Leaders that are invested in building a strong employer brand and employee value proposition for their organizations are taking steps in the right direction. It’s no secret that we’re living in turbulent times, and feelings of uncertainty are surfacing for both employers and employees across several industries.

With a looming recession, inflation, war in Europe, and supply chain issues (to name a few considerations), companies are exercising caution around their decisions. There is pressure for leaders to find a balance between doing what’s best financially for the business, and to ensure that their team members feel supported at work amid uncertainty.

As these things remain top of mind, now is a great time to evaluate your current employer brand for a revamp or create a plan to get your employer brand in order.

Terms defined: Employer brand and employee value position

Before we continue, let’s make sure that we have our main terms accounted for. When we say, ‘employer brand,’ what we’re talking about is how an organization brands and markets the full employment experience. You might discuss topics such as your company’s reputation as a good (or bad) place to work, which impacts both recruitment and retention metrics.

When we say, ‘employee value proposition,’ or EVP, we’re talking about the portion of your employer branding that organizations use to attract certain employees with certain skillsets to join the company, as well as the basis for keeping those employees engaged once they’re part of the company.

Even though your EVP is crucial in the talent attraction process, it can also be used to retain your current talent–especially if you include them in the creation process. Your EVP shouldn’t just reflect the thoughts and feelings of your leadership team; the process should span all levels of the organization.

At Blu Ivy, we’re currently reworking our employee value proposition. We’re fortunate to be in a growth stage and have had many new team members join us over the last year. After doing the preliminary work on our new EVP, the pillars were presented back to the entire team, and everyone had a chance to evaluate them and weigh in on how well the pillars reflect their current employee experience.

Not only did we find this exercise to be engaging for our team, but it was another opportunity for transparency and openness in our conversations. That’s one of the things that we strive to maintain in our company culture.

How to market your employer brand

You’ve done all this incredible work to solidify your EVP and your overall employer brand. Now what? We suggest using the spaces that you already play in. For example, we engage with our audience a lot on LinkedIn. When we have new content to share, company news, client news, or we want to celebrate professional milestones that our team members have, LinkedIn is the go-to for sharing that information.

On the note of content, creating an EVP and putting your employer brand in words is a long and strenuous process. After all that effort, why not take some time to look back on the process and be ready to tell that story?

It could be a blog post that recounts a conversation between all major stakeholders on how they felt the process went; it could be a case study on why creating your employer brand and EVP was important to the organization.

No matter the direction you choose to take, telling the story of your employer brand process builds your credibility as an organization that values transparency, practices accountability, and strives to be the best work environment it can be for its current and future employees.

Why it is important to market your employer brand

Once you take the time to document the whole process, whether that’s in real time or in retrospect, decide what numbers you want to look at. Not only should you set goals around the performance of these content pieces, but you should use the process to guide what metrics you want to track around the impact of your new employer brand and employee value proposition.

You could look at things like:

• Number of applications (i.e., increase or decrease)
• Increase in employee net promoter score (eNPS)
• Job offers acceptance rate
• Employee engagement rates (new vs. current employees)

Going back to our definition of employer brand, we’re looking at the entire employee experience that your organization provides. When you remind yourself why your organization needed to make an investment in employer branding, study the results of the work that was put in, and then set goals based on those results, you’ll be able to measure the success of your employer brand effectively.

Make sure to choose metrics that mirror the holistic nature of employer brand. Don’t just account for new employees and how receptive they’ll be based on their fresh perspective; evaluate the impact on current employees. The strength of your employer brand marketing will be truly tested in practice.

How to encourage adoption of your employer brand internally

Marketing your employer brand is two-fold. You need to think about how to present it to your internal audience before you present it to an external audience. Your current team needs to have input so that you can confirm that the work you’ve put into your employee value proposition and the rest of your employee brand is reflective of the current state in your organization. Once you affirm that, you can start to infuse different materials with the terms and language that your employee value proposition contains.

Some materials that you should update include:

• About Us or Our Team pages
• Job descriptions
• Standardizations decks and other presentation material
• Event and trade show booth paraphernalia
• Voice, tone, and brand guidelines

We realize that updating your everyday use materials is not marketing in an obvious sense, but the more your employees interact with the new pillars, the easier it’ll be for them to adopt the new language in their conversations with clients/customers, and the more it’ll come across in those moments of ambassadorship. When they’re talking about the organization, they’ll have less hesitation around using verbiage that reinforces your employer brand because of their increased comfort level with it.

Going forward, your hiring process should tie back to your employee value proposition. The language presented in your EVP will first appear to prospective talent in your job descriptions. If you’re unsure where to include it, start with the ‘why join’ section of the job description. Candidates who are seriously considering your company will have gone through your website, and they’ll be looking for consistency outside of the homepage.

Are you ready to get started on building your employee value proposition, or have one that needs to be reworked? Get in touch with Blu Ivy Group today.

Blog Author:

Khadijah Plummer
Marketing & Content Manager
Blu Ivy Group

About Us

Blu Ivy Group is a global leader in employer branding, organizational culture, and recruitment marketing. We help organizations across the private, public, and not-for-profit sectors build extraordinary employee experiences, magnetic employer brands, and high-performance cultures.

From C-Suite to Employer Brand and Talent Acquisition leadership, we partner with our clients to transform their organizations and design the most compelling workplaces of the future.

For inquiries, please contact sparker@bluivygroup.com.