, every organization communicates some kind of message, whether they know it or not.

So, if you’re going to send signals, they might as well be of the positive kind—something that will make you stand out from the crowd and help potential employees form expectations about what it’s like to work for you.

Sure, pay is important. But it’s just one of many factors candidates consider when looking at an organisation to work for. You also have to consider company culture, which, according to Fortune, is especially important to millennial job seekers.

Your EVP Shapes Your Company Culture

When you look at why people love working for Google, the tech company voted as having the best corporate culture in 2017, the list of reasons doesn’t begin with pay.

Instead, former and current employees sing praises about the intangible benefits of working for the search giant, such as true flexibility, room for creative freedom, a fun working environment, and the opportunity to work alongside talented and smart people.

On the other end of the spectrum is dissatisfaction. According to JobStreet’s Employee job happiness index 2017, around one in two Singaporean workers are unhappy with their jobs due to issues such as feelings of stagnation, poor leadership, and lack of training opportunities.

Identifying the cultural factors that make employees happy and unhappy is part of what makes an EVP so important. Understanding your EVP helps you know whether you have a great company culture or one that needs work. If it’s the latter, you can make the appropriate organizational changes, then follow up with image and reputation management.

This brings us to the next point.

Your EVP Can Prevent You From Wasting Money

The lack of a strong EVP may be hurting you financially. A study published in Harvard Business Review found that companies with at least 10,000 employees may be spending up to $7.6 million in wages to compensate for a poor image.

And that’s just for the people they could convince to come on board.

In contrast, a strong employer brand and image can reduce cost-per-hire by as much as 43 percent. Similarly, a great image backed by a strong EVP can reduce employee churn by up to 28 percent and improve your ability to find qualified talent by as much as 50 percent.

How to Create an Irresistible Employer Value Proposition

Now that you know what an EVP is and why it’s important, where do you start making one for your company?

Although there are different ways to craft an irresistible EVP, we think it’s best to provide examples to see how certain companies have developed theirs.

1. State What You Believe In

What values and ideas do your company believe that you wish to wish to share with employees, now and in the future?

Do these values align with your vision and mission?

What about your products and services?

To be effective, an EVP that talks about values must be relevant to the kind of employees you want to recruit and keep. You can’t say you promote flexibility but still have a primarily butts-in-seats management style.

These values should also be consistent with what you do—it’s hard to say you embrace sustainability when your company uses excessive amounts of fossil fuels.

In the example above, Bosch in Singapore offers a good example of the values it believes in, explaining in clear and concise language why it believes in these principles and how they are integrated into their business practices.

2. Offer the Promise of Growth and Challenges

What many employers fail to realize is that for many workers, growth and development are their own rewards.

According to a survey commissioned by the Singapore Business Federation (SBF), the lack of growth and development opportunities is the most-cited reason why Singaporean employees decide to leave a company.

This is consistent with the previously mentioned JobStreet survey showing that Singaporeans are unhappy due to a lack of career development opportunities.

The promise of a challenge and personal growth is an integral part of a solid EVP. It’s how Canva, a graphic-design tool, succeeded in convincing then-Google engineer Dave Hearnden to leave the search engine company at a time when Canva had yet to raise its first round of capital.

The company used a tongue-in-cheek pitch to show that Canva was a place where he could grow and make his mark on the Internet. And the rest, as they say, is history.

3. Identify and Share Your Culture

What makes your company tick? What practices, beliefs, and quirks make up your company culture?

Like many young companies, the company culture over at Hong Kong-based traveltech startup Klook has been described by reviewers as being relatively free of bureaucracy, embracing flexible work and casual wear.

According to Eric Gnock Fah, Klook’s president and co-founder, their company culture and relatively flat structure encourage cross-cultural collaboration and communication, ensuring that staff have different perspectives and stay open-minded.

Klook’s focus, he notes, is to maintain the same casual and creative vibe they had since day one to keep their momentum going.

As an employer, what you can do is figure out the things that make your company unique, which you can then package as part of your company culture. This can include an open-door policy with managers, flexitime, a hip vibe, a focus on creativity, or closely-knit teamwork, among others.

4. Don’t Be Shy About Benefits

According to a 2015 Glassdoor survey, 60 percent of people said that benefits are a primary factor in deciding whether to accept a job offer. More surprising is how the same survey also indicates that 80 percent of people would pick generous benefits over a pay increase.

So, work perks are definitely important. If you can afford to be generous with yours, make sure existing and potential employees know about it through your EVP.

Mastercard Singapore is one such company that isn’t shy to share its benefits package, putting it front and center on their Careers Page.

The company knows that these benefits are above the usual, which is why it has no qualms about using them as a bargaining chip to attract talent.

An EVP Sets Expectations—Make Sure You Live Up to Them

Failure to live up to the expectations set by your EVP can have disastrous results, making you look dishonest, untrustworthy, and unreliable. For example, if you claim to advocate for diversity but don’t actually have a diverse workplace, you’ll just end up in a worse position than when you first started out.

It’s one thing to claim your company believes in these values or treats employees a certain way, but it’s another thing entirely to walk the talk.