By: Fengting Lee
Your company may be known for having a great product or service that your clients love. But what about your employer brand? Your employer brand is your reputation as a desirable employer. Having a strong employer brand is what makes people want to work for you. Companies such as Google, Apple and Microsoft have such strong employer brands that top talents are constantly drawn to them.
While the employer brand is how potential job candidates view an organisation, the employer value proposition (EVP) is the set of attributes the organisation most want to be associated with, in order to attract talent. The employer brand is essentially how the organisation communicates its EVP to potential job candidates.
Investing in EVP has been shown to yield results in employee retention and cost savings. The following figures are from CEB’s reports:
Determining your EVP
To communicate your EVP to prospective employees, you’ll first need to define your employer value proposition.
Although pay and benefits do make an employer more desirable, they form just one part of the EVP. While the salary is an important reason why people work, it is often not the only reason. This can be understood by a well-known concept in psychology, the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which examines human’s intrinsic motivations.
According to Maslow’s theory, people seek to fulfill their basic, physiological needs. Once their basic needs are fulfilled, they seek to move up the pyramid to fulfill their higher order needs.
Applying a similar concept to creating an EVP, Mercer devised a modified version of the pyramid:
At the base of the pyramid are the tangible elements of an organisation’s EVP. These consists of pay and incentives, and other benefits such as company cars, healthcare and insurance coverage.
As we move up the pyramid, we see less tangible elements such career development plans. At the top of the pyramid is purpose. This refers to the organisation’s vision, social causes that the organisation supports and communities that the organisation adds value to.
Three steps to identify and communicate your EVP
Most companies already have an EVP in place even if it’s not formally documented. It’s crucial to be clear about your EVP so that you can communicate it in order to build a strong employer brand.
Step 1: Analyse
The first step involves looking internally to find out why your current employees like to work in your organisation. This step helps you uncover your strengths and weaknesses as an employer.
This can be done through running focus groups, surveys and in-depth interviews with employees. You can also use existing data from exit interviews and employee engagement surveys. Even your employee turnover and absenteeism data, when compared against industry standards, can tell you something.
At this stage, identifying the following would be useful:
Step 2: Design your EVP
With the data from Step 1, you can now design your organisation’s EVP. It is recommended to involve a workgroup for this task, consisting of a diverse group of employees from different profiles, teams and departments. This would help ensure that the final EVP is effective and appealing to the different talent profiles your organisation wants to attract.
Some tips when designing your EVP:
Step 3: Communicate your EVP
After you’ve come up with your EVP, you need to let people inside and outside of your organisation know about it.
Similar to a marketing communication campaign, spread word about your EVP through as many channels as possible. These could be company emails, company website, social media channels, intranet and posters around the office.
It should also be on all your recruitment channels and onboarding materials.
Tyro Payments is an Australia fintech company established in 2003. The company specialises in merchant credit, debit and EFTPOS acquiring.
In 2012, Tyro exceeded $3.5b of card transaction volume. The rapid growth and expansion of the company meant that it needed to increase its workforce quickly. In particular, it needed more Software Engineers, Security Engineers Network Engineers, Testers, UX Designers and Web Developers.
Challenge
Having good people on its team was what made Tyro successful. The team at Tyro was unwilling to compromise on the quality of new hires despite having to expand its team quickly. Managers at Tyro set a high technical bar for candidates. Besides being technically strong, they must also have great interpersonal skills and be able to fit into Tyro’s culture.
Tyro initially posted their job advertisements on job portals and LinkedIn. They also worked with recruitment agencies. Unfortunately, these methods did not yield good results for Tyro.
Solution
In 2017, Tyro partnered with Evolution Recruitment Solutions (Australia) for its hiring needs. To build Tyro’s employer brand, Evolution consultants interviewed Tyro’s existing employees to find out why they enjoyed working at Tyro. With the data, Evolution defined clearly Tyro’s EVP, and spread word about Tyro’s EVP in the market. As Evolution created buzz around Tyro’s EVP, it also strengthened Tyro’s employer brand, making it appealing for technology candidates.
Results
With Evolution’s proposed solution, Tyro filled more than 50 positions with top candidates in the market. With a talented team in place, Tyro grew even more rapidly as a business. In 2014, it was processing $7B in payments. In 2017, this figure grew to $14B.
The campaign led to long-term positive impact on Tyro’s employer brand. With the strong employer brand that Tyro has built, Tyro can now leverage on its increased brand visibility for its future hiring plans.
“Evolution proposed a new way to recruit the masses of quality IT staff we needed. The results we are achieving are unprecedented. We can wholeheartedly and unreservedly recommend Evolution to any company wanting to recruit world-class employees.”
To learn more about how we can help your organisation build a strong EVP and employer brand, contact us here.
