Thoughts from the road…

There are a lot of people talking about the best way to pump on their employment brand these days as they prepare for the recovery, which either has started, is getting ready to start or is still a couple of years away depending on your point of view…

Here’s the deal about your employment brand – you can’t make it up and make it what you want it to be. Like your culture, it already exists. Can you move it over time? Sure, with some hard work. But back to today…

The backbone of your current employment brand really rests in something called the EVP (employer value proposition). The EVP is an employee’s perspective on “what’s in it for me to work here?” and an employer’s demonstrated promise to its employees. Key components of an EVP may include: Compensation, Benefits, Affiliation, Career Prospects and Work Content.

I know, that’s boring. But here’s what really matters – start talking to your leadership team about your company’s EVP, and they’ll start telling you what they want the EVP to be, or what they believe it to be. Which doesn’t matter much. To accurately assess an EVP, you’ve got to do a bunch of interviews with people inside and outside of your company – current and past employees, candidates who didn’t get the job, etc.

What they say your EVP is…. is what your EVP is. Not what you want your employment brand to be.

The real promise of figuring out your EVP is there’s gold in what you hear. You’ll hear a bunch of stuff that’s disheartening for sure – people laugh at what you think the employment brand is – but…. you’ll hear things that they really value about working at your company that could be great cornerstones of an employment brand.

BUT – you have to be brave enough to tell the world what you heard in the EVP work. Example – we’re not a family at all here. We’re a culture that values real performance and the people who think and act differently have a career path that happens in their first two years. Meanwhile, we ignore average performers. Or maybe everyone here operates in a culture of brutal honesty – as a result, you see a lot of directness and even venting that everyone accepts and encourages – and no one gets their feelings hurt for long.

Is that what you want to say to the world? I don’t know. But for some of you, it’s what your EVP is.

Subsequently, it’s your real employment brand. You ought to find a way to leverage it