Employee Value Proposition
A Look at the Landscape
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, talent competition is rising in public, state, and local education. Job openings increased by 227% from 2014 to 2023. Meanwhile, the number of people leaving their education positions has also gone up by 151% during the same timeframe.
Many now say “retention is the new recruitment.” Retention has become a top priority for organizations, mainly because retaining current employees is more cost-effective than constantly recruiting new ones.
EVP describes how you want the employee to perceive your organization as an employer, and its benefits as they best meet their needs.
Your Employee Value Proposition (EVP) clarifies why candidates should choose you, and why current employees should stay. It helps you stand out in the competitive market—so you can attract and keep the best talent.
Who Owns the Employee Value Proposition?
While it’s true that the EVP is terminology from the world of marketing, there are many disciplines and departments in organizations that focus on getting the word out about the employer brand. These include communications, public information, community engagement, and human resources.
Knowing that the EVP is a key set of messages to help tell the story about what your organization offers, how do you play a role?
Keep Your Current Employees—and Attract New Ones
According to 2024 data from Gallup, employee engagement peaked at 36% in 2020, and we are now at the lowest reported level of engagement since 2013. We are seeing the most dramatic declines among younger generations:
Older millennials (born between 1980–1988) are down by 7 points
Younger millennials and Gen Z engagement is down by 5 points.
Whether you are seeking to attract new people to your organization or keep existing employees, it’s important to compete in the market. Here’s why:
Non-education jobs are also attracting education employees away from the field
Other educational organizations are pulling out all the stops to draw in new staff, including your current employees.
Your Employee Value Proposition is part of the larger strategy of employer branding, designed to recruit new employees and retain your existing staff.
New Tools to Level Up Your Game
Use this worksheet to conduct a scavenger hunt and identify potential elements of your EVP from your Total Rewards.
The EVP sits within the larger context of branding, marketing, and employee experience for your organization. Learn more about how to make the pivot between what you want target groups to understand about your organization and how they will perceive you based on their own perspectives.
Helpful Concepts
These concepts can help you to better understand how EVP and employer brand fit within the overall framework of marketing and branding.
Brand
“[N]ame, term, sign, symbol, or design, or a combination…intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from…competition” (American Marketing Assoc., n.d.).
Branding is the use of the organization’s brand elements.
Employee Value Proposition
The EVP is"a set of associations and offerings provided by an organization in return for the skills, capabilities and experiences an employee brings to the organization” (TalentLyft, n.d.).
At its essence, the EVP is how you want the employee to perceive your employer brand and its benefits.
Employer Brand
How an organization tells its story to attract and retain employees by using its brand elements (narrative and visual). This includes all of the storytelling you do in person, online, and in writing to attract and keep employees.
Employer branding is the activation of your recruitment and retention strategies.
Positioning Statements
Targeting the employer brand to certain audience segments or personas. This is how you can use your social media, career fair, marketing collateral, internal communications, and other messaging to reach more people.
Tell your story in a way that is meaningful for potential and current employees.
Marketing
“[T]he activity, …institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value…” (American Marketing Association, 2017).
Marketing brings your storytelling to the market to attract and retain employees through many channels.
Personas
“[P}rofile of a specific employee segment that details their characteristics, attitudes, wants, and needs. HR teams can use these profiles to better personalize and tailor their initiatives to best suit their employees” (Culture Amp, 2023).
Personas personalize the EVP and allow us to develop brand positioning statements to tell our story.
It’s worth your while to understand how to tailor your EVP. You can write positioning statements to target specific types of employees that showcase your EVP and get their attention. These are called personas—and they can help you level up your employer branding to better compete in today’s marketplace.
Employee Personas
Consider personas as imaginary people we develop, based on life stage, identity, psychographic, valuegraphic, and/or sociographic information that describes the organization’s target candidates (for recruitment) or employees (for retention and development).
We use employee personas to help fine-tune conversations with types of candidates where we need a very compelling story to get their attention: hard-to-staff positions like science and math, special education, and bus drivers, for example. They help us to reverse engineer what we say to the actual people we want to hire, so we can help them understand how our organization is where they want to be.
In other words, personas help us to personalize the employer brand. At the most basic level, they specify bio/background, goals, and motivations and frustrations. They can also include:
Life factors that can influence decisions (caregiving, single life, family life, etc.)
Values that drive behaviors
Identity including gender, race, and other demographic, and sociographic characteristics that individuals use to describe themselves
Career stage or employee journey preferences based on stage for employee tenure overall and/or with the organization
Sample Persona
Catalina is a first-year teacher working at a neighboring district. She is at that stage where she’s still learning, eager to help her students succeed. But she has not yet found that sweet spot where she really belongs in her current district.
When we look at her goals, she is planning ahead professionally and personally. And she has motivations we can align with and frustrations we can solve for.
Take the next step! Build your own personas to guide how you highlight your organization’s total rewards.
Get Started on Your Personas
Begin the process of developing your personas for priority positions today. By taking steps to create the messages to highlight your Total Rewards that make a difference for the many types of employees you want to retain and recruit, you can make an impact on your staffing success in the short and long term.
