Key takeaways:
- Talent Marketing Board members Danny Francisco at Bristol Myers Squibb, Francesca McCaffrey at MassMutual, and Keri La Ra at U.S. Bank shared insights into how you can leverage current employee experiences to elevate your EVP.
- Start by determining which pillars of your EVP resonate with current employees using storytelling and sharing authentic experiences within your organization.
- You can balance what employees value the most with aspirational goals by creating opportunities for feedback and showing sentiment with future expectations.
Creating an effective employee value proposition (EVP) requires authentic messaging that highlights the experiences employees have within your organization. Interweaving current employee experiences and using those experiences for your talent marketing strategies can elevate your company as an employer of choice and create personable connections that your candidates value.
But how can you successfully determine which benefits current employees value and how their current experiences can help you elevate your EVP?
During a recent leadership panel discussion hosted by the Talent Marketing Board, senior talent leaders shared insights into how they’re understanding how EVPs resonate with employees and how you can balance what employees value the most with aspirational goals.
Here are four ways to leverage current employee experiences to elevate your EVP.
1. Determine How Your EVP Resonates with Employees
Talent Marketing Board Chair Danny Francisco, Digital Project Manager of Strategic Talent Attraction at Bristol Myers Squibb, noted how you can determine how your EVP resonates with current employees by implementing effective storytelling strategies.
“The foundation of our EVP is the storytelling factor,” Danny said. “Our company is who we are because of our employees. The work that we do transforms the lives of patients; it also transforms the lives in the careers of those who do it right.”
She continued to share how leveraging blogs on their career site helps showcase authentic employee experiences.
“It’s been extremely successful, and there’s wonderful metrics that we’re able to pull from it,” Danny added. “It is really honing in on the authenticity of a specific person or a specific team, or a specific project and being able to share that out.”
Talent Marketing Board Member Francesca McCaffrey, Employer Brand Marketing Consultant at MassMutual, discussed how you can then gauge which marketing content employees value the most and share.
“I think it’s interesting to pay attention to little pockets or teams where employees are particularly engaged,” Francesca said. “There’s always some element of starting up a cycle of editorial content and getting employees to start being comfortable writing and creating content and giving them the tools to do so.”
She explained how it helps to measure which content is most receptive amongst employees and different teams. Focusing on the most successful storytelling content can then help assess how you can implement those stories into your EVP.
2. Showcase Current Experiences in Your EVP
It’s always important to think about not only what story we want to tell about the company, but also what is helpful to a candidate.
Francesca McCaffrey, Employer Brand Marketing Consultant at MassMutual
The next step is taking what employees value most in your company and creating marketing content that candidates also find valuable.
“It’s always important to think about not only what story we want to tell about the company, but also what is helpful to a candidate,” Francesca said.
She explained how using employee stories from various business lines can help attract specific top talent.
“Say you’re looking to hire engineers. What topic would an engineer be into?” Francesca asked.
Being specific about the content you’re providing to candidates can help give perspective on what they’re looking for within certain business lines throughout your organization.
“You’re thinking about what kind of content is helpful and interesting to that candidate and what will also be a sign that you are a player in this space,” Francesca said. “You have teams that are working on these things that are interesting to them. That all is telegraphed to the candidate through content like that.”
Our end goal isn’t always volume, it’s quality. We’re giving our candidates as much information as we can about what it’s like to work in our company. And then from a localization level, what it might be like to work within one of our branches.
Keri La Ra, Head of Talent Attraction and Experience at U.S. Bank
Talent Marketing Board Chair Keri La Ra, Head of Talent Attraction and Experience at U.S. Bank, added how it’s essential to provide quality experiences and authentic insights into what your company can offer.
“Our end goal isn’t always volume, it’s quality,” Keri said. “We’re giving our candidates as much information as we can about what it’s like to work in our company. And then from a localization level, what it might be like to work within one of our branches.”
She described how this helps candidates understand what they can expect from specific roles during the application process.
3. Balance current experiences with aspirational goals
To elevate your EVP, it’s also necessary to balance what employees are experiencing with what executives want to accomplish. At Bristol Myers Squibb, Danny shared how recognizing strong recruitment goals within the pharmaceutical industry is important when creating messaging tied to your EVP.
“Think about what the vision is of your company and what impact you’re looking to make as a company,” Danny said. “If there is disjointedness, loop in other teams and try to evaluate why that is.”
Francesca explained how balance is important when creating EVP goals. She noted how it’s necessary to give employees an opportunity to share their career journeys externally, and for employer branding teams to be open for internal feedback.
“Make sure that internally, you’re opening up platforms for discussions to happen where employees feel like they’re heard,” Francesca said. “Whether that’s constructive feedback or something positive, make sure that you’re thinking about that internal part of the employer brand as well and not just solely focusing on what you say externally about your company.”
It’s also key to recognize that gaining feedback from employees requires sentiment from leadership teams. Keri noted how you should not rush the process of elevating your EVP and understand employees’ true experiences to reflect them in your EVP.
“The whole exercise of EVP — it’s critical that it’s not rushed,” Keri said. “It’s not just a couple of folks that you speak to. It’s truly embedded in this practice of talking to employees and making sure it’s a safe space where they can share their sentiments.”
She shared how in previous roles, she had success with understanding employees better through roadshows to gain feedback on what benefits were valued most and where there were opportunities for their employer branding team to improve the EVP.
“You don’t want it to get to a place where you feel like employees are feeling so vastly different than what leadership is saying, because then it’s nearly impossible to rally behind what your ‘North Star’ is in the first place,” Keri added.
4. Gain More Peer Insights on How to Elevate Your EVP
Danny, Francesca, and Keri shared more insights on balancing current experiences with future goals during the Talent Marketing Board’s leadership discussion on activating EVPs across your enterprise. They also gave insights into how you can measure the success of your EVP, equip recruiters with EVP to bring in top talent, and more.
If you lead employer branding and talent marketing at a large organization, you have the opportunity to join the community where senior talent leaders at the world’s largest companies are benchmarking their EVP strategies.
