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If you’re struggling to bring your EVP to life in a meaningful way, it doesn’t mean your EVP is weak, or that you’re lacking in activation ideas. It could be an ownership problem. As teams have become leaner, the employer brand has been dissected and in some organisations it’s unclear who owns what. There isn’t a sole person or team owning how the EVP actually works.
In reality, the employer brand is split across the organisation. Talent Acquisition owns candidate experience and attraction campaigns, Internal Comms are tasked with driving engagement and culture storytelling, while the People team leads employee experience. And sometimes Brand have a stake in the creative.
Everybody owns a piece of the puzzle, but nobody owns the whole picture.
As a result, your EVP shows up inconsistently.
Messages feel disjointed, content becomes reactive rather than strategic, and there’s misalignment between the candidate and employee experience. Frustratingly, you can find two separate teams duplicating work. It’s not that people aren’t capable or don’t care, it comes down to a lack of coordination.
In the last two years we’ve seen fewer companies hiring, and more disengaged employees staying put. As a result, the drivers for EVP have shifted towards employee experience, culture and engagement. While the scope of employer brand and EVP work has evolved, organisational structures haven’t, leaving smaller teams trying to do more. The employer brand still isn’t a priority for all teams, because historically it’s been seen as a recruitment activity.
The core problem is that there’s no framework. Most companies have an EVP and defined channels but lack an operating model to connect the dots. To overcome this, you need to have clarity on who is responsible for what, who leads, who contributes and who signs off. Teams also require guidance on ways of working together. For example, how do teams collaborate on campaigns? What’s the process for creating and distributing content? Think about integrated roadmaps and shared planning cycles. Better visibility helps reduce bottlenecks and conflicting outputs.
Ensure teams are aligned on what success looks like and how you’ll measure attraction and engagement performance. The key is to treat the employer brand like a cross-functional system, rather than a one-off campaign or function without clear ownership. Think about redesigning the process as opposed to trying to solve the problem with a single hire. When you have an effective system in place you benefit from a wide range of expertise and resources.
The fix is better structure, not more activity.
If this pattern sounds familiar and you want to create better coherence across your employer brand, start by asking yourself these questions:
- Who ultimately owns employer brand across your organisation? Not who contributes, who is accountable for how it all joins up?
- If TA, HR, and Internal Comms all launched campaigns tomorrow, would they feel like they came from the same place? Note if/where they would compete, duplicate or contradict one another.
- Are your success metrics aligned across teams, or is each function measuring something different? If so, how do you connect those results into one overall report that links back to your EVP objectives?
If your EVP lives in a deck and you’re struggling to lift it off the page and embed it across the employee lifecycle, look at ownership before messaging. The problem isn’t what you’re saying, it’s how your organisation is set up to deliver it.
