What’s moving in EVP and employer brand

Consumer brands spend decades building recognition. So why do employer brand teams seem to reinvent theirs every year? Consistency compounds - here's why.

After 19 years in this space, I keep coming back to the same four things. The EVPs that genuinely work are relevant, authentic, differentiated, and built to evolve.

Your customer brand promises one thing. Your employer brand tells a different story. That disconnect creates problems that neither team sees coming.

Employee advocacy programmes fail when they're just a distribution channel for the comms team. Real advocacy starts with trust, not templates.

It's a question I hear more often than you'd think, usually from organisations that have been burned by a previous attempt. Here's when an EVP is essential, and when it isn't.

Most employer brand measurement tracks activity, not outcomes. Impressions and clicks tell you what happened, not whether it mattered. Here's a better approach.

Everyone knows what a Mars Bar looks like. But could you describe what's actually in it? Most employer brands have exactly this problem: all wrapper, not enough substance.

You invested in an EVP. It sounded good. So why isn't anyone using it? Here are the five patterns I see most often, and what to do about each one.

The distance between what you promise candidates and what employees actually experience isn't just a retention problem. It's a credibility problem that compounds over time.

The five things shaping EVP, culture and employer brand this quarter: mental health, financial wellbeing, presenteeism and surveillance, AI in hiring, and the DEI rollback.

The five shifts moving in EVP, culture and employer brand this quarter: pay transparency, early careers, AI and DEI, job security, and leadership trust.

The entry point into work is narrowing, and only one side of it is really about AI. What the hiring data actually shows, and what’s genuinely ours to do.

AI adoption isn’t a technology problem. It’s a change programme without a change approach. Why uneven access signals who belongs, and what that asks of EVP.

From keeping your job to staying employable. Why job insecurity is an ancient threat the brain cannot be talked out of, and what that means for your EVP.

Pay transparency rules make organisations publish numbers. But people judge fairness against four yardsticks the gap report never captures.