How to win the war on talent (spoiler: with your unique EVP)

In our blog “Employer Branding is your most powerful weapon in the fight for talent” we already mentioned the importance of a strong employer brand.

The starting point of any employer brand is to formulate the Employer Value Proposition (EVP), the USP of your company as an employer. Why should a candidate choose your company? What makes your company so different from others? You will discover the answers to these questions by looking at your EVP. It is crucial that the EVP is authentic and corresponds to reality so that you don't create any false expectations among new and current employees. Once the EVP building blocks are known, you can start using them to build your brand. You incorporate them in your vacancies, on the career site, in social media campaigns, business cases, pitches, etc.

In the last two years, Unikoo has grown enormously. We professionalized further in various areas such as further digitalization and optimized pay policy to go to the next level. We believe that we have a lot to offer our employees. But how do you explain to candidates why it is so great to work at Unikoo? Buzzwords such as "a great working atmosphere", "great colleagues", and "challenging projects" are not enough in an era where there are plenty of vacancies!

The ideal time to work out our EVP!

How did we approach this challenge?

We have already indicated that authenticity is essential. And how do you find out what's really going on in the company? By talking to employees! Therefore we opted for an interactive workshop with a representative group of colleagues in our cinema: colleagues from different services, colleagues who have been working for Unikoo for a long time or recently started, very experienced colleagues and colleagues who have just graduated, An ideal mix!

Our colleagues were challenged by various questions to reflect on who we are as an employer. Challenges like making a collage of images or texts that you associate with Unikoo or making an association between our culture and sports, known celebrities and dishes brought up interesting feedback. Strange exercises, you think? On the contrary! Wrong answers are not possible, only inspiring stories that taught us a lot about Unikoo as an employer. Because the link with a pizza that you can personalize with your favorite ingredients but which also remains delicious, you don't discover that every day!

We wanted to have a very realistic and widely supported picture of how our colleagues experience Unikoo. That's why we launched an additional survey in addition to the workshop. Specific topics required extra information; some items asked for feedback through a rating, ... To allow everyone to speak openly and freely, the survey was completed anonymously.

But what was the result?

From both the workshop and the survey, several points always emerged:

1. Team vibe/culture: we have a very diverse group of employees, but the solidarity is great. There is a lot of attention to the employee and his/her well-being. No one is a number to us.

1. Job shaping: our employees are given a solid opportunity to shape their own job and career. We look for assignments in companies and sectors that closely match the colleague's wishes. In this way, we like to play into the day-to-day job happiness.

1. Making a difference: because we often work for start-ups and scale-ups, we genuinely want to achieve greatness for our clients. So we bring in expertise that they don't have that is essential in their day-to-day business.

The most significant learning point from this exercise was training our employees. Unfortunately, we do not yet have an overarching approach for this today. All the more reason to focus on this in the coming months!

How to proceed? Our next step is to convert the above "values" into a story, in words and images, after which we can extend this further in our recruitment, marketing campaigns, communication strategy, talent policy, internal branding, and so on.

Do you expect our EVP to be fully developed? No and it never will be, because Employer Branding and EVP are a 'work in progress that needs to be continuously adapted, and that's what makes it so fascinating.

Ready to win the war on talent?

Are you struggling to fill those open positions or attract staff that is a perfect fit for your company?

Whether you already have a unique EVP or not, try brainstorming what your ideal employee looks like and what expectations they have of you. Recruiting the right staff starts with a good analysis of how you see yourself as a company and how you want to deal with your employees.

Try to identify your EVP as well as possible and work it out for your company. That way, you can be sure that you are well armed in the battle for talent.

Are you curious about what a good EVP can mean for your company but don't have the necessary expertise or time? Then be sure to send us an email, we'd love to help you out!