When it comes to marketing your employee value proposition (EVP), a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work. Instead, we need to embrace an approach that appeals to the unique talent segments we engage with and the different geographic markets we operate in. However, this personalized method is easier said than done!
While you can create local versions of your EVP to achieve this, that approach can be a time-consuming and costly process if you have a presence in a significant number of markets, and it may create a disconnect with your global employer brand. So at Philips, our approach is to localize our EVP pillars through storytelling to make it relevant to candidates in each region and geography where we attract and recruit talent.
Here are my top tips for creating compelling, localized recruiting content that’s relevant to candidates in each geography where you recruit and hire.
1. Solidify your global EVP
The first step in any Recruitment Marketing strategy is to uncover your EVP. This involves identifying the unique parts of your employee experience that matter to employees and potential candidates across all your locations. While your various offices and locations may have their own culture, your overarching EVP should reflect the common experiences across your company.
For example, at Philips, when I speak to employees in both our North America and Latin America (LATAM) offices, there is a consistency in the passion and sense of purpose employees feel when they talk about working at Philips. This passion might be expressed a bit differently though for each group.
Some regions will talk about career growth opportunities, others about working with diverse groups of people, and others will touch on the cultures they’ve experienced while traveling around the world with Philips. While the details are sometimes different, they all share similar themes around the globe, which have been developed into our EVP pillars.
Rally note: Since many employees are working remotely, you may have to tweak your existing EVP to reflect your new normal. Here are some tips for defining or refining your EVP.
And when it comes to bringing these themes to life, employee stories are a key piece of collateral here. The EVP pillars you uncover can act as your overarching guide, helping to inform the employee stories you hone in on and create.
For example, one of our EVP themes is growth and development, so we seek out stories from employees around the world who have grown professionally or personally during their tenure at Philips. This brings the theme to life and shows candidates and employees one of the many great things about working here.
2. Create regional personas
Building out candidate personas is an exercise that involves getting to know your ideal candidates a little more closely and walking in their shoes. It involves listing out all the details about a prospective talent segment, like their motivations, pain points, places they hang out online and much more.
At Philips, we get our candidate personas insights by sending out surveys, conducting focus groups with employees in similar roles and interviewing recruiters who frequently recruit for those roles. You’ll want to create a persona for each role and region as candidate behaviors and motivations can vary. Then you can refer back to this persona to ensure the content you’re creating and messaging you’re using will resonate with the group you’re trying to get in front of.
Philips creates a candidate persona for each role and region, as candidate behaviors and motivations can vary.
Rally note: If you’re looking for more information on where to get started with candidate personas, download our Candidate Persona Template and Examples.
3. Develop your localized content
Now that you have your EVP pillars and candidate personas defined, it’s time to create content to activate your employer brand messaging for different local audiences. Before creating our content, we map out our EVP pillars, candidate personas and identify what employee stories we should tell based on the overlap. Our strategy is to create content for each talent segment that communicates all 3 of our EVP pillars.
To exemplify what this looks like in action, let’s take the growth and development example I mentioned earlier. In both of the below examples I’m using the same Philips pillar, but I’m going to create different stories based on what our different regional audiences are interested in.
Candidates in LATAM are more interested in learning about the growth and development possibilities within a multinational company. They want to see stories of employees taking on assignments in a different country, or working with people from other cultures and speaking different languages. In addition, LATAM talent is very attracted to multinational companies as they give a sense of stability.
This is an important piece because sadly in many countries there are some political issues that cause the economy to fluctuate, and working in a multinational can minimize that risk. In LATAM there are very few companies that touch on all these points, so Philips is seen as an employer of choice.
In North America, however, candidates want to see more of your growth perks and benefits, such as tuition reimbursement, mentorship programs and opportunities to attend conferences. North Americans are more indifferent about working for a multinational company, but they are attracted to big brand names! With so many well-known brands established in the North American market, the competition for talent is a lot tougher. You really have to create content that is unique from your competition.
Ultimately, once you know your audience a little better you can start to identify stories that will resonate best with your target audiences, you can then translate this into your content strategy.
The Philips team creates careers blog content that tells employee stories in a way that’s localized to The Americas while in support of their global EVP.
4. Telling Employee Stories through Video
In terms of our storytelling format, we try to use video as our primary medium for as much Recruitment Marketing content as we can because we know that video is one of the most effective ways to reach our target audiences.
And there are so many different approaches now to capturing video content, whether that’s employees taking videos on their own devices or hiring a professional company to film and edit. We partnered with Stories Inc. to leverage their virtual story sessions.
Stories Inc. sends a video toolbox with audio and video equipment to create the best quality possible. They also help prepare the employees by guiding them through the set-up process, and conducting virtual conversations to guide the storytelling process.
We then took the employee stories from our talent segment videos and created a compilation video that exemplified each pillar to ensure our EVP was clearly being communicated. This type of approach ensures candidates around the world understand our EVP, and also are presented with information that is appealing to them based on the types of things talent in different geographies are most interested in.
As an added bonus, planning and mapping out our content in this way helps us maximize our efforts because we end up with a lot of evergreen content we can use in different personalized ways again and again!
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At the end of the day, creating a Recruitment Marketing content strategy takes time and persistence, particularly if you are trying to attract candidates from across the globe. However, I hope hearing about our approach to localizing employee stories and our global EVP to attract candidates will inspire you with some ideas for your own content strategy!
Looking to learn more? Watch our webinar on demand featuring Maria for more insights about developing a localized employer brand content strategy.