Obvious Signs you Need to Refresh Your EVP

If change is afoot within your organisation, you probably need a re-evaluation of your employer brand. Here are some subtle and not-so subtle signs to look out for…

The Blindingly Obvious

There’s been a pandemic, and your EVP hasn’t changed.

The proposition can't possibly be the same as it was before Covid. Every organisation has changed as a result of the pandemic, so the proposition you put to people has to change in line with the way the organisation has.

It might be that you are trying to dig yourself out of a hole from a financial perspective, you might be less stable, your reputation might have been knocked, and need repairing. There’s a whole litany of things that will have affected an organisation during the pandemic, so now you need to recalibrate.

Your workforce used to work in an office, but now they all work from home.

If you've got 1,000 people, and 900 of them were working in an office, there's a good chance that has now flipped the opposite way. So that must be the catalyst for looking at your proposition.

So many people have left, the new 'Corporate HQ' is a hot desk.

Does this need explaining? You have a big problem. You probably need to re-evaluate your employee value proposition. And…well….maybe some other things about your company.

You ask some employees to help with advocacy stories and they turn out to be ‘sick’ that day.

If no employees are willing to contribute to your EVP content and say stuff like, ‘if you're willing to put in the effort, you get great rewards and so on’, it is probably because they're not enjoying it, or they think it's disingenuous and they don't want to lie.

You keep hearing ‘well, obviously, we still do that, but we're really a tech company now’.

If that's the case, you need to change your perception in the marketplace, and you need to recalibrate how people think of you - the offer, the benefits and everything else. Most organisations are going through a digital transformation, which directly impacts and changes the employee experience.

Your recruitment marketing media spend looks like a bonfire made of dollars and keeps getting bigger each week.

If you must keep turning the dials up on the money that you're spending to put adverts in front of people, then it's not getting traction, and it's possibly not creating the affinity you need. A big recruitment marketing budget is the tax you pay for lazy messaging, and not being as relevant as you could be.

Your company has had vacant job roles open so long, one of the ads says ‘must have own quill’.

You’re clearly not selling that role and you're not reaching the right audience. You don’t have a proposition that's compelling enough for people to apply.

You look around one day and realise the company is 99% white, and 75% male.

In the last few years, organisations have made a concerted effort to do something about their diversity. This is a wake-up call that you need to get with the times and be more inclusive. Even if you haven't got any hiring problems, but it's just more middle-aged white guys walking through the door, it probably needs a refresh to be a little bit more representative.

Less Obvious

You get bought, or acquire another company yourself.

Bolting on a new culture and new employee experience won’t work. You can't just slap on the same proposition and expect everybody to wear it. You need to work hard to discover  the new reality of the employee experience. If you want to galvanise two very distinct employee experiences, you need to do the research and find what the common themes are, and then find ways of galvanising them together.

Your business priorities change significantly.

If the organisation pivots in a completely different direction, if the North Star of the company, which is the vision and the mission, has changed then everything that was aligned is almost certainly now misaligned.

Your recruitment marketing shows significant and continual diminishing returns.

If all the metrics demonstrate a slight decline, it’s basically telling you that the blade is blunt and you're just not getting the value that you want. It’s death by a thousand cuts, but it means you have time to do something about it and you must.

Amazon enters your sector (or any new entrant that changes the game or raises the stakes).

Continually refactoring and reframing your proposition to calibrate against the competition is important. If a big disruptive competitor enters your space, it’s one thing to be authentic and have alignment with your organisation, you might even be super relevant to your talent audience, but you've always got to differentiate from competition and be very clear about what that differentiation is. If your proposition existed before that seismic shift in the marketplace, then you need to recalibrate.  

You're growing more than 50% a year.

Great news everyone! But it becomes difficult to keep hold of the culture you've got. In some respects, the organisation doesn't really want to either. The message here is that what got you here won't get you there. Your employer brand might be still true. It might be your North Star, but because of the change in size and population the proposition needs to be refreshed.

There is a known corporate culture issue or problem.

Your employer brand and EVP can be a sharp tool to change the corporate culture or the employee experience. It might just become more authentic, and it might be respected more if you lean into something and acknowledge that there's no work life balance, or there's rigidity around having to work in the office or whatever. Own it.  You either embrace it or change it.