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“Why do you want to work for us?”
It’s a common question across interviews, but the truth is, you should already know the answer.
An EVP is the succinct articulation of why an employee should pursue a career with your company. It tells candidates what they can expect by communicating what your brand stands for.
Customer value propositions answer why a customer should choose your product: Is it the fastest? The most reliable? The most unique? EVPs operate the same way, just for your employees.
The best EVPs are locked at the hip with their company’s purpose and customer value proposition. In fact, they are an extension of these concepts to employees. They often occupy two sides of the same coin.
Here are the traits of effective EVPs:
There are two basic ways to build an EVP: the generic way, and the sustainable way. As you can infer, the generic way is your standard approach - it’s what most people do when thinking through their employee value proposition. Let’s take a look at what makes the sustainable approach preferable.
This is the standard industry approach of identifying the trends in the labor market and developing your company’s answer to those trends.
The challenge with this approach is that it’s difficult for an EVP to be distinct, and even harder to live up to and scale the promises that are made across these dimensions. Your EVP ends up looking a lot like everybody else’s and then you’re back where you started.
To build a sustainable EVP, build it exactly like marketing and product teams build customer value propositions - by starting with the human experience.
Moments that matter are the times in an employee's journey when they’re growing, making a difference, or connecting with others. They typically include something like this:
Use a mixture of leadership observation, employee engagement data, or interviews with employees to help you diagnose your employee experience today. A helpful way to think about evaluation is on a scale of maturity.
These are positive aspects of your employee experience today that you can confidently pitch to new and existing employees as reasons to join your organization.
These are the areas that need your time, energy, and resources to improve. You can’t fix all of these all at once so prioritization is key. Which area can you make the fastest improvement with the least amount of effort? This is where you begin.
Once you build this system you can tune it dynamically as things change and evolve. Invite continuous feedback from employees to gain insights into where the experience can be optimized.
Great EVPs make a clear and distinct promise to employees, and then make that promise true throughout the employee journey.
Google makes sure this promise is true at every step of their employee experience, whether it’s the high degree of respect and professionalism in the recruiting process or the level of autonomy and empowerment they give teams and individuals once they arrive for their career.
Hubspot anchors in optimizing for people’s happiness at every step of their journey. When they join the company on day one, happiness is what sits at the center of their experience.
Yelp’s EVP is crystal clear. If you come to work at Yelp you are going to work hard, but have a ton of fun. It sets expectations for everything the employee is going to experience ahead. This is a bold promise to live up to, but if delivered, creates differentiation.
Nike speaks for itself. Their EVP is a direct reflection of their customer value proposition which is “bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete* in the world. *If you have a body, you are an athlete.” Nike wants people who love sport and believe that it’s more than a game. They even call their employees ‘athletes’.