Attraction & Retention

Employer Branding and Employee Value Propositions  

A key part of employee retention is your organisation’s signature experience – known as your Employer Brand.

You’re going to need:

1. An attractive Employer Brand
2. Employee Value Propositions that clearly articulate why people should work for you
3. A Strategic Attraction and Retention Plan that will guide your whole attraction, recruitment, selection, on-boarding, development, remuneration, wellbeing, flexibility, work design and retention strategy.

Read our blog to find out more about The Five Pillars of a Strong Employment Brand.

What HR Practitioners are learning from Branding Experience

• People are brand conscious – but often not brand loyal.
• If a product elevates your status in the eyes of your peers it will be conspicuously consumed. Translated into employer branding – if being interviewed or employed by your organisation elevates a person’s status in the eyes of their peers – they are more likely to talk about it.
• It’s important to live the brand traits.
• Experiences are key.

Developing your Employee Value Propositions and Employer Brand

For more detailed assistance to develop and implement your branding strategy, please contact Development at Work Australia.

1) Research

You already have an Employer Brand – it’s been created in the minds of employees and the target market by their experiences with your organisation to date. You need to know what you are starting with.

a) Conduct research with current employees, job applicants, exiting employees.

Find the associations people make with your brand (their perceptions, images, the attributes and emotions they associate with your organisation).

What attracts and retains people in your organisation? What do they value most about their employment experience? Determine the key attributes of their employment experience.

Be careful to note if there are distinct differences of opinion by factors like: job performance or job type. It may be that what attracts your top performers is different to what attracts your poor performers!

b) Find out your employer brand position – how are you seen by potential employees / current employees compared to other likely places they might work?

You want to become an expert on the target market (as a marketer would) – know their likes, preferences, aspirations – so you know how to deliver the kind of employment experience that your target market (the talent you want to attract) wants.

Reverse Brand Engineering.

When you discover what your current employer brand is, you may realise there is some work to do to change the employer brand to the one your employees and top team desire. Call us for more information about how we can assist you to manage this process.

2)  Develop Employee Value Propositions (EVPs).

In consumer marketing this stage could be called a “brand story” – it represents in an instant emotional way what the brand stands for and what it is about. What does your employer brand evoke emotionally?

Using what you learnt in the research stage – identify the key attributes and emotions that attract staff, the attributes that you want to have associated with your brand.

Phrase the employee value propositions as direct propositions. We can help you with this.

3) Test out your Employee Value Propositions

• Test your employee value propositions – find out if current employees relate to them.
• Test the employee value propositions with your target recruits. You may have different employee value propositions for different groups (e.g. Accountants, Engineers) – make sure this isn’t a problem!
• Pilot the employee value propositions on current employees (especially an employee value proposition such as “Come and work with us and have a senior manager as your mentor for your first year”. Test your senior managers’ capabilities to deliver on this!)
• Refine the employee value propositions before going to the market.

4) Recruitment

Start to manage expectations and target those who can naturally operate within your “brand space.”

Ensure any third party involved (a recruiter) is really clear about your brand and that they communicate it clearly to your candidates. Test candidates’ experiences to check for this – a poor recruitment agency experience can put your candidates off.

Align your selection methods and the underlying competences, values and behaviours with your employer brand (if they are not already aligned).

Contact us for more information on Development at Work Australia’s help with candidate attraction, defining key competences and designing reliable, valid in-house selection methods, including competency interviews, to enable your managers to select the best.

5) Organisational Development, Training and Development – How is the promise delivered?

Reinforce the brand, the organisation’s culture, the “way we do things around here”, and the organisation’s valued behaviours. An employer brand – in its essence – is about everything we do for, and with, employees and everything they say, or do, related to their employment.

So, the biggest part of employer branding is managing every part of the employment experience so it leads to the perceptions and associations that you want to create or reinforce. Involve employees in this process of designing work experiences – they’ll be the experts on the experience they desire.

The employer brand needs to integrate with every process and organisational system – including induction, reward and communications – to ensure that employees across the organisation (current and new) engage with the brand. Create brand engagement experiences, create passion for the brand.

On-boarding / induction are a key part of managing expectations and aligning employees’ expectations with the organisation. What is this experience like in your organisation? Does this experience feel rewarding, exciting, welcoming?

Manage each experience in the company – these moments of truth – to provide an employee experience that fits with and reinforces / creates the brand.

Managers and staff may need additional training to align operational practices with the EVP’s/Employer Brand. This training helps to ensure that the employer brand is actually delivered and that the employee experiences what they expected.

Measurement of the success of your employer branding strategy

How will you measure the success of your employer branding strategy? You can measure employee retention rates / employee turnover. You can measure employee satisfaction via “pulse” surveys. You can also assess how well your employer brand is delivered by conducting exit interviews. The best exit interviews are those that provide you with valuable, actionable information. Sometimes people leave because of a poor relationship with their line manager so we believe its best if exit interviews are conducted by human resources or, ideally, by an external consultant. It’s no secret that people often tell a company what they want to hear for fearing of “burning bridges” or getting a bad reference.