Working with an Agency to Develop Your EVP

Creating a strong employer brand will save you time and money in the long-term and improve ROI, as the organisation sees reduced time to hire, increased internal recommendations and enhanced talent pipeline.

Working with an agency will necessitate putting together a brief for the project team, based on robust research backed with budget and management buy-in. An agency will help you bring your brand proposition to life with a narrative that articulates your unique story and materials suited to all the appropriate channels. Look for an agency that can get under the skin of your organisational values while being flexible in formulating innovative approaches to your brief.

Start with two things in mind:

• What you offer – the employee package and what it’s like to work for the organisation including development opportunities
• Who you want to attract – the talent you want to target and attract.

Showcase values

A strong brief allows you to sense check agency proposals to ensure their approach aligns with your stakeholders, and expresses your brand while positioning you as an employer of choice. You want to design an EVP that showcases your vision and values and which resonates with existing and potential employees.

You need to map out ways and means by which the organisation will be able to monitor and measure brand success and ROI using dashboards, KPIs and robust data. Your EVP provides a critical link between business strategy and the HR agenda.

Metrics might include:

• Feedback from new starters, hiring managers and recruitment teams
• The number and calibre of applicants
• Offer acceptance rates and the speed and cost of hire
• Performance ratings for new hires
• Number and quality of internal referrals
• Employee surveys and roundtables examining retention and engagement
• Absenteeism records
• Exit interviews
• Mystery shopper exercises to test hiring processes
• Recruitment agency and temporary staff fees.

A key part of an agency project plan should be to create a toolkit of brand guidelines for staff so everyone is clear as to the EVP proposition and is able to implement the brand consistently across all channels, using language that is right for your marketplace.

Live the brand

Before you launch your EVP externally it’s important to communicate the changes. An agency will design workshops to introduce the brand proposition and guideline toolkit, so that your staff understand the new brand image. Social media enables every employee, whatever their role, to become a brand ambassador for the organisation.

The ideal EVP is one whereby employees ‘live’ your employer brand via a user-friendly recruitment process that conveys your brand personality at every salient point from the advertisement or job posting to onboarding and beyond. The EVP is not just aimed at the recruitment process but is for all employees whatever their tenure and career path, maintaining the ideal for all staff is where the organisation improves engagement and retention and the route to employee advocacy.

An agency will help you to develop a communication strategy that encapsulates an engaging employee experience and give you the tools to maintain a consistent message over all campaigns and channels.

Organisations that get it right in terms of an effective EVP are less likely to report problems with attraction and retention. Towers Watson’s Global Workforce Study shows that when the EVP is clearly articulated and communicated, employees better understand the “give and get” of a career at their organisation, along with the value – both extrinsic and intrinsic – of staying.

An effective EVP is an increasingly important tool in the global war for talent.