Blog

15/03/2022

By Chris Andrews – Director and Head of Advisory

EB vs EVP – let’s break it down:

As employers, we have a brand value, whether care about it or not.

Your Employer Brand (EB) is best described as how current and future employees feel about working for you.

Given that the factors which cause us as humans to form opinions are complex and unpredictable, your EB is highly subjective, so it follows that it won’t be totally in your control.

Industry reputation, a neighbour’s experience as a customer- these experiences contribute to our opinion of a company long before we have any concrete knowledge of them. Even if the company name evokes a certain unrelated memory, it can influence our views.    

For example, on a personal level I spend a lot of time explaining that Stone does far more than pure recruitment, knowing that some listeners have already decided we are a typical recruitment firm because they heard the phrase ‘Stone Recruitment’ and the second word in that phrase has already labelled us with the baggage, or stigma, of a whole industry.       

So clearly there are large aspects of the EB that we simply cannot control. This is natural and not something to be concerned about.

There are areas however, that sit within our sphere of influence as an employer. Examples of this are; conducting regular employee satisfaction surveys, adopting company-wide value systems, creating shared goals/performance expectations and prioritising employee wellbeing. These activities as a collective are termed your Employee Value Proposition (EVP). 

Employer Branding is the activity of marketing your EVP both internally and externally to the company. Without good branding, and strong EVP can go unnoticed in the wider market, which means missing a lot of the benefit from all the hard work in building it.

At Stone we support clients in building their EVP, and then developing a clear Employer Branding approach to maximise their employer brand both internally and externally. Taking a logical and staged approach ensures that your brand is authentic and consistent. All the strongest employer brands share these qualities of authenticity and consistency – for that reason they know clearly who they are trying to attract and are prepared to move past the best resumes to find the best people for their organisation.   

If you have any questions on this topic, or feel that you could use some guidance, reach out to our team here.