Analyze Your Employer Brand

[0:00:33] Tim Gillies: Hello, everybody. I think we're going to get started in just a moment here as we're waiting for some people to join in. No theme music. We have to get that going next time.

[0:00:53] John Lynch: I see the attendee number popping up here. Looking good. As we wait for folks to join, it'd be great to hear from our attendees. Let us know where you're joining from. We have the Q&A function here in the top right corner of your screen. Please go ahead and drop something in there. Thank you for joining. It will be just 1 minute.

[0:01:41] Tim Gillies: I see, John, you got us started.

[0:01:43] John Lynch: That's right. Hey, Lydia from the UK. The Lakes Region, New Hampshire, Fort Worth, Texas. Here we go.

[0:01:53] Tim Gillies: I am calling from Northeast Pennsylvania, a tiny town called Milford.

[0:02:00] John Lynch: Very nice. Alright. Toronto. Fantastic. A global audience. Alright. Well, I'll get us started as we're a couple of minutes past 11, and I think we've got some housekeeping things to cover. So, first of all, thank you all for joining us. My name is John Lynch. I lead communications and content at TalentNeuron and will facilitate it today.

Before we start, I want to spend a few minutes on our agenda and your experience. So, today's session will run for about 45 minutes, so we've got a good stretch ahead of us and a jam-packed agenda. We've got a big conversation around employee value proposition and the elements that define it, and we'll demonstrate how the TalentNeuron platform supports EVP development.

We'll have time at the end of today's session for Q&A on the topics we cover. As we go through the session, just drop your questions into the Q&A function. We'll get to them at the end of the session, and we also have folks backstage who can help answer some of them as we go.

One more thing: we have a survey at the end of today's webinar. It's a really valuable way for us to gather feedback on your experience and where we can help inform you in the future. We'd be really grateful if you could fill it in. It would just take one minute of your time.

Alright. So now, on to the fun bit and on to the next part of the next slide. I want to talk a little bit about your webinar experience. This is the webinar room you can see in front of you. As I mentioned, during the webinar, you'll have the chance to submit questions and make comments using the Q&A feature. We encourage you to ask questions as they arise, and we'll get to them at the end.

In the document section today, you'll find a couple of really valuable resources. We have the presentation slides and some other great materials on EVP. This week, TalentNeuron is also publishing a new e-book on EVP creation. Our attendees here today will be the first to get access to it, so you can download it at any time. We will also provide our EVP brief on our offering at TalentNeuron.

• Differentiate Your EVP with Data

• Employee Value Proposition
  

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Alright. The table setting is done. I would like to introduce our panel for today. We're very lucky to have Elin Thomasian, who leads TalentNeuron's strategic consulting team, and Tim Gillies from our advisory team. Hello, both of you. Thanks for joining us. Elin, would you like to kick us off?

[0:04:46] Elin Thomasian: Sure. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much to everyone around the globe for joining us. I hope this will be a good, informative session for all of us. Tim.

[0:04:59] Tim Gillies: Right. Yep. And hi, everybody. My name is Tim. I'm a senior advisor here at TalentNeuron. A big part of my job is supporting our clients, developing creative solutions, and helping people adopt data into their workflow. I get deep into the weeds with our clients and love that. EVP and employer branding, in general, have been such hot topics in recent years, and there's still so much work to be done in this space. I'm excited to be here. Thank you, everybody, for joining.

[0:05:26] Elin Thomasian: Great. Let's dive in. And you're going to be a great partner for me, Tim, as I talk about the strategy and the thinking, and you will help us dive into the TalentNeuron platform. So, where do we begin? Let's think about EVP and employer brand and how they fit together to express your company's value proposition to employees and prospects. But before we dive into that, let's think about defining these terms and really understanding and grounding ourselves in the definitions.

Let's start with EVP. What is an EVP? Well, it's a strategic tool to attract, engage, and retain employees by offering a compelling proposition. What's really important to think about in an EVP is not just to come out with an EVP but to really understand how it connects to a company's mission, vision, and values. How does that align with the goals and your culture through five dimensions of the EVP that we at TalentNeuron like to think about. What are our people leaders and their leadership styles? Total Rewards: how do we think of rewarding our employees? What are our culture and values, and what are our behaviors? What is our stance on diversity and inclusion? And, of course, the workplace model, how important it has become post-COVID, and its importance in thinking about productivity and innovation in a company. And then, where do I fit in terms of growth opportunities as an employee? What does this mean for my career? How does the EVP express that? These are all things to consider when you think about EVP as a strategic tool to communicate your employer brand.

Now, before we go to the employer brand, let's think about the connection that EVP has to its mission, vision, and values. EVP, think of it as the thread that really has to go through each mission, vision, and value chain. If you think about your company's mission and purpose, do I, as an employee, feel the mission within my own purpose at this company? If we think about the organization's long-term goals, how do my goals align with the long-term vision and inspiration of my company? When you think about values, this is all about people, behavior, and culture. How do I, as an employee or a prospect wanting to come to this company, agree with the values and behaviors exhibited at this company and what this company really promotes as part of its brand? So this is how it fits together, and I think taking note of that and ensuring that the EVP is always aligned with the mission, vision, and values makes it an even stronger message in the market. We've discussed that connection, but let's go to the employer brand.

Lots of terms here to define for us. Now that we understand that the EVP is the thread to the mission, vision, and values, where does the employer brand come in? Well, simply put, it's what it's like to work at an organization. It's that reputation, that image a company gives to the market. It encompasses the perceptions and the experiences of how an employee feels working at the company, how a potential candidate perceives a company and what it's like to work there, and how other stakeholders such as customers, clients, partners, and the external labor market perceive your company and its reputation.

In the new world of ever-changing information and data, it's so important to think about how your employer brand resonates with all of these stakeholders, whether it's employees, alumni, or prospects. This really helps us achieve the full circle of being able to attract, recruit, retain, and engage talent as they speak and interact with your brand through all of these channels that we mentioned here.

If we think about the employer brand and how it's tied to EVP, think of it as two puzzle pieces that come together. While the EVP delivers on the promise, the employer brand sets an employer's reputation and attractiveness. Together, when they are done well in a very dynamic method of aligning them, it does propose a compelling message to attract, engage, and retain talent, and it really gives the organization a competitive advantage as you think about your company in the marketplace as well as setting up your organization for overall success.

And let's think about how we benefit from having a wonderful, well-aligned EVP with an employer brand. You really think about the fact that it elevates you as a top employer and helps you become a successful business through your human capital, and it does this through three pillars. So, when you think about the EVP and the employer brand being communicated externally, it helps attract top, high-quality talent to your company. It also even attracts passive talent who might not have known about you. Still, when you describe the opportunities at your company, it really piques their interest without needing to say much because your reputation precedes you. It also helps enhance your reputation, as we just discussed, and it helps develop brand ambassadors naturally, as people like to talk positively about your company on lots of different channels.

When you think about it internally, a really strong EVP and employer brand helps reduce costs of recruiting and compensation because people really want to work at this organization, and they're willing to do it at interesting, cost-effective possibly, price points because they want to be able to get that on their resume and work in this organization and its culture because they know that they can get a lot out of it. It's a give-and-take, and it really helps employee retention. People really feel proud to work where they do. It then, in turn, gives cultural cohesion. Everyone really understands the company's values and behaviors, believes in them, and exhibits them every day, whether they're individual contributors or leaders, leading to employee advocacy.

Once you feel this cultural cohesion and stand behind your employer brand and your employee value proposition, you become an employee advocate, improving employee engagement. You really want to make the company the best place it can be because you really believe in where you're working and the fact that your work contributes to the bottom line, and leadership thanks you for it and shows their gratitude in various ways. All of this combined helps align the business goals, which translates to happy employees, a happy workplace, and a competitive advantage in the market.

So, hopefully this is a great way to think about the benefits of a strong EVP and employer brand.

If we think about building an EVP and employer brand, where do we start? I mean, we understand it's very important, but what's the first thing I think about? At TalentNeuron, we like to think about ourselves as neurons the personas, the people at our company.

So, when we think about building strategic personas, these are fictional representations of ideal employees or candidates that we want to be at this company. We find out who those personas are through a proprietary method that we can help you do at TalentNeuron through our strategic consulting services, but I'll give you a little bit of a sneak peek into it. We help you research the personas. Consider who is important to drive your business goals, aspirations, and long-term vision. Who has the same values and behaviors you want this company to attract? Once you understand and research who you'd like to attract, you want to employ multiple persona options for you to activate. Then, you want to test those personas through qualitative and quantitative methods to ensure they are the personas you want to hone and target for your company's future.

Once you've gone through that methodology and decided on and narrowed down your personas, you're ready to activate them via HR and its talent practices, communications, and marketing.

Now, after building your personas, what's next? Well, you can't just have personas; you also need to assess who you are competing against. Who are the folks within these personas, and how will they translate into a great competitive advantage? And you can only do that by evaluating the depth of your EVP as it relates to your personas and how it translates to the competitive market when you think about your talent and skills versus others, product technology and tools versus other companies, and their comparative advantage, and market strategy and how your company and its human capital strategy also aligns with market strategy and what other companies are doing.

These are non-obvious external labor market competitive factors that many people don't think about, but we at TalentNeuron can help you see around the corner or into the future as you consider building a strong EVP and employer brand and testing it in the market.

So, now that we've gone through personas and competitive intelligence, you're ready to define your EVP.

But before we do that, we need to think about who are these competitors that we're going to compare ourselves against. Tim, you are going to take us through that journey on our platform to show us how we pick our competitors.

[0:16:16] Tim Gillies: Yes. Thank you, Elin. I'm really excited to show you all a platform demo on how we might do that. But before we dive in, Elin, let me just ask you a question. Are you a baseball fan?

[0:16:26] Elin Thomasian: Well, I'm a New Yorker, so naturally, I am a baseball fan. I guess you could say I'm a fan of the Yankees.

[0:16:34] Tim Gillies: I didn't think you'd actually bring the hat out. I have a stack of Mets caps here. I have, like, six hats here. Huge, huge Mets fan. It's pretty timely, we have the Subway Series coming up. I'm going somewhere with this for everybody on the line. And even if you don't quite follow baseball, hopefully, this analogy will make sense to you. So, like I said, I'm a New York Mets fan. It's been a really tough life for me, let me tell you. Right now, the Mets are 51 and 48. So that means they have 51 wins and 48 losses. Elin, what does that mean to you? Do you think that's any good?

[0:17:08] Elin Thomasian: I'm not sure. You're the baseball expert. Let you tell me what that means.

[0:17:13] Tim Gillies: Yeah. So it's really impossible to say unless we're comparing ourselves to our competitors, benchmarking ourselves in some meaningful ways to contextualize some of the data. So, how can we analyze our game's weakest and strongest parts and identify where we need more work without added context?

Right now, the Mets are in third place within their division out of five teams. And so that's a good place to start identifying your known competitors. If we're thinking about the Mets, we can start with their division. Who are the people competing within our industry who offer similar types of products and services and may have similar types of employees? That's the obvious place to start.

I'm sure most of the people on this call I see Colleen saying, "Let's go Mets" in the chat, thank you can probably list some of their industry competitors with little to no effort.

Uncovering talent competitors is where it gets interesting, and we may dive into external intelligence tools like TalentNeuron or similar tools. If we zoom out and think about baseball, for example, instead of just thinking about our division, maybe we're thinking about the entire league. Who are we competing with in that zoomed-out kind of way?

When thinking about talent competitors, it's: who's hiring for the same types of people regardless of industry, even if they're not our direct industry competitors?

The third point would be to compare to progressive companies, maybe companies that we know are doing really well, have strong reputations, and have strong employer branding. I may be thinking from a baseball lens about the Yankees, Alan, which I got to give you that one. Teams that have historically performed well and are performing well to this day. So, tip my hat to you there.

[0:19:00] Elin Thomasian: No. It's a great point. Progressive companies are sometimes also aspirational companies. So, who you look up to, who you want to be in a few years if you're not there yet, and they don't have to be direct competitors. As you said, they could be just talent competitors. We sometimes compete for the same talent and don't have to be in the same industry. But we know those certain companies have all the bells and whistles to attract that talent to them as being progressive. So that's a really great point.

[0:19:28] Tim Gillies: Absolutely. And I have to address one of the questions here quickly. I have to zoom down a little bit. Oh, I've lost it. So we'll come back to it. But we can come back.

That said, I'm going to hop in. I'm going to demonstrate how we may start to build competitive work with a tool like TalentNeuron.

Let's do it. Alright. And hopefully, you can all see my screen here. So, in this fictitious example, Elin and I are operating under the premise that we work for Acme AI. We're a small startup tech company that works in the artificial intelligence space. Right now, just to direct your eyes to the left side of the screen, we can define locations, talent profiles, and employers in a tool like this. So, in our example that we're running through today, we're hiring for an AI and ML engineer in the Washington DC Metropolitan area. We can look at really any type of location. We can look locally. We can look nationally. We can look multinationally. Talent profiles we can customize our definition of a role. And for... oops. It's refreshing for me, so bear with me for one moment. It's, as somebody says, called the curse of the demo when you're demoing something and your computer decides to refresh itself.

[0:21:00] Elin Thomasian: Well, I didn't have the curse of crowdsourcing from last week. We're okay.

[0:21:07] Tim Gillies:  And in this example, what we're looking at and how we're defining an AI or an ML engineer is just software developers familiar with either machine learning or artificial intelligence. If you're using a tool like this or a similar type of tool, you can customize your own definition based on the skill sets that are relevant to you. What are you requiring for this type of role? I'm going to clear up the employers for now. And so, basically, what we're looking at here is which companies are actively hiring for AI or ML engineers in the Washington DC Metropolitan area. And so when we're thinking about those three categories that we had before industry competitors, talent competitors, and then aspirational companies we can identify who those direct industry competitors are or who those direct talent competitors are in a tool like this. So we can identify which companies, organizations, or employers have the most job postings for our same role definition in this given location. And so this is a fantastic place to start. We may want to add some of the top companies here that we know we're going to be competing with, even if they're not necessarily within our industry.  

[0:22:16] Elin Thomasian: Before I start, I think it'd be a great set of competitors. I mean, they're across industries, they're across sizes, progressiveness, and some of us might not have heard of and some non-obvious ones like Johns Hopkins University. So, this is a great set of competitors I would have never considered if I hadn't gone to TalentNeuron and looked at it.  

[0:22:38] Tim Gillies: Yeah. Absolutely. This is part of the reason why it's important to use external intelligence because it's sometimes really simple to think of your industry competitors, but we may not have realized that we're actually competing with a lot of different industries that are all hiring for AI or ML engineers in our location. So, a great call-out there, Elin. We do see some consulting companies, financial services, insurance, universities, and aerospace just in the list of top 10 companies, and there are pages and pages of other companies that we're competing with.

[0:23:10] Elin Thomasian: It also tells us that the DC area is very rich in the types of companies that it's attracting. So you would get a good diversity of talent being attracted to different industries to come work there, but then maybe move to Acme AI because they get introduced to us through looking at roles within DC. So, location is also a really important factor in the rich diversity of talent there.

[0:23:38] Tim Gillies: Yes. Absolutely. A great callout. Yeah. And we can see we're actually competing with about 1,500 other job postings that have been posted over the course of the past year. So there is a lot of demand for this type of talent. That's an insight that I would want to be aware of just from thinking about, even from an EVP perspective. There's going to be several different companies and industries. And where do we start? So we're going to start with our talent competitors, and we'll add a number of the top ones here. For illustrative purposes, I'm not going to add 50 companies, but realistically, we could add 50 companies here if we wanted to. But we're going to try to hit on several different industries to stay relevant for a number of people on this call. So maybe we'll add in GEICO. Maybe we want to add in some of the fastest-growing companies.

So you'll notice we have three tabs here. We have the top talent competitors, which the top number of postings can sort. We have the fastest-growing talent competitors, which are just companies that are ramping up. They're hiring the most. So, if we're thinking about Salesforce, for example, two years ago and one year ago, they had one posting for this type of talent in DC, and now they have 11. So we're seeing a 1000%.

[0:24:48] Elin Thomasian: What's interesting about that is I know their headquarters are in Silicon Valley, but it shows that they're growing exponentially in the DC area. So, Salesforce is one to look out for. Didn't know that. That's great.

[0:24:59] Tim Gillies: Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. And we'll notice that with the number of the companies here like PwC. I think their US headquarters is in New York, so maybe we wanted to add them as an employer to keep an eye out for. And so we have a third bucket here. That's new entrants.

These are companies that previously had no postings in this area, but now they're starting to ramp up their hiring for this type of talent. So maybe we want to keep some of these companies on our radar. So I'm going to add in some of our direct industry competitors, and I may think about adding in an aspirational company like Google, somebody that we know historically has performed well, well known for scoring well in things like total rewards and those types of scores. And we can explore all of these competitors in just a moment. But what we've got here is a mix of our talent competitors, a mix of our industry competitors, and some aspirational companies that we want to explore.

[0:25:59] Elin Thomasian: Those are all a great cohort's elements. So you don't miss anything or develop any blind spots because you are looking at your cohort of competitors through every dimension: location, progressiveness, type of talent they hire, great dimensions of EVP that they offer, and you mentioned one of them, for example, rewards. So, thank you so much for walking us through that.

I will continue by noting that we've looked at personas and the competitive landscape. Now, what's next? You're ready to define your EVP.

Now, this webinar is not going to dive deeply into defining and doing the process of developing your EVP. We can certainly talk to you about that as part of our strategic consulting services here. But let's just say you've aligned your employee preferences and your personas, you've looked at your competitive differentiation, you've strategically aligned your organization and priorities and culture to what your preferences are internally and externally, and you've developed your EVP, and you have activated it through your employer brand.

Let's say that's where we are. So, internally, it's very important to activate. If you don't activate your EVP and employer brand, it really falls flat, and it kind of dissipates. What you want to do is keep it alive, keep a pulse on it. So you're going to deliver it internally through all types of internal channels. You're going to embed it in all of your talent programs and practices through your HR teams, and you're going to integrate it into your leadership communication. You want the company to feel and speak the talk of your employer brand and your employee value proposition. That's how you know it's alive and living.

Then, you want to ensure that it's communicated externally, build powerful employer brand messaging pillars, and activate the brand across all those external channels that we showed you when we discussed employer brand.

So, you've defined your EVP, activated it internally, and are communicating it externally well, now what? What's next? I personally think this is the most important step to maybe not just establishing your EVP. The next step is thinking about monitoring and adjusting.

I know there was a question about how we can ensure EVP remains relevant, especially with the constant influx of research data and evolving employee expectations. Well, here is your answer, Craig. We monitor and adjust by constantly examining our internal activation.

You look at employee satisfaction through employee surveys and exit interviews. You hold specific focus groups within the personas you want to target. You look at performance metrics, what are people saying about your organization's performance, skills, and talent? What is the sentiment of your ERGs? What is the employee's thought process when they get a reaction from the brand that you've built? And what are people leaders saying about your culture and the different dimensions of your EVP? Are key leaders staying at the organization? What is your stance on diversity and inclusion in a world where that is ever-changing? What is your stance on internal mobility and support for the career growth of your internal employees?

You also, looking inward, want to look at the reasons for your decline of candidates. Are you presenting yourself best through interviews and interactions with your business leaders who are interviewing any of the external candidates? Let's look at the acceptance ratios. Do they differ by group and team, and why does it make it different in one part of the organization versus another?

These are always to monitor and adjust your EVP, keep it alive, and keep a pulse on it, which is very important. And I would say it's as important as doing it monthly, quarterly. And if you're only doing it annually, you're probably not doing it quickly enough to be able to adjust and pivot.

But as we know, internal analysis is not the only way to look at it. We always want to be holistic.

So what else are we going to do? We're going to monitor and adjust externally, relying on Tim's expertise in helping us navigate the external perspective of how we keep a pulse on our EVP and employer brand.

[0:30:28] Tim Gillies: Great. Thank you, Elin. So, like we just solved, we figured out how to set up our competitor cohort, and now we're going to dive into how we benchmark your EVP sentiment against competitors.

How do we market it within job postings? And so I noticed a question in the chat here. Where is the data coming from in the dashboard you just shared? What we are just looking at and so I'll dive into that a little bit more in just a second. But, all of our data is coming from thousands of different sources. So, it comes from a combination of job boards, employer websites, and governmental data. We're also analyzing data from employee sentiment sites so current and former employees can leave reviews. And so it's really the marrying of a lot of these different data points together that helps us understand that complete picture. When I share my screen in just a moment, we're going to break that down in a little bit more depth and we're going to break it down.

[0:31:25] Elin Thomasian: Aren't you forgetting a big announcement today about EVP sentiment that we can offer?

[0:31:30] Tim Gillies: Oh, yeah. And so what I'm going to show in just a second, Alan, thank you, is what we just launched, I believe, yesterday or early today the employee value proposition module within our platform. It's pretty timely with our webinar right now. I don't know if it was coincidental or not. It's probably not a coincidence.

[0:31:49] Elin Thomasian: I think we meant to do it intentionally. Aren't we the best? Aren't we the biggest, best fanfare to inaugurate our new EVP sentiment analysis module? I think we are. Let's dive right into it.

[0:32:09] Tim Gillies: And so I'm just setting up my screen here now. I want to make sure that it's shared properly. Okay. And so what we're looking at here are the five definitions Elin was just talking about. It's the five pillars we have for EVP: workplace and model, people, total rewards, growth opportunities, and culture and values.

What we're doing on the platform, thinking from an employer branding perspective is tying together how we market these things what things we're specifically mentioning within our job postings externally to future potential candidates with how employees actually feel about that, as employees have ranked us or scored us as employers across these five pillars.

The workplace and model talk about flexible location, flexible scheduling, and all types of work-life balance. How are we talking about that within job postings? How are we delivering on that, and how do employees feel about us delivering on those promises?

When we're thinking about people, it's the relationships we have with our colleagues, leaders, and managers. So we're thinking about work environment, collaboration, leadership style, and coworker quality. From a sentiment analysis perspective, a lot of the scores we'll notice in the people category tend to be the lowest. People who leave reviews about employers they've recently left often have had bad relationships with former managers. So, we'll see that that type of contextualization is really important. Like, we're scoring really poorly in people. Is that normal, or is that an “us” problem? That's why context matters when we're thinking about our competitors.

When we think about total rewards, we consider everything we offer in terms of compensation and benefits. So, are we paying appropriately in line with the market? Are we offering competitive retirement plans, paid time off, health benefits, insurance, and family support things like parental leave? What are our competitors doing? How are they marketing? How do employees feel about that?

The fourth category will be growth opportunities. So, for personal and professional growth, do you offer career and development opportunities? And are we following through on our diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives?

To put all this into context, we really have two different sections here: the employer branding section and the sentiment analysis section. From the sentiment analysis page, we can see our overall rating. How are we scoring? How are former and current employees scoring us across the five categories we've outlined here?

Understanding that context over time can be really insightful. How have we been trending? Have we been making progress on our promises to deliver on these five different pillars? Being able to get that historical view can be extremely insightful. Like, why did we have a dip in Q4 of 2023? Oh, that's right, we had a return-to-office program. Maybe that has something to do with it. We can also see how the different policies we've rolled out have changed our scores over time.

We can get rating breakdowns by the different categories and view some real, live reviews that have been posted over the past two years.

But a view like this would be extremely insightful. Like I said, we can add up to 50 employees or 50 employers at a time and compare how we stack up within our industry, among our talent competitors, and among companies that are hiring in the same location as us.

[0:35:53] Elin Thomasian: This heat map is really helpful, Tim. I can't imagine adding that many employers and being able to compare them in one place like that. It is mind-blowing and amazing, especially if you're recruiting nationally, not just location-specific but virtually across the country. You want to pick and choose different competitors from across the country or globally, picking different companies within the global framework and comparing them to each other. This is really insightful and is now available in our new module. Right?

[0:36:28] Tim Gillies: Yes. So it just went live yesterday.

[0:36:31] Elin Thomasian: Awesome!

[0:36:32] Tim Gillies: Yeah. It's really exciting. This is actually my first time demoing this live, so thank you all for joining and watching this demo.

[0:36:40] Elin Thomasian: We're all seeing it together for the first time. This is amazing. I love it.

[0:36:44] John Lynch: I'd like to shout it. There are a couple of really good questions here from Ebony Jackson. What recommendations do you suggest when gauging company standing regarding sentiment and Asika? How do we evaluate the current employer brand? This is the answer. It is very encouraging that we're sharing a hit for the first time today, and this is the feedback we're getting. So yeah, this is what we're aiming for.

[0:37:06] Elin Thomasian: And if you see, you're seeing every dimension of that EVP that we were talking about at the beginning of this presentation, it covers all of it through the lens of talent competitors, direct competitors, and geographic competitors. And you would want to look at this; I would say probably on a weekly to monthly basis because I could see this changing drastically month to month. Wouldn't you agree, Tim?

[0:37:34] Tim Gillies: Absolutely. And that's the piece you were talking about, Elin, with the monitoring and adjusting. Checking in on this monthly or quarterly and seeing how our sentiment scores are changing over time is the best practice we recommend. I am not just checking the scores, but also checking across the different categories. We can get different views and breakdowns across these categories to see how our scores have changed.

[0:37:59] Elin Thomasian: So, for example, us being Acme, I'm sort of in the middle there, and I look like I'm green, which is positive on several fronts: total rewards, growth opportunities, culture, and values. But I have some ways to communicate better and activate my workplace model, the culture of my people, and my leadership. That's interesting. And then I can look at who is doing better in those categories and directly compare myself and say, what's Booz Allen doing versus what I'm doing in the DC area that is putting them on a larger scale when it comes to workplace and model. I'd love to dig into that with you.

[0:38:41] Tim Gillies: This is where we can find some really interesting and really deep insights about a company that's doing well and how they are doing it. And so let's take Booz Allen, for example, and explore how they're performing in the workplace and model as the leader in this group and see if there's anything we can uncover from them. So we'll hop over to the workplace and model rating section. We can view Booz Allen and how they've done over time compared to our ratings, and we'll see that dip in Q4 of 2023. But there's something here that jumps out to me, and I don't know if anything here catches your eye, Elin, but there's something really important on the screen here. And there's a lot of information to digest, so I'll leave it up here for a moment.

And so the one thing that really jumps out to me is Booz Allen. They're ranked 1st. They have 4.3 out of 5 stars within this competitor cohort, but it's something that they're taking very seriously. They're mentioning and promoting it in 100% of their job postings, so 27,000 postings over the past year. They mention workplace and workplace model attributes. So this is an example of a company that is marketing it. They feel like they offer a really strong and competitive workplace, model attributes, and deliver on them. So it's landing well with employees, relatively speaking, to our competitor group. So, we may want to take a deeper dive into this. We could read the reviews if we wanted to, or we could hop in and see what Booz Allen mentions the workplace and model.

[0:40:20] Elin Thomasian: Sounds great. I'd love to see that.

[0:40:24] Tim Gillies: Lots of numbers here. This may take a moment to digest if you're not a numbers person. The numbers, in my opinion, are beautiful. They tell us a really important story about what's going on in the market, and we can explore so many different avenues and paths that could make this story come to life. But is there anything that jumps out to you, Elin, related to what Booz Allen is doing?

[0:40:47] Elin Thomasian: Wow. I mean, they mentioned remote in 100% of their possible postings. Do I see that correctly?

[0:40:57] Tim Gillies: Yes.

[0:40:58] Elin Thomasian: And flexible scheduling 80%, if I'm also seeing that correctly. So if I'm Acme and I knew that I was scoring lower than Booz Allen, then I need to really take a look at how I'm communicating that we offer either remote or flexible scheduling in our communication to candidates, in job descriptions, and how that's being communicated through various channels, whether it's even through our employees or our alumni, to help boost us in that area because clearly, Booz Allen is doing a really great job at that, and they must be known for that as part of their EVP pillar.

[0:41:39] Tim Gillies: Absolutely. There's one more example, and it's a similar type of story, and there are 100 or probably even thousands of different stories or different rabbit holes we could jump down.

[0:41:49] Elin Thomasian: There was. Yeah. We test out. Love that.

[0:41:52] Tim Gillies: We could spend a lot of time getting lost in here. But I just want to show, and I'm not meaning to pick on any companies in particular, but I just want to think about something from a different lens, from a different perspective. And so we see some companies here scoring poorly in a category like total rewards. This is like the flip side of the example we're just looking at. We're looking at a company mentioning total rewards in many of their postings, so 95% of their postings, but they're scoring poorly.

[0:42:24] Elin Thomasian: Right.

[0:42:25] Tim Gillies: So what, what do you think? What does that tell you, Elin?

[0:42:28] Elin Thomasian: Well, there's probably a disconnect between what's being communicated and what is actually happening with the reality of total rewards and how people interpret it. So, I would want to understand where the disconnect is, and we can do some research here on the platform. We can look closer at that and understand how they mention rewards in their job descriptions. Then, we can pull job descriptions from our platform to see what is mentioned, according to which words are resonating or not.

The second column is GEICO. So it does look like they're mentioning paid vacation, vision plan, paid training. I would say total rewards, that's great, but maybe those aren't the things that are resonating with a candidate when they're thinking about building a future career with GEICO. So, it's a good area of opportunity for GEICO to take a look and see if those are the words they should be mentioning versus others that could give them a little more boost in attraction for total rewards. Is that right?

[0:43:44] Tim Gillies: Exactly. And what Brian Jackson just put in the chat here exactly summarizes that point. Can we imply that just because they're talking about it doesn't mean the employees think it's good? That's really what the essence of this insight comes down to. It's important to us. We're marketing these benefits and rewards, but it's not landing well with our employees. So where can we improve? Where can we close the gap on what we think we offer, what we're marketing that we offer, and how employees perceive us to be delivering on the things we're promising throughout that candidate journey? So, there are hundreds of different ways that we can dive into this. We've only touched on two categories here across five different companies in one location. So, it's a lot more to explore.

[0:44:29] Elin Thomasian: So I'm looking forward to exploring more with you, Tim. Any of the audience here can also schedule demos to explore further with us to see if our platform is the answer for you in monitoring and evaluating all of your employer brand and EVP needs. This is great. We could do this all day because we're data geeks.

[0:44:54] Tim Gillies: I would love to, and I said this is a big part of my job working with companies and helping them find these insights and contextualize what all this means. So, that being said, I think we're about at the time, but Elin, John, and I are going to hang out here for a couple more minutes to answer some of the questions that came through.

[0:45:12] Elin Thomasian: I'll bring it all back together. So I'll share my screen, Tim, once we do that. So what did we learn? Let's bring it all to a nice summary to take away before we dive into specific questions. What we want to think about is monitoring helps future-sense your risks to your EVP and your employer brand.

We learned that just because you put it into your employer brand doesn't mean it's resonating. So, if you remember, that's what's going to be missing. Activating your employer brand involves future-sensing your risks through a tool like TalentNeuron, looking at external intelligence, and ensuring your message resonates with the market.

So you can't just think that because your employees love an aspect of your EVP and your culture or your mission and vision, it will resonate. You really have to gut-check that against the external intelligence and look at all the signals it provides to help pivot. And that's where you bring it in internally those external signals, and you contextualize it and say, is this something I want to act on, or are we comfortable with how we're presenting ourselves to the market?

That helps you build the case for action planning. Sometimes, you might decide you're very comfortable with the way you're communicating it, and there are certain aspects where you don't mind that it's not resonating because you really want to stick to your guns in communicating a value proposition.

Other times, when you look at the context of the external market and the signals, you might say, "Oh, I need to really pivot quickly and make sure that leadership in our organization is optimizing our strategies for success and business impact." What we're saying is not working, and it's not moving us in the right direction to align with our business goals.

So it's really important to keep this close pulse on your EVP. It's not just setting it and forgetting it. It is set and monitored regularly and frequently. So we're hoping that this presentation was able to give you a glimpse of the definitions, the important aspects of your research, and the data that we can provide as TalentNeuron and the framework that we can also help guide you through in our consulting services to help you get the most out of your EVP and your employer brand.

Thank you for that. If we have some time, John, let's go in for more Q&A.

[0:47:52] John Lynch: Yeah. Well, I mean, we're certainly over our 45 minutes, but I hope everyone can hang on for a few more while we answer some questions. As I said, the presentation and recording will be delivered to you after the event, but I think we have some great questions I'd like to answer here.

So we have, well, our first question here from the New York Mets, Colleen Sweeney. How do you avoid bias and discrimination when using personas to hire?
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[0:48:16] Elin Thomasian: That's a really good question. TalentNeuron is a big believer in building an inclusive and equitable culture, and as I said, we can help you build your personas, and all of your personas should keep that in mind. What does it mean to say you want a diverse and equitable culture, for opportunities to be wide and available to everybody? You want to inject that into the personas and be able to use that aspect of your personas to make sure you're testing and continuously pressure testing against your values. Are we building inclusive personas? Do they have all aspects and dimensions of the human capital in mind? Generational diversity, thought leadership diversity, ethnic diversity, global diversity, business diversity, skill set diversity. You want to make sure those are all included in your personas. So, if you would like further information on that, we can help you build those personas with a very methodical and inclusive system.

[0:49:29] John Lynch: Awesome. Thank you. And I think this may be another one of you also, Elin, from Vienna. Forgive me if I'm pronouncing that correctly.

[0:49:36] Elin Thomasian: Mhmm.

[0:49:37] John Lynch: In the world of branding, which terminology is the best to influence stakeholders? Is it EBP, employer brands, talent brands, or employee value propositions? It can be confusing. What are your thoughts on that?

[0:49:49] Elin Thomasian: Well, as we defined in our presentation, EVP is the strategic tool used to build those five dimensions of your value proposition. Employer brand is the communication and marketing strategy and reputation activated through the messaging. So it's the delivery. The EVP is the delivery method. The sorry. The employer brand is the delivery method, but the EVP is the concept. So those are two different definitions, and that's why we started to ground ourselves in those definitions. So, I suggest if you're going on that journey, you should define your EVP versus your employer brand to all your stakeholders and employees and put them underneath your mission, vision, and values because they're all connected. Still, they all have a unique aspect as they're integrated into your organizational DNA.

[0:50:53] John Lynch: Awesome. Thank you. And I just wanted to summarize a few questions in one answer here. There have been a few questions on data coverage specifically, which markets we provide data for. We provide data for over 90% of the global GDP, so in your market, we probably provide much of the data we discussed today. I'm posting a link to some of our recent data updates in the Q&A section, and we'll provide that in the follow-up, too. We'll also include more details on which markets we've been discussing.

I think we have time for one more question from Maggie Lee. Thank you, Maggie. When you create candidate personas, are they by title, department, or job family? You talked about that a bit already, Elin, but do you have any more insights there?

[0:51:43] Elin Thomasian: We can help you create those personas depending on the data. The data might tell you that a job family is what you want to put into a persona. The research might tell you it's a certain title. For example, maybe leadership is a persona that you want to concentrate on. So it all depends on the data you pull that forms your thought process and your methods in choosing your personas, and then pressure testing it against what you are trying to achieve that are challenges with those certain personas. So you detect a challenge, and then you want to build those personas and the challenges into your EVP because the EVP is the give and take that is addressing those challenges of "bring us your best self, and we will cover these wonderful dimensions of your work life with you as a company."

It could be a title, a department, a job family, diversity, a geographic region, or a type of skill set. It all depends on how you distill the data.

[0:52:58] John Lynch: Awesome. Thank you so much. Looking at the clock, I think we may be at the end of our time together. I do want to say we've had so many incredible questions. I want to make sure everyone knows that they're going to have those answered in follow-ups. If we don't get to anything today, you will have a follow-up from our team, and we'll help you answer any of your queries, whether you shared them today or have more to discuss.

If you'd like to see a demo again of our EVP capability, EVP sentiment analysis, or any part of the platform, please hit the request a demo function.

Thank you again for your time today. You've been a fantastic audience. This is our best interaction, so it's much appreciated.

If I could ask you for one more favor, it would be to fill out our survey at the end of the webinar. So please take a minute to do that.

Thank you again to all our attendees, and thank you, Ellen and Tim, for speaking today and sharing a bit of a view on EVP.

[0:53:55] Elin Thomasian: Thank you to our amazing clients and our wonderful audience members.

[0:54:00] Tim Gillies: Thank you so much for joining everybody.

[0:54:03] John Lynch: Thanks for joining. Have a great day. Bye-bye.

[0:54:06] Elin Thomasian: Bye.