Targeting your MVPs

A translation for all of those that don’t watch American sports like baseball, basketball and American Football: MVP = Most Valuable Player. It’s the winner, the best available, the greatest out there. The talent and skill sets required in each of these sports is different, but all of the MVPs are the best in their fields. Now think about your EVP (Employer Value Proposition) – is it effectively targeting the winners, the best available and greatest out there in terms of talent across each of these different sports (or skillsets)? It may just be appealing to all – but to target these even more effectively to each sport, skillset or role, you may want to dive a bit deeper into your EVP..

What is an Employer Value Proposition?

If you’re on this page, you probably know this already. Your EVP is what you can uniquely offer an employee in terms of benefits and reasons to work for you in return for the skills, capabilities, and experience they can offer.

Simply put, today’s job seeker isn’t just looking for the best salary in the market for their role, or the one with the best view from their office, they want to know more about their potential employer, like:

• What are they doing to be inclusive?
• How are they supporting their employees and developing talent?
• What social impact do they have?

You can see the way that some leading organisations are doing this across social media – like in the EVP we’ve recently been working with DE&S on here.

How to create a targeted EVP

We are seeing more and more leading organisations creating targeted EVPs for harder to fill or core segments of their business. They do this by creating dedicated pages on their careers site to show off specific aspects of their culture and employer brand that would appeal to their target talent segments. Some organisations have LGBTQ+ dedicated pages, others have Women in STEM and Veterans pages.

Having more than just one blanket EVP allows organisations to speak directly to underrepresented groups and show the movements they are making towards diversity and inclusivity, or to showcase specific offerings to particularly niches roles or groups within the organisation.

Creating trust with target employees

How employers treat people in today’s ultra-competitive market, is absolutely key to setting them apart. You might be the biggest name in your industry, but if you aren’t supporting your employees, you’ll quickly find yourself struggling to attract talent. The next step of this is then articulating that effectively through branding.

Building a brand is important, but a brand can look brilliant externally and then come undone if the same promises and tone of voice aren’t communicated effectively throughout an EVP – i.e., how you treat people at each stage of an application process regardless of whether they are successful or not. Building trust begins from the messaging you create, how you articulate it and then how you’re accountable to it across their journey as an applicant and career with your organisation.

Ask yourself, is your EVP good enough to target the winners across all sports? If not, a targeted EVP with a Diversity & Inclusion and Employer Branding specialist might just be your answer.