The Changing State of Talent Acquisition
The Changing State of Talent Acquisition cuts through the noise in the crowded world of recruitment marketing, employer branding, workforce intelligence, and AI.
Hosted by Graham Thornton, President of Consulting & Growth at Talivity, this podcast brings you unfiltered conversations with industry founders, practitioners, and the occasional contrarian who's actually doing the work – not just selling you on it.
We're not here to hype the next big thing. We're here to help you separate signal from noise, understand what's actually working (and what's just well-marketed), and make smarter, data-backed decisions about your talent strategy.
You'll hear from TA leaders navigating real hiring challenges, founders building solutions worth paying attention to, and experts who see around corners before the rest of us catch up.
Whether you're navigating the AI arms race, trying to figure out your tech stack, or just trying to hire better people faster – this is the podcast for people who care more about ROI than buzzwords.
The Changing State of Talent Acquisition
Change State Methods & Practices #1: Where to Start When Building an Employee Value Proposition
Change State is thrilled to introduce a new recurring “mini” feature on the Changing State of Talent Acquisition podcast. In “Change State Method and Practices”, we’ll periodically share practical tips, frameworks, tools, and strategies we rely on to help our clients build world-class talent brands and recruitment marketing strategies.
What is Methods & Practices?
We launched the podcast five years ago with a focus on education: how do we engage with, promote, and elevate the most interesting voices in our industry? This has led to fascinating conversations with nearly 60 leaders in and around the talent acquisition space. As our listener base has grown, some questions keep popping up from our fans: What is Change State, anyway? How do we help clients? How can I take a similar approach in my organization?
Methods & Practices is one part of our answer. Staying true to our educational mission, these mini episodes provide a quick “behind the scenes” look at our approaches to solving common problems in the TA space. And while we love the opportunity to partner with new clients, we created these, like all of our episodes, to be helpful whether you ever become a Change State Client.
Have a topic or guest suggestion? We love to hear from our fans! Shoot us an email at podcast@changestate.io
Topics include:
The definition of employer brand, how an employer brand differs from an employee value proposition, perception vs. reality in branding, the connection between a consumer or master brand and an employer brand, key dimensions of strong employer brands, stakeholder groups involved with an EVP project, and the top considerations when designing an employee survey.
Welcome to the Changing State of Talent Acquisition, where your hosts, graham Thornton and Martin Credd, share their unfiltered takes on what's happening in the world of talent acquisition today. Each week brings new guests who share their stories on the tools, trends and technologies currently impacting the changing state of talent acquisition. Have feedback or want to join the show? Head on over to changestateio. And now on to this week's episode.
Speaker 2:Welcome back to another episode of the Changing State of Talent Activation Podcast. You know this week we're going to take a little bit of a different approach. You know we've had a number of folks reach out, you know, asking us to wax poetic on how we approach HR tech, selection, recruitment process optimization, what's programmatic advertising, and so we're going to drop a series of shorter episodes really focused on broader education on how we approach specific tools in our metaphorical toolkit in support of Change State as a recruitment marketing agency. So today's episode is going to be a little bit shorter in nature and we're going to dive into what is an employer brand, what's an EVP, how are they different? You know, really focused on better understanding how we approach and how companies approach some of the tools in the metaphorical toolkit for recruitment marketing. So on to this week's episode. So let's get into it, marty. So we'll start with. It's probably not the softball, but what is an employer brand to you, marty? What's an EVP, maybe? You know. Let's explore how they're different. So, what's an employer brand? Go, you're up.
Speaker 3:Great question. Yeah, I think these terms get confused a lot. So I think it's a helpful place to start, because I think having a clear understanding and definitions about these terms and the differences between them helps us figure out how to define an EVP. So generally we think of an employer brand as sort of a company's reputation as an employer. That's kind of an oversimplification, but that's the idea and I think the point there is. Reputation is perception-based. It exists in the minds of your employees, current and past employees, as well as candidates and the wider communities that the business operates in. So we always remind our clients that everyone has an employer brand, whether you're paying attention to it or not. And in fact you don't really own your employer brand, but you can help kind of curate it or manage it by participating in that conversation with candidates and employees. Which brings us to what an EVP is, which is certainly part of that ongoing conversation. But it's really just a crystallization or distillation of the unique why behind why someone would choose to work for your company.
Speaker 3:And we encourage our clients when we engage in these projects, to really engage in that project. To simplify it, because I think we've all seen these very extensive PowerPoint decks that have all these frameworks and pillars and all these great things on them. But then if you just stop someone in the elevator and say, hey, what's our EVP? Nobody knows what to say because they'd have to pull out that slide, and we think it should be. If it's done right, you should be able to summarize it in one or two sentences. Of course you're not going to get all the details in there, but you should be able to have a succinct answer to the question of why should someone work here? So hopefully that makes a little bit of sense. The EVP is kind of our contribution to that conversation. We're certainly trying to mold the perceptions that people have, but ultimately it's what they think we are as an employer and that's what the brand represents. So how?
Speaker 2:do you think about your employer brand, or how should companies think of their employer brand as it relates to their consumer brand? Is this something where you know? I guess this is a leading question. I know how you feel. Are these two different things? Are the consumer brand and employer brand related? What should that look like or what does that?
Speaker 3:look like in most organizations. Yeah, I think one of the challenges in this space is that there's a lot of different words and nomenclature that aren't necessarily being used consistently and people can get worked up about those differences and really what's important, of course, is the ideas themselves, not what we're calling them. So I think it is just worth pointing out to everyone who may not be familiar.
Speaker 3:Employer brand is a pretty new concept.
Speaker 3:It's been around I don't know, 20, 30 years in the business world and the idea of branding more broadly has been around probably since anyone started selling any products on the street side.
Speaker 3:It's just this concept of what's your reputation as a company in a consumer-facing context, and I tend to think of it as there's one brand for the organization. That has different faces and the most important face is probably the consumer-facing brand. But we also have a reputation to our talent pools and our employees and our candidates, and that's just sort of another face of that master brand, if you will. Now I think a lot of people think of employer brand as something that's a separate entity altogether and, to my point earlier, I don't think it really matters. If you want to think of it as a separate entity, that's fine, but certainly when we are building out an EVP, the conversation involves the folks on the consumer brand side of the house and we really push hard to make sure that there's a nice intimate connection between what the consumer brand represents and what we're saying to our employer brand facing audiences, if that makes sense.
Speaker 2:Well, I think that's a great segue. So you Well, I think that's a great segue. So I want to talk about how we approach brand projects, how we think about defining an EVP. But before we get to that, marty, so what do you think makes a strong EVP? What are some of the considerations that companies should be thinking about when they're thinking about what goes into an authentic, strong EVP?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think that's a great question. Obviously, most people would probably agree with my general definition of an EVP. I think they might phrase it in different ways or they might add more complexity to it. But I don't think many people would balk at the notion that an EVP is an answer to this question of why should you work for this company. And once you start there, then people kind of branch off.
Speaker 3:There's various different frameworks that people use to try to define an EVP, and again I just want to say that there's not like one right or wrong framework. What's most important is the core ideas, and so that brings up this question of what makes a strong EVP. As we're engaging with our clients to build these out, what are the criteria that we use to determine whether we've found a good one? And we think of it in terms of four big ideas. To be an effective EVP, to be an effective answer to that question of why should you work for us, the EVP needs to be number one, relevant, which is to say it needs to be appealing to the external talent market. You know, I think this is a pretty obvious statement. We can say things about ourselves, but if nobody cares, we've kind of you know, stalled before we even got out of the gate. So that's an obvious one. But more than that, it needs to be credible, which is to say, we have to be able to actually own that. You know, people have to be able to believe us when we say that this is why we're so great, this is why you should work for us, and we need to be able to support that with reasons to believe. So you say that you're a super innovative company great, but you got to be prepared to follow it up with a why and some examples. And that's what we mean by credibility.
Speaker 3:The number three big idea is that it also needs to be differentiating. So we could say something to the talent market that's extremely appealing and it's credible. People believe that we can say it. But if every other employer in town can also make the same claim, it doesn't also do us much good in terms of getting a competitive advantage. So we want our EVP to be somewhat different. You know, ideally it would be completely unique, which is to say one of a kind that's hard to do. But be completely unique, which is to say one of a kind that's hard to do, but at the very least, we don't want to be putting out the exact same answer to that. Why question as everyone else? So that's what we mean by differentiating.
Speaker 3:And then, last, certainly not least, is this idea of authenticity. I kind of wish we had a different word for it because I feel like that word has gotten overused in the space, but it is a very core and important idea and it's just this notion that our EVP is aligned with what employees say about the employee experience. So, again, if we say that we are a company that really values work-life balance and we're such a great place to work for, having a healthy balance like that, it needs to actually be something that our employees would also agree is true about us. Otherwise we get into this realm of aspirational EVPs, which, you know, it's okay to be aspirational to some extent, but you can't be so far afield from what actual employees say about your experience. Otherwise it's just a recipe, of course, for disappointment. So, yeah, the big ideas there again are credibility, or rather, I'm sorry, relevance or appeal, credibility and differentiation and authenticity.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's great and so all right. When we're looking at those four pillars right, or four components, how do we get started? So, if we're an organization, we're in the process of identifying or defining our EVP who gets involved? How do we get groups involved? Maybe let's talk through, as we do through these projects. What's the first step? Sure, yeah, where do we begin?
Speaker 3:Yeah well, how to get people, Maybe let's talk through, as we do through, these projects. What's the first step? Sure, when do we begin? Yeah Well, how to get people involved, that might be a whole other episode. But who to get involved?
Speaker 3:You know, there's some obvious well, at least obvious to us, but let's list them out Stakeholder groups that definitely need to be involved in an EVP project. You know, we always start an EVP project with an initial phase that we call discovery and ideation, and this is a process of inviting members of the executive team from any and all departments that want to join. There's certainly a few that must join. I mean, we can't force them, but it would be pretty concerning if we didn't have somebody from senior leadership involved with the consumer, brand side of the house or marketing. But beyond that, we really want to have a wide tent and invite people into a brainstorming session about what are some different answers to that why work for us question that we could credibly own. And this serves two functions. One, it gives us some ideas that we can take forth into some different stakeholder groups and say, hey, here's some ideas, what do you think? So that's great, but it's also really a bridge building activity and a team building activity, because if you're going to take the time to develop an EVP and you do it behind closed doors and spend several months and lots of money trying to figure it out and then the first that other people in the organization hear of it is just this big unveil, you're going to have a much harder time activating the brand and getting people to buy in across the board. So phase one is really all about that engaging all these people, and when we end at the end of this process and say here's our EVP, nobody's surprised and everyone kind of felt like they co-authored it in some extent, because they did the first stakeholder group. I think that's really critical. Of course, the other two big ones are ones we've referenced already candidates and employees.
Speaker 3:We usually follow that initial phase with two subsequent phases of research, and we start with employees. You know employees can tell us a lot and of course you know is helping us understand what is credible and what is authentic. Who's better positioned to tell us if what we're saying about why we're so great is true or not than the people who are actually living that experience? And so that usually takes the form of a survey and we try to get as many people involved as we can and we put some of those ideas that we developed in that first phase in front of them and say what do you think how appealing is this? Does this accurately describe the reason why you like working for us? And of course, we can slice that and dice that data by industry or by department, rather, or by tenure, all kinds of things like that.
Speaker 3:But it helps us get a pretty clear understanding of which of those initial ideas we developed in that ideation session are worth taking to market, which is to say worth testing with the external talent market.
Speaker 3:And we do the employees before the candidates on purpose, because if you just started with candidates, you could find out that some EVP is extremely appealing and think this is the direction we want to head, only to find out later that your employees say it's not authentic, that's not actually what it's like to work here. So it's strategic. You can start with employees and hone those initial EVP ideas that you had and then you take it to candidates and by that time you may have narrowed it down to one or two big ideas in terms of directions to head with your EVP. Candidates will tell you hey, this is appealing. Hey, this is different than what other employers in the space are saying. Yes, this would get me to click apply, and then you can make a decision. With all of those stakeholder groups, having put their input in here, you know which way do we want to head, and usually you get a pretty clear decision by looking at all three of those groups.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I'm just curious you know a lot of surveying, right? A lot of conversations like what makes a good survey, marty? Or maybe you know a lot of surveying, right? A lot of conversations like what makes a good survey, marty, or maybe you know. Maybe a better question is like what have we seen as gaps when people try to do this themselves, right? I think we see a lot, like anyone could say. I've always said anyone can send a survey. You know, I think there's a lot of nuance to structuring surveys, interpreting data. So you know, maybe just at a high level, you know how do you think about the approach to analyzing data, some of the important pieces for just how you structure data collection in general? Are there certain rules or things that are incredibly important that we should be considering or clients should consider if they're embarking on this on their own?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean I think your point is well taken. Surveys have become kind of a commodity in the business world. In fact you could argue there are too many surveys. We hear that from a lot of our clients. They're constantly pushing emails to their employees, say, give us an NPS score, how are things going? Or rate this idea, or what kind of snacks do you want in the break room, and I think there is survey fatigue.
Speaker 3:But those kinds of automated surveys are really not a substitute for what I would call more strategic market research kind of surveys, and that's what we do. So it's hard to answer the abstract like what makes a good questionnaire, I suppose. But there are established consumer marketing methodologies for evaluating the effectiveness of a concept In the consumer marketing world that would be a product or service. Here, of course, we're talking about jobs, but the same principles apply and so you can take a really kind of scientific or rigorous approach to measuring the differences between how each one of those EVPs performs. Is it rocket science? Could someone figure it out? Probably, but if you don't know those frameworks and methodologies and how to read the data with confidence, I think a lot of organizations just get jammed up. Yeah, they conducted a survey, but they get stuck in terms of the analysis and how to actually activate the insights, if that makes sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I think it does, and I guess you know. The last question I'll leave you with or maybe comment you know, before we close is we've spent a lot of time talking about how we define an EVP, what makes a strong EVP, all the data and surveys that goes into understanding your supporting pillars and what opportunities you're going to bring forward to test with employees and candidates. We've talked very little about activation. Is it worth talking about what we've seen as gaps with other EVP projects? Is it fair to say that we've seen other starting points started activation with the flash, and how do you feel about that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, I know we've touched on this quite a bit with some of our guests on the main podcast. But yeah, it is worth stating that employer brand is a strategic activity. That's why it starts with research and these core insights among those stakeholder groups. Now plenty of organizations skip the strategy piece and go to the exciting stuff, which is a career site, testimonial videos, other recruitment marketing collateral. That's exciting, that is the fun, sexy stuff, no doubt about it, and it's incredibly important. That is the final sort of execution that gets brought to market. But, of course, if it's not rooted in the strategy and in that kind of framework that I was just talking about, you're really just kind of guessing and maybe you'll guess right. But that's why we emphasize doing the research first and then the output of those three phases that I talked about is kind of what we've called an employer brand playbook.
Speaker 3:It answers that question that we set out to answer very clearly, in a short way why work for us? There's one or two sentences, remember, but then it goes into a lot more detail in terms of like. Here are the messages that will appeal most to different subgroups, different types of employees you might be trying to attract, and here's how you should emphasize and communicate with them, and that really serves as a springboard for that activation phase, which is the creative phase. So now we have a really great understanding of what the message should be from all this great research we just did. Now let's bring it to life with some appealing creatives and interesting videos, that sort of thing. But I think this is a big difference here to start with strategy, rather than just skipping straight to the visuals, which you know, frankly, has been common in industry, although I do think it's changing, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well.
Speaker 3:I think that's a good place to.
Speaker 2:You know, put a pin in. You know, our first educational episode, you know. I'll just say I know. You know, one of my more recent favorite books is that scientific advertising. And you know it's 101 years old now and it's not rocket science. But if you're going to spend thousands of dollars advertising a product, you'd probably test different ads and see what worked best. If it costs you 50 cents to buy a widget versus $5 to buy a widget, there's probably a lot of value in testing two different messages to see which one is going to be cheaper to convert, and the same goes for finding the right talent and understanding how you speak their language too. And I think that, in a sense, approaching an EVP project, an employer brand project, with data is arguably a bit more scientific than maybe the industry has been used to, at least over the last couple of decades. All right, thanks for tuning in. As always, head on over to changestateio or shoot us a note on all the social media. We'd love to hear from you and we'll check you guys next week. You.