Why your EVP deserves consumer-grade creativity.

Joe Hoppard, Strategy and Planning Director, February 2025

Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room, or so the saying goes. In short, it’s your reputation.

Naturally you’ll want customers to think well of you and advocate for your business, but these days your reputation as an employer is increasingly important.

As businesses struggle to attract and retain the best talent, we’re seeing an up-turn in the number of clients investing in their ‘employer brand’. That means using brand theory, strategy, and consumer-grade creativity to grow a winning reputation as an employer, just as we would for a consumer brand.

In fact, 86% of HR professionals say that recruitment is becoming more like marketing, and it seems to be working. LinkedIn data shows that businesses which invest in building a strong employer brand receive 50% more qualified applicants, and experience 50% cost-per-hire reduction and 1-2x faster time to hire.

The benefits aren’t limited to attraction. As Glassdoor has shown, having a compelling employer brand reduces turnover by as much as 28%.

So, where should we start? Having a thorough understanding of your offering as an employer is important, so many of us invest in Employee Value Proposition (EVP) development.

But it ain’t what you say, it’s the way that you say it.

How we communicate a proposition is often the deciding factor, particularly when markets are undifferentiated. Your positioning relative to competitors, how culturally resonant and memorable your messaging is, how arresting and magnetic your visual identity, your posture, body-language, campaign behaviour – all these things drive share of mind, subconscious shortlisting, and preference even before candidates are in the market.

Typically, we’re asked to adhere to a set of master brand guidelines. Brand guardians carefully scrutinise and feedback on the communications and experiences we develop. If we’re smart, our work is approved as compliant.

But will it be effective?

Like many of us at BrandPointZero, I worked in consumer brand agencies for a good long while before moving into the world of employer brand. I know first-hand how carefully good consumer brands are built, the detailed audience research, the meticulous testing involved.

Which is why I find it so odd that we think consumer brands should be a good solution for delivering candidate and employee outcomes.

Yes, it’s important that a brand ‘looks like itself’ (thanks Byron Sharp), but a brand is more than logos, lock-ups and colourways. In its positioning, proposition, proofs, persona and platform (The EB 5Ps), a brand must be designed for the needs of the audience it serves. And a brand designed for the needs of consumers cannot serve the needs of candidates and employees.

Our people have a completely different set of needs of our business from our customers. So, we must play a different role in their lives.

At BrandPointZero our approach involves establishing a deep understanding of the candidate and employee audiences we’re looking to engage at a cultural level. Starting with the seed of your EVP, we then grow employer brands (EB 5Ps) which make great employers famous. We call our impact ‘cultural clout’, but we’ll save that for another article.

Of course, we’re always going to play ball when it comes to logos, colours, and those ownable brand assets that drive consistency, and there are big strategic ideas like vision, mission, and values that ought to influence all business functions.

But if you want candidates and employees to talk positively about you when you’re not in the room, it’s time to invest in employer brand. Drop us a line to explore how we can help.