There are four key factors to building a strong EVP: uniqueness, authenticity, aspiration and dynamism.

You can see how they interact in the EVP of our client, Linklaters, an international law firm. The role of a lawyer is changing with AI and automation; it’s becoming more consultative and advisory as opposed to administrative. We developed the EVP, “Great Change is Here,” for Linklaters to help them attract the candidates they need to take their organization into the future. Below, I’ll share how this EVP is unique, authentic, aspirational and dynamic.

Unique

Your EVP should stand out from the crowd and have a unique point of view. Many organizations promote statements like “Our people are our strength.” Because a statement like this is generic, it doesn’t tell a job candidate why they should work for your organization specifically, which makes it less effective.

The “Great Change is Here” EVP is unique because rather than emphasize the traditional aspects someone might attribute to a lawyer – attention to detail or strong analytical skills – it focuses on where the profession is going.

Authentic

An authentic EVP should reflect the true culture and values of your organization. If your EVP doesn’t reflect who you are, you can’t speak to the people who would excel in your culture. An EVP that lacks authenticity could leave new hires feeling confused and betrayed if they find the culture is different than what they were led to believe.

“Great Change is Here” speaks to the way the culture truly operates within Linklaters – they are market leaders and future-focused. In the employer branding platform, we featured real employees and real stories to ensure the message was authentic to what the firm is and who the employees are.

Aspirational

Your EVP should also reflect where your organization wants to go. The aspirational aspects of your EVP will help you attract people who have the skills and passion to help you get there.

For Linklaters, the EVP calls out the fact that change is at the organization and in the industry and, no matter what the future holds, they are ready.

Dynamic

Your EVP should be dynamic in two ways. The first is that it should be agile enough to respond to change, but also future-focused. The second is that parts of the message should be able to be dialed up or down to speak to different audiences. Over time, the current state and the aspirational state of your organization will change, and your EVP should shift with you.

Your EVP should also be able to speak to the diverse group of candidates you want to attract. Your current employees are not one homogenous group – they have different roles and responsibilities and come from different backgrounds. The candidates you are targeting are equally diverse. The core of your employer brand should start with a universal truth, but effective employers will also create messaging that speaks directly to different audiences and geographies.

Gathering Insights to Produce Results

An effective EVP should be developed through a process of embedded discovery. This is what we do at PeopleScout. We spend time in each organization, developing a deep understanding of the culture, the goals and what makes the organization unique. We ask hard questions and gather insights that leaders may miss when they are too close to be objective. Our approach also allows employees to speak more candidly.

This process includes qualitative research – like conversations with leaders of the organization and former and current employees – and quantitative research, including data from candidates as well as engagement and pulse surveys. During this initial insights phase, we collect data and information from new hires, current employees and alumni of your organization so you can understand what motivates people to stay and what drives people to leave. You may have some of this information from exit interviews, but you can learn more by adding stay interviews and new-hire surveys.

After completing the discovery process, we define three elements:

• Your organization’s aspirations: This includes short- and long-term goals about how the organization wants to change in response to industry and cultural transformation.
• Your organization’s current state: This should reflect the reality – the good and bad about what it is like to work at your organization right now.
• The outside perception of your organization: This should include the level of brand recognition you have as an employer, as well as what potential candidates think of your organization.

There will be areas of overlap between these three elements, and by analyzing they intersect, we can begin to build your EVP. We put together a statement that reflects those three elements and what is unique, authentic and aspirational about your organization. We also build the EVP so it can bend to speak to different audiences and change over time. Once that statement starts to take form, we test, refine and optimize.

Testing, Refining and Optimizing

The process of building an effective EVP is more akin to the process of testing and refining prototypes than it is to a grand reveal. In many ways, gathering insights and testing will happen at the same time. Throughout the process, start with a hypothesis, and then test and refine the message. Your hypothesis will be challenged through conversations with leaders and employees so that it can be refined for an initial roll-out.

Throughout this process, you will make changes to your initial EVP framework as you see what aspects of it resonate with your audience and current employees. During the testing phase, you should also identify your audiences. Your organization will have several, depending on the type of work you do. The type of candidate you want for a digital or creative position will likely be drawn in differently than a candidate for a floor manager or call center position. Test your EVP with these different audiences and build a spectrum of employer brand messaging, rather than one that simply splits the difference. Once your EVP is ready, you move into the roll-out stage – gaining buy-in from your current employees and infusing it throughout your entire candidate experience.

You can see how we adapted the EVP for Sainsbury’s, a UK grocery store, in the following case study.

Once you roll out an EVP, you aren’t done testing, refining and optimizing. One way to think of this process is that your EVP should always be “in beta.” This doesn’t mean you need to undergo the process of discovery from the beginning each time you modify your EVP. Instead, as your organization evolves, continuously test and evolve your brand messaging so that it always reflects where your organization is and where your organization is going.

This is the second article in a series. Read the first article, Employer Value Proposition and Employer Branding: Time for Change is Here and the third article, Employer Value Proposition and Employer Branding: Launching and Managing a Dynamic Employer Value Proposition and Employer Brand.

For banks and financial services firms looking to build a robust workforce with the skills of the future, now is the time to develop a winning talent acquisition strategy. New highly specialized technical skills, coupled with the need to recruit talent from a diverse range of candidates, has made the task of recruiting in finance more challenging.

In this article, we cover the top challenges currently faced by finance recruiters and actionable advice on how to manage and overcome them.  

The Challenges of Recruiting in Finance

The finance industry is facing significant talent acquisition challenges. According to a PwC survey, 70% of financial services CEOs are concerned with the availability of talent with key skills. More alarming, a mere 33% of CEOs were willing to give their CFOs a passing grade for talent management.

So, why is this happening? For starters, the competition to attract and retain talent in financial services is no longer contained within the industry itself. It’s no longer feasible to view finance talent as bound to the industry because many of the new skills needed today transcend industries.

This is in large part due to the increasing use of technology and the emergence of new non-traditional roles within finance, such as data scientists, market makers and social and behavioral scientists. Many professionals with these skill sets have little to no experience in finance and may not have an interest in working in the field.

There is also a greater need to build a more diverse workplace, not only in the kind of skills your employees possess but also in terms of demographics, such as gender, age and ethnicity. PwC’s Female Millennial Report found that 85% of respondents felt that “an employer’s policy on diversity, equality and workforce inclusion was important when deciding whether or not to work for that employer.” Moreover, workplace cultures that embrace all backgrounds have been proven to build a more productive and engaged workforce.

Given these challenges, finance organizations need to rethink and re-conceptualize what it means to recruit candidates in the modern talent landscape.

Addressing the Digital Talent Gap in Finance

Financial institutions are in desperate need of IT talent and tech talent. A study conducted by Capgemini and LinkedIn found that 62% of senior leaders in the banking industry expressed a belief that the digital talent gap has been widening in the finance industry.

What’s more, 76% of financial institutions report that they have created new IT roles in the last two years, but they are having a hard time finding the talent they need. Below, we outline a few strategies that can help you bridge the digital talent gap in finance.

Add Technology into your Recruiting Mix

AI tools, such as those within PeopleScout’s proprietary platform Affinix^tm, can help you quickly identify candidates who have a high probability of changing jobs. This is a crucial advantage in sourcing tech talent early and engaging with them before the competition. Recruiting technologies leveraging predictive analytics can help you evaluate the quality of your recruiting sources and forecast the results of tweaking certain job qualifications, such as required years of experience, job title, credentials and so on.

Revamp Your Job Postings

Typically, job postings in finance are heavy on listing credentials and years of experience. To effectively recruit digital talent, jobs postings on your career page and job boards should emphasize skills such as software proficiency, computer engineering, data management and data analysis. By revamping your job posts, candidates with tech skills will feel more comfortable applying to roles in finance.

Offer a Flexible Workplace

To attract tech talent, it will become increasingly important to offer a more flexible workplace. In the Q3 CFO Signals survey, 45% of respondents expected most finance work to likely be done in real or virtual shared services in three years. This provides an excellent opportunity to offer tech talent with flexible work arrangements, such as remote work and flexible scheduling. Flexible work arrangements not only benefit the employees, they also benefit employers by improving productivity and efficiency.

Attracting and Retaining Millennials in the Finance Industry

Retaining employees is a matter of vital importance in the financial services industry where, according to a PwC report, only 10% of millennials plan to work for the long-term. What’s more, it costs organizations an average of $4,129 to replace an employee according to the Society for Human Resource Management’s Human Capital Benchmarking Report.

The following are some of the top drivers for millennials when considering job opportunities.

Provide Mentorship and Feedback

Millennials tend to be more loyal to their managers than to their employers. This makes it imperative for finance organizations to develop a strong working relationship between leaders and millennial employees. Rather than practicing directive leadership, try to provide millennials with a more collaborative, mentor-oriented approach with one-on-one meetings that involve open discussions, feedback and career advice.

Provide Professional Development Opportunity

Millennials look for professional development opportunities to keep up with fast-paced changes in technology and industry standards, and they value employers that are willing to help pay for these opportunities. According to Gallup’s How Millennials Want to Work and Live, 59% of millennials say opportunities to learn and grow are extremely important to them when applying for a job.

By providing clear, structured professional development programs, your organization will be seen as more progressive and attractive in the eyes of millennial candidates. This can be a huge competitive advantage when recruiting in finance.

Values Matter

A Deloitte survey found that “61% of senior millennials (those with higher ranking job titles) chose not to undertake a task at work because it conflicted with their values.” Understanding what values matter most to millennials is vital in attracting them to positions in finance. If millennials feel the work they’re performing is for a greater good, is fair, and is meaningful, will be much more motivated to perform their best and stay with an employer longer.

You should consider your organization’s goals and match them with the values your millennial employees hold as important. Things like sustainability, integrity, community contribution, and customer care are all areas that could be reviewed.

Improving Diversity in Finance

As the makeup of the U.S. workforce continues to diversify, many organizations in the financial services industry have recognized the importance of recruiting and retaining minorities and women in key positions to improve business or organizational outcomes and better serve the needs of a diverse customer base.

Unfortunately, diversity in the finance industry is lacking–especially in leadership roles—and there’s a lot of room for improvement. Here, we highlight strategies to help attract candidates from diverse backgrounds and ways to promote diversity in your workplace more effectively.

Find the Right Diversity Program for Your Organization

There are many types of diversity and inclusion programs that are designed to address the special considerations that arise in a diverse workplace. For example, if your organization is looking to hire more women in management positions, creating an outreach program that seeks out top female finance talent and positions them for success in leadership positions can help achieve this goal.

Create a Culture of Diversity

Rather than simply convening a committee and setting diversity targets, you should create a workplace culture where leadership vocally and visibly supports the spirit of diversity in the workplace. People need to work in a culture that encourages them to bring their diverse skills and experiences to the table. Managers and leaders need to support growth, help raise awareness of opportunities and, as needed, invest in the professional development of employees from diverse backgrounds.

Encourage Individuality

Help employees build confidence in their capabilities and the value of their unique perspectives rather than asking them to conform to a mold. When building teams, look for employees with diverse viewpoints and encourage them to speak up. Employees need to believe that their perspectives are valued and respected.

Conclusion

Whatever individual talent acquisition challenges your organization faces in the recruitment of finance professionals, becoming more agile and flexible in your recruiting strategy is the first step to improving outcomes.

Whether that’s means using data to make smarter and faster hiring decisions or refining your employer branding, the best way to meet these challenges is by rethinking the status quo and being ready to adapt to the talent trends of recruiting in finance.