Unlocking the Power of EVP: Elevate Your Recruiting Strategy and Cultivate a Magnetic Employer Brand

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Companies spend endless hours obsessing over their value proposition for customers, perfecting every nuance to win their business. But there's a crucial value proposition that's often overlooked: the Employee Value Proposition (EVP).

It’s an important concept for all employers to master but for remote-first companies, understanding and leveraging EVP isn't just a strategic advantage—it's essential for survival. Without a physical space to provide a first impression of your EVP, it’s absolutely critical that your are able to distill your culture into a compelling story that you can tell in written and video formats. At Remotivated we're passionate about helping businesses create EVPs that resonate deeply with top talent and nurture a thriving work culture.

So, what exactly is an EVP, and why should you care? Let’s explore the intricacies of EVP, its vital importance, and how you can harness its power to transform your recruiting strategy.

What is EVP?

At its core, an Employee Value Proposition (EVP) is the unique value an employer offers to its employees in return for their skills, experience, and commitment. Think of it as a magnet that attracts, engages, and retains top talent. Your EVP encompasses everything from salary and benefits to career development opportunities, work-life balance, and organizational culture.

It is a covenant between you and your employee that should be clearly defined and mutually beneficial. Most importantly, your EVP needs to be authentic and should be delivered on in every interaction the company has with employees or prospective talent, the same way you would for a customer.

The Distinction Between EVP and Employer Brand

While EVP and employer brand are closely related, they serve different purposes. EVP is an internal communication tool that articulates what employees will receive in return for their commitment. In contrast, the employer brand is the external reputation and message shared with potential employees about the company’s mission, values, and work culture.

In essence, the employer brand is the outward expression of the EVP. The EVP forms the core of the employer brand, driving the narratives and perceptions that attract talent to your organization.

Both are important for recruiting with Employer Brand being the image you project in recruitment marketing while EVP is the leading driver of the all important employee referral.

Why EVP Matters

Think of your organization’s value propositions as a funnel. Employees are the mechanism through which your customer value proposition is crafted, communicated and fulfilled. That makes EVP the top of the funnel and the quality of your EVP is going to translate down into every aspect of your business.  According to Gartner, a strong EVP can lower your turnover by 69% and help retain high-performing employees. Here’s why investing in a compelling EVP is a game-changer:

Attract & Retain Top Talent

A well-defined EVP helps attract individuals who resonate with your company’s unique offering. By clearly articulating what sets your organization apart, you can draw in talent that aligns with your values and goals.  According to Gallup, companies that attract talented employees have 33% higher revenue than their peers.

Promote Employee Engagement

An engaging EVP boosts employee investment by clearly communicating your organization’s mission, vision, and values. A compelling EVP tells the story of what employees have to gain from sticking around. According to Gartner this clarity can increase new hire commitment by nearly 30%, leading to a more engaged and motivated workforce.

Reduce Turnover

Attracting and retaining the right people translates into significant cost savings. A strong EVP reduces recruitment and retention costs by minimizing turnover and fostering loyalty among employees. According to Gartner, a strong EVP can lower your turnover by 69% and help retain high-performing employees.

Business Performance and Growth

Engaged, productive, and satisfied employees are the bedrock of improved business performance. Highly engaged teams can increase profitability by 23% and enhance customer loyalty by 10%. Some of that increased customer loyalty is surely due to being served by happier employees but according to the 2023 IHA Market Watch Report, 82% of customers said that how brands treat employees influences their purchase decisions. Wherever you look, the data is clear that understanding and communicating a compelling story about your value as an employer leads to great business results.

Drive Employee Referrals

Your organization’s ability to craft a value proposition that resonates with top performing talent also has a direct impact on employee referrals. Most employers consider referrals to be a critical part of their recruiting strategy. 82% of employers rated employee referrals as having the best ROI of all recruiting channels. Referred hires also can be hired 40% faster and are almost 3x as likely to still be with the organization 3 years later than a job board candidate.

Key Components of an EVP

Creating a powerful EVP involves understanding and addressing several key components. As you reflect on each, consider the story you would need to tell to attract the best talent in your field. When businesses describe their value proposition using the same generic terms, they allow themselves to be commoditized as an employer. By crafting and then delivering on a compelling EVP you can ensure a steady pipeline of top talent. The 5 pillars of an effective EVP strategy are:

1. Compensation

This includes salary satisfaction, bonuses, and benefits. At Remotivated, we strongly believe in aligning incentives and encourage employers to craft total rewards packages that are mutually beneficial. Employees should always be incentivized to do what’s right for the organization. Likewise, as key stakeholders, delivering value to employees should be a factor in every business decision.

Consider the personas you are trying to attract to your organization. Where one organization may be trying to attract ambitious professionals with an aggressive bonus structure, another may be better served offering the kind of flexibility and health benefits that attract a different type of employee.

2. Work-Life Integration

At the end of the day, we all work to improve our lives. Ensuring that our work and personal lives fit neatly together rather than impede on each other is key to helping employees actually experience the value of their employment. Paid time off, holidays and flexibility around hours and location are all key components.

Again, consider your ideal employee when considering what this should look like. Some people want to leave work at work and for others their career is a key component of their identity. For most of us, striking a balance between professional and personal fulfilment is a life-long journey but it’s also a goal we can only achieve by finding like minded individuals to work with.

3. Stability

Offering physical and psychological safety, predictable work schedules, and career stability through learning and development opportunities enhances employee satisfaction and retention. Some businesses can’t offer all of this and that’s okay, what’s important is transparency in what we are offering. Startups can’t always guarantee financial stability and first responder agencies can’t always offer predictable work schedules.

All organizations will have gaps but the important thing is to be honest about where those are and to provide as much stability as possible in other areas to help employees feel comfortable making your organization a part of their long term plans.

4. Location

In today's hybrid and remote work models, the meaning of location has expanded. It now encompasses the work environment, organizational culture, and level of autonomy.

Merely by the fact that you’re reading this, you are likely a remote-first organization so you’re starting on 3rd base for this one! If you have an office, consider the value employees see in going in and make sure that those expectations meet reality as this is a key point of failure for many hybrid cultures. If you don’t have an office, do your people often use co-working spaces, coffee shops or do you tend to be a home office crew?

5. Respect

This is the pillar of EVP that feels like plain common sense but it is actually one of the hardest to get right. Fostering a culture of respect requires constantly modeling those values but also ensuring that your managers and employees do as well. Positive relationships, support, team spirit, company culture, and core values are vital. A lack of respect and uninspiring leadership are common reasons for employees leaving their jobs.

Not to be a broken record but… consider how different personalities might value respect being expressed in different ways. Employers can show respect with recognition, inclusivity and transparency but different personas will value each of those things very differently.

Real-World EVP Examples

Learning from successful companies can provide valuable insights into crafting your own EVP. Here are a few standout examples:

GitLab

GitLab’s EVP centers around their commitment to remote work, transparency, and collaboration. They redefined what having a culture of openness and transparency means by publishing their handbook for the world to see. Gitlab’s culture of documentation aligns perfectly with their product. They have published basically everything you can think of from the best home office gear to their decision making framework for acquisitions. Organizations with less confidence and commitment to their vision would (perhaps understandably) be hesitant to put so much of that out into the open but GitLab sends a very clear message to their employees and the world by doing so.

Automattic

The company behind WordPress emphasizes a "work from anywhere" policy. Founder Matt Mullenweg is essentially one of the founding fathers of the remote movement. They offer home office setup stipends, professional development opportunities, and team-building retreats. Automattic emphasizes asynchronous communication using their internal blogging tool P2. For the company that brought us WordPress (which powers 40% of the internet but is often associated with blogging), communicating in a blog format keeps the team aligned with their core mission.

Buffer

Buffer’s EVP highlights work-life balance and personal growth. They offer a four-day workweek, paid sabbaticals and insist on employees taking at least 3 weeks of PTO per year. Buffer clearly values having their employees feeling refreshed and incentivizing people to build work around their lifestyle instead of building their life around work. Since Buffer helps save marketers time scheduling their social media posts, perhaps it’s unsurprising to see that they also place a lot of value on respecting their employee’s time as well.

Zapier

Zapier’s EVP focuses on empowering employees through remote work flexibility and professional development. Their asynchronous work style allows employees to work from whatever time zone they like and Zapier also offers learning stipends, co-working space reimbursements, and bi-annual company retreats. They encourage all employees to use their product to build automations and use an “all hands” support philosophy that keeps the entire company engaged with their customers.

Noticing a Pattern?

The best employee value propositions take the company’s core values or product philosophy and translate that into tangible value that can be offered to employees. The phrases on their careers pages aren’t just platitudes, it’s the core of the organization and it’s reinforced in every policy and employee interaction.

Developing Your EVP

If you don’t have your employee value proposition documented anywhere you are far from alone! After thinking about the 5 areas above you can get started by looking at the current state of your EVP and documenting what you believe you offer. Next it’s a good idea to ask your existing employees what they are getting out of this relationship. Getting honest feedback around this requires a thoughtful and structured approach and, ideally, an anonymous survey. This is exactly what we do at Remotivated. As a trusted 3rd party, we can gather these insights for you and work out what your team loves the most about your culture and where they think there’s room to grow. If you want to continue on solo though, here’s what you should be trying to gather feedback on:

Identify What Makes Your Company Unique

Determine the distinctive features and benefits that set your company apart. Align your EVP with the company's identity and goals to ensure authenticity and resonance.

Understand Employee Needs

Gather feedback through surveys, focus groups, and interviews to understand employee priorities. Consider demographic and individual differences to create an inclusive and appealing EVP. Build your ideal employee persona (base this on your best employee if you are unsure!) and figure out how to deliver long term value to that type of person.

Align with Mission, Values, and Goals

Ensure that your EVP reflects your organization’s mission and values, fostering a shared sense of purpose. This alignment enhances employee connection and commitment.

Be Authentic

Authenticity is crucial for building trust and credibility. Your EVP should genuinely reflect your company’s culture and values. Employees are quick to spot inauthenticity, which can erode trust and engagement. In a survey context this means that you shouldn’t ask questions you aren’t prepared to take action on. Employees expect that feedback the organization solicits will be acted on and when it isn’t it can quickly lead to frustration.

Make it Tangible and Inclusive

Link your EVP to specific policies, programs, and real-life examples. Highlight how these efforts benefit employees and make the EVP relatable and meaningful. Avoid the typical platitudes like “we are a family” and “work hard, play hard” and instead opt for specific language that leadership is going to be able to live up to. At most organizations, treating everyone like family just isn’t realistic and people know it, you can’t fire family. Specific commitments to transparency, flexibility, growth and inclusivity go a lot farther.

Address Different Stages of the Employee Life Cycle

Tailor your EVP to address all stages of the employee life cycle, from attraction and recruitment to retention and development. This holistic approach ensures consistency and relevance. Just like having multiple buyer personas, the carrots you use to attract a college grad are not going to be the same as what you might pitch to a senior leader.

Measuring EVP

Establishing a strategy is just the first step on the road. Now the goal is to continuously measure it’s effectiveness.

Employee Engagement Scores

Regularly survey employees to gauge their satisfaction with various aspects of the EVP. In particular, we recommend measuring Employee Net Promotor Score (eNPS) as well as satisfaction with each of the 5 pillars of EVP we covered in this article. This allows you to learn even more about what your employees value. If you have a high eNPS then that tells you that any other areas you got negative feedback on are probably not as important to your team as the ones they rated highly. If you didn’t do as well on eNPS as you expected, you’ll know that the low feedback areas on the rest of the survey are the most impactful places to start making changes.

Turnover Rates

Monitor employee turnover rates to identify trends. A decrease in turnover can signal a strong and engaging EVP. On the other hand, increases in turnover that don’t correspond with macro trends or some other known variable may signal that you need to revisit your EVP strategy.

Employee Advocacy

Measure employee advocacy by tracking referrals and positive reviews on platforms like Glassdoor and Blind as well as engagement on social media such as LinkedIn. High levels of advocacy reflect a positive and compelling EVP.

Collect Employee Feedback

Regular surveys, feedback sessions, and exit interviews help you understand what employees value and where improvements are needed. The secret ingredient here is trust. Most businesses ask the same questions and most get the same answers too because employees don’t trust them enough to be honest. In fact, often employees don’t even have any incentive to be honest and every reason not to. To get honest feedback, particularly in exit interviews, people need to have absolute conviction in your integrity and that you have their best interests at heart.

Continuous Improvement

It’s common for organizations to conflate their EVP (which should be constantly tweaked and refined as needed) with their overall cultural values which are often written in stone. This is a huge mistake that can lead to company culture that once felt fresh and vibrant stagnating over time.

There is nothing wrong with changing your values over time nor is there anything wrong with keeping the same values indefinitely (as long as they are good ones!). But the way that employees expect to see those values expressed changes constantly and so your EVP should remain flexible and constantly changing with the times.

Integrate Employer Branding, EVP, and Employee Experience

Aligning internal and external images of your company creates smoother transitions for new hires, boosts employee referrals studies show it has a positive revenue impact as well.

Improve Employee Experience

This starts with consistently delivering on your EVP but that is just table stakes. It’s like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, once you’ve satisfied the basics look to build on that by improving technology, internal processes and creating a fun and engaging culture.

Promote Your EVP

Use hiring channels, your company website, social media, to tell your story. Always keep in mind that people trust your employees more than the company to tell it like it is so the best promotion comes from gently encouraging employee advocacy. Be careful not to directly ask for Glassdoor reviews or to overzealously demand engagement with LinkedIn posts. We have to respect that people’s social media accounts (and opinions) are their own and delicately encourage advocacy by simply making it easy. This can be accomplished by making your content easily sharable and by celebrating when people play along without ever making it awkward when someone doesn’t.

Remotivated Can Help

Celebrating the best remote companies isn't just what we do—it's why we exist. We understand that genuine feedback is the cornerstone of a thriving work culture. As a trusted third party, we gather 100% anonymous, honest insights from your employees, providing you with a clear picture of what they love and where you can improve.

Our analytics are designed to be your secret weapon in continuously measuring and refining your employee value prop and employer branding. And the best part? Our success is intertwined with yours. We thrive when you do. We’re not just observers; we’re your partners in building on your accomplishments and sharing them with the community.

We’re the authority on remote work, and our certifications carry weight because they’re based 100% on employee feedback. When it comes from Remotivated, it just means more. So, let’s work together to spotlight what makes your company amazing and take actionable steps to get the best people working at the best companies.

Nominate your company today.

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FAQs

What is a Strong Employee Value Proposition (EVP)?

A strong EVP is a clear and compelling statement of the unique benefits and rewards your company offers to its employees in return for their contributions. It should reflect your organization’s culture, values, and goals.

What’s the Difference Between Your EVP and Your Employer Brand?

Your EVP is an internal communication tool that outlines what employees can expect in return for their commitment. In contrast, your employer brand is the external perception and reputation of your company. While the EVP forms the core of the employer brand, the latter is the outward expression of it.

What are the Key Employee Value Proposition Components?

Key components of an EVP include compensation, work-life balance, stability, location, and respect. These elements collectively define the value employees receive from being part of your organization.

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