How to Create an EVP Playbook

An organization concerned about their employer value proposition will take care to ensure that staff and other stakeholders understand, live, and bring the brand to life each and every day.

While celebrating strong values the enterprise also needs to articulate and illustrate what makes the organization special, ensuring all employees sing from the same hymn-sheet.

A recommended approach is to develop an employer value proposition playbook, a guide to how things work in your culture. A playbook is created to share the why and wherefore of how you approach employer brand; include in the playback some examples of employer brand campaigns and how employees bring them to life.

Actionable recommendations

Aim to create a playbook that makes it easy for team members to understand the thinking behind your employer branding efforts while providing actionable and detailed notes on how they can participate in driving forward branding efforts. Here are some ideas to ensure you explain how the EVP plays out across the employment experience:

• Create a concise but comprehensive playbook to support employer value proposition strategy
• Enable all stakeholders to appreciate and promulgate the brand messaging
• Facilitate effective onboarding of new hires across the organization
• Support talent sourcing and recruitment with positioning and resources

The benefits of being specific and clear are tangible – LinkedIn found that the bottom-line impact is real as a strong talent brand reduces cost per hire by up to 50% and lowers turnover rates by 28%.

The playbook should be designed to help you navigate the challenges of the current labor market.

Create a showcase

A comprehensive playbook will set out the steps, processes, strategies, and milestones that the organization envisages in terms of sourcing, recruiting and managing employees. These cover all aspects of the talent management lifecycle:

• Internal procedures and processes
• Recruitment and onboarding
• Talent development
• Performance management

Think beyond remuneration and benefits, aim to highlight the teamwork and culture. Show how you work and showcase the talent and skills of your team, use employee profiles and outline how you use personas in aligning the EVP with the brand.

Emphasizing culture is important because it demonstrates why your organization exists and encapsulates shared organizational values, goals, objectives, and priorities – the things that guide all aspects of your activities, behaviors, and decision-making.

Revise and review

As with other aspects of brand management, you will need to revisit and review your EVP playbook as with every new employee you take on, the organization’s culture changes, so aim to revisit your employer brand strategy as you grow.

Your image as an employer is delineated by your communications with existing and prospective staff about why your organization is unique and an employer of choice, aim to be consistent in your messaging throughout the organization.

In summary, we suggest that you look at the all work done on your EVP and employer brand to design and create an EVP playbook that will encapsulate all your employer branding process templates and systems in use as you activate your employer branding strategy across the organization. In essence, a playbook offers recommendations for employer branding initiatives; use your playbook to inform decision making, assess priorities, assign roles to team members and to procure resources for recruitment, talent management, succession planning, and employee development.

Competition for talent is fierce so organizations need to differentiate themselves in order to attract high potential recruits, ensure you have an EVP playbook that provides a narrative around working for your organization, a narrative that will resonate with prospective and existing employees.