This article was first published on LinkedIn in 2023.
I’m often asked what I feel makes a great Employer Brand or Employer Value Proposition.
I really think it all begins and ends with a great culture. Culture is our source material, and an EVP is excavated from the depths of our culture.
The EVP fundamentally stems from the belief that there is a right role for a right person. The Employer Brand, then, is NOT our EVP. It’s how we use the EVP to source, attract, hire, engage and retain best-fit talent. And it sure isn’t social media campaigns, t-shirts or posters on walls.
Yes, best-fit talent. Not just top talent – because that’s just wishful thinking for some organisations. Not every employer can be (or frankly, deserves to be) an employer of choice. Therefore, a great Employer Brand (to me) isn’t just about talent attraction, but also repelling talent who aren’t best fit for the organisation, or simply talent we can’t afford. It’s about right-sizing perceptions to fit our reality. It’s about intentional management of talent attraction drivers, and putting in the right sensors in place that allow us to continuously flex to the needs of the organisation.
So how can we manage our employer brand? Well, what gets measured, gets done.
I like to think about it through Sense and Steer. Sense is about collecting a data picture. Steer, on the other hand, is about controlling where we’re going. To borrow a concept from robotics and automation, Sensing is about perceiving our surroundings and making decisions based on that information, while steering enables us to respond to that information and to navigate our surroundings. While they are symbiotic, they are two distinct things. Let’s not confuse both.