How to Review Your EVP
Maybe you're struggling with rising attrition. Perhaps you’re tired of relying on compensation as your only attraction strategy. Or it could be you're simply sensing a disconnect between your promises and employee experience. In any of these cases, a systematic EVP review can help.
A comprehensive review helps organizations navigate four fundamental EVP dilemmas:
- Balancing business needs with employee expectations
- Managing authenticity against aspiration
- Differentiating yourself while maintaining industry standards
- Creating global consistency alongside local relevance
But before tackling these elements, you need to clearly understand where you stand today. A thorough EVP review begins with honest self-reflection.
It requires looking beyond what you think you offer. You need to understand what your employees actually experience, what your candidates truly value, and how this aligns with where your organization is heading.
Let's examine each step in detail.
Step 1: Understanding Your Current EVP
Your EVP review must start with a clear picture of where you stand today. This candid assessment will help you identify the strengths and gaps in your current offering.
A comprehensive audit examines both your stated EVP and its lived reality.
This means analyzing what you say (your career site, job descriptions, recruitment materials) against what drives employee engagement and satisfaction in practice.
Pay particular attention to disconnects between promise and reality.
- How do your recruitment messages align with day-to-day experience?
- What do exit interviews reveal about unmet expectations?
- Where do your employee engagement surveys suggest gaps between intent and execution?
Understanding these gaps provides crucial insight for your EVP evolution.
The goal isn't just to document your current EVP, but to understand its effectiveness across different talent segments and career stages. This forms the foundation for tackling larger questions about business alignment, authenticity, differentiation, and local relevance.
"Conducting an in-depth analysis of your current culture, mission, values, and employee experience will mean engaging everyone from the C-suite to recent hires."
—Agnes Talavera, Korn Ferry
Step 2: Key EVP Issues a Review Should Address
A comprehensive employee value proposition strategy must address four fundamental issues.
Business Needs vs. Employee Expectations: Finding Common Ground
How well does your EVP balance organizational objectives with employee needs?
"What does the business need to achieve its strategy, and what do employees say they're looking for? Sometimes they're the same, but often they are not," explains Amato.
For instance, if your business strategy emphasizes lower-cost leadership, but your employees prioritize maximum compensation, how do you resolve this disconnect? Your review must examine this alignment—or lack thereof—across multiple dimensions.
Start with a thorough analysis of your business strategy. "Look at any strategic documentation you may have or interviews with business leaders to understand, from their perspective, what they're trying to accomplish," recommends Amato.
This means examining:
- Long-term business objectives
- Future skill requirements
- Transformation goals
- Market positioning
Next, dive deep into understanding what drives your employees, today and tomorrow. This can be done with a range of tools, including things like surveys and focus groups.
Understanding future talent needs requires a sophisticated approach to data collection. While broad labor market surveys provide insights, they can be expensive.
A more practical approach, says Amato, is to look within your own workforce. She recommends having executives identify employees who exemplify the mindsets, experiences, and skills your organization will need in the future.
This targeted approach doesn't mean ignoring broader feedback, but rather ensures your EVP resonates with both current and future talent needs.
Authenticity vs. Aspiration: Striking the Right Balance
How aspirational can your EVP be while remaining authentic?
Some organizations tackle this question by maintaining two versions of their EVP. The public version includes only what's currently true, while an internal version captures their aspirational goals. They add to their public EVP as they achieve milestones and make real progress.
Others take a bolder approach, communicating future intentions alongside current realities, but only when backed by concrete action plans and leadership commitment. The key is identifying high-impact, feasible improvements.
Your review should examine not just what you say, but what you can genuinely deliver. "Base it on the strengths of the organization and positive aspects of your company culture," says Korn Ferry’s Agnes Talavera. "Be transparent, acknowledge challenges and limitations, and address how the organization is improving."
"Your EVP has to be credible. There's no point in saying things that aren’t true because they’ll soon be discovered.”
—Maria Amato, Korn Ferry
Must-Haves vs. Differentiators: What Sets You Apart
Your EVP review must identify what makes you stand out in the talent marketplace.
"Not everything about your EVP has to be unique, but you need to have at least one thing that is truly distinctive," says Amato. This requires understanding both industry standards and your genuine differentiators.
Take healthcare organizations, for instance. While many build their EVP around their mission of improving lives, this rarely differentiates them—every healthcare provider shares similar aspirations.
Your review needs to dig deeper, beyond common industry elements, to find what's uniquely yours.
This means examining your talent competitors through multiple lenses. For example, Amato says she looks at competitors’ owned media to understand the messages they're putting out, as well as their earned reputation. She might also survey a specific labor market to understand how they perceive different employers. What do people who have worked there, interviewed there, or have close connections say about the experience?
The goal isn't to be different for difference's sake. Rather, it's about identifying which elements are essential to compete in your space, and where you can authentically differentiate. Your review should examine both your stated differentiators and whether they truly resonate with talent.
Universal vs. Local: The Flexible Strategy
For organizations operating across multiple markets, an EVP review presents an additional complexity. How do you maintain standardization while adapting to local needs?
"As EVPs are often created at a global level, it's important to have global consistency with local flexibility," says Talavera.
This balance becomes particularly crucial when operating across different cultures, markets, and employee segments. For example, if your EVP is positioned primarily for professional employees, don't be surprised by attrition issues among hourly workers. Similarly, benefits and perks that resonate in one region might miss the mark in another.
Your review should examine how your EVP translates across different audiences. This means evaluating not just geographic variations, but also how it resonates across different employee segments, job families, and career levels. This creates the foundation for what's known as a "glocal" approach.
“Organizations need to identify universal elements that define their essence while allowing appropriate localization for different markets and talent segments. It's about maintaining what makes you uniquely you while ensuring relevance across diverse audiences."
—Maria Amato, Korn Ferry
Step 3: Setting the Right KPIs
Once your analysis of your EVP is complete and your updates are made, it’s time to think about how you’ll measure how well it's working. Effective EVP strategy requires looking beyond surface metrics to understand your EVP’s true impact.
"The challenge is that you have different levels of measurement, each telling a different part of the story," says Amato.
Start with fundamentals—elements completely under your control. This includes tracking EVP activation across your channels, from career site updates to social media presence. But while these metrics are easy to measure, they're just the beginning.
The next level examines how employees and candidates experience your EVP. This means monitoring employee engagement levels, candidate sentiment, and market perception.
How can you gauge how well your EVP resonates?
- Employee satisfaction surveys
- Net promoter score (NPS)
- Engagement surveys
- Retention rates
Pay particular attention to candidate experience surveys during the recruitment process.
Ultimately, tracking compensation premiums is one of the most effective ways to gauge success. If your EVP isn't performing well, you're going to have to pay a higher premium.
Finally, measure business impact through metrics like:
- Time to hire and cost per hire
- Quality of applications and hire
- Employee productivity
- Retention rates
- Revenue and profitability
- Customer satisfaction
Remember, these metrics work together to tell a complete story. While individual numbers might fluctuate, the overall trend reveals your EVP's true effectiveness in attracting and retaining the talent your organization needs.
Step 4: Future-Proof Your EVP
As organizations navigate an increasingly complex talent landscape, EVP review has become more critical than ever. The stakes are clear.
Companies with strong, well-maintained EVPs enjoy higher employee commitment, lower recruitment costs, and greater talent attraction power. Those who fail to review and evolve their EVP risk falling behind.
As workforce expectations continue to evolve, your EVP must keep pace. The future belongs to organizations that can authentically align their employee experience with their promises while staying responsive to changing talent needs.
Now more than ever, your EVP must be your MVP.
Ready to update your EVP? Download a PDF version of this guide
