Building a strong EVP isn’t a matter of just putting together an extravagant compendium of ingredients to attract any talent available. In order to tailor an employment deal that differentiates you from all your competitors and to drive in candidates that are the best fit for your company, your EVP needs to be as accurate and as customized to your audience as possible.
This is the secret behind a unique employment proposition: to offer future employees a deal that not only consistently reflects who you are as an employer, but that resonates with the exact candidates with whom you want to communicate.
Researching the Market
The first step to building a strong EVP is carrying out market research in order to really know and understand who your target audience is. Taking the time to dig deeper about the type of audience you want to reach and attract is key to getting a clear insight on what your typical candidate is looking for and what their professional expectations are. Getting answers to questions such as gender, age, and generation will allow you to better know your market. By putting together an accurate portrait of your ideal candidate, you’ll be able to effectively tailor a customized offer that will efficiently attract and engage them.
Getting Extra Intel
Aside from market research, an already proven way of getting to know your target audience is to collect data from your top performing employees, both current and former. Who better to give you hints on what to look for in candidates than the employees whose standards and work ethic already live up to your expectations?
Assess those individuals from your workforce that resonate the most with your company’s values, goals, and beliefs, and who show the highest satisfaction and commitment rate. They will provide you with accurate data about their career path interests, what attributes to look for in a candidate, and what company practices are the ones that make people stay—or leave.
Profiling Your Ideal Candidate
In order to really get to know your prospect employees—and know what they expect from a job—so as to be able to offer them a deal that truly appeals to their interests, you need to break this information down into precise profiles. In other words, you need to transform the data you’ve collected into candidate personas, an educated representation of your ideal candidate.
Creating candidate personas will give your company a framework of the type of candidates that it needs to hire. Knowing the career goals and motivations of your prospect employees, as well as what they expect from a job and from an employer, will help you develop a more accurate employment deal that matches what they’re looking for.
For example, if your company is looking to attract a tech-savvy IT recruit whose professional interests revolve around the application of the latest tech on the field, the way you would engage them is through a position that entails learning and keeping up-to-date with the trendiest programming languages and tools.
On the other hand, if your ideal candidate stands as a millennial, you can really win them over with an EVP that reflects a strong disposition towards career growth. Millennial candidates are moved by opportunities for career development and the desire to be part of something of transcendental importance. Therefore, in order to be able to resonate with these types of candidates, you need to offer them the chance to contribute to innovative projects and to learn new skills and abilities in the process.
As you see, the relationship between your EVP and candidate personas is more relevant and impactful than it seems. Having candidate personas that accurately portray what experiences and opportunities move them, and where they stand within their career journey, will allow you to create the right message to attract your ideal candidates. If you know what your prospect employees want, expect, and need, then you’ll be able not only to offer them a consistent and compelling employment deal that matches their reality and expectations, but you will also greatly improve your EVP, employer branding, and your overall recruitment strategy.
