I get asked this more often than you might think. Usually by an HR Director who might have been disappointed by previous EVP work, they invested their people’s time and energy, it cost a fair bit, but very little changed. Or by a CEO who’s sceptical of anything that sounds like HR jargon. Or by an employer brand lead who’s doing some great work already and wonders whether a formal EVP process would actually help or just slow them down.
It’s a fair question. And the honest answer is: it depends. Not every organisation needs a formal EVP process. But almost every organisation needs what a strong EVP gives us.
The case against
First off, let’s take the sceptics seriously, because they have some really legitimate points.
Sadly, it’s not uncommon for EVPs to not have the impact the organisation hoped.... it had a decent budget, took six-months and what comes out the other end is a PDF with four pillars that in all honesty could belong to any company in any sector. “Great people.” “Meaningful work.” “Growth and development.” “Making a difference.” The document gets signed off and it lives in a shared drive gathering dust.
Let’s be honest, the process can feel bloated. Stakeholder interviews that tell you what leadership wants to hear, not what employees actually experience. Workshop after workshop refining language. A level of vagueness that strips out the human specifics and replaces it with corporate-safe phrasing.
And so, the output often doesn’t connect to anything real. It doesn’t change how recruiters talk to candidates. It doesn’t shape the onboarding experience. It doesn’t influence how managers have career conversations. It exists in parallel to the actual employee experience, describing a version of the organisation that people on the inside don’t recognise as completely true.
If that’s what an EVP is, then no, you don’t need one. Nobody does.
Where the sceptics go wrong
But here’s the thing, that’s not a case against EVPs; it’s a case against poor EVPs, and there’s quite a difference.
Saying “EVPs don’t work” because you’ve seen poor ones is like saying “strategy doesn’t work” because you’ve sat through a crap strategy away-day. The concept isn’t the problem; the execution is.
A bad EVP is a branding exercise that never connects to reality. A strong EVP is a strategic foundation; a clear, honest, evidence-based articulation of why someone would choose to work here, stay here, and give their best here. When it works, it doesn’t just sit in a document. It acts like a compass, shaping decisions on what to invest in and what not to invest in.
Let’s say we have an EVP with a beautiful, substantiated thread around growth and development of people, because you have great succession pathways, a slick LMS, and a true learning culture. This sits alongside a parallel thread of innovation and continuous improvement in the customer value proposition. It comes to budget forecasting time and we need to make decisions, because… surprise, surprise, the wish-list is always longer than the budget allows. You can either invest in a new, slightly faster payroll system, or a coaching and mentoring programme (the bit that would be the icing on the cake of supporting people’s growth). That’s what I mean by the compass; the EVP helps you know which direction to go next.
And at a more granular level, it gives recruiters a structure to articulate what it is like working there. And how it is different from your competitors. It gives leaders a framework for conversations about how the people of the organisation support the vision and purpose. It both unifies the organisation around a single source of truth that people believe in because it’s true, and it becomes a litmus test, because it gives the organisation a mirror to hold up and ask: are we actually living this?
What a good EVP actually gives you
At its core, an EVP answers a deceptively simple question: why here?
Why would a talented person choose this organisation over the alternatives? Why would they stay when a headhunter cold-calls them? Why would they recommend it to someone they respect? The answer needs to be honest, specific, and distinctive. Not aspirational fluff from a rose-tinted version of the organisation that only lives in senior leaders’ heads, but actual, provable reasons rooted in the real experience of working here.
When that answer is clear, several things happen. Recruitment becomes more effective because we’re attracting people who genuinely want what we offer, not just anyone who needs a job. Retention improves because there’s no mismatch between that rose-tinted picture of the organisation and the one employees experience; people arrive knowing what to expect and early attrition starts to go down. Engagement strengthens because the organisation has made explicit promises and follows through on them. And advocacy becomes natural because employees are proud of something that is genuine and they can articulate easily.
Without that clarity, you get inconsistency. Every recruiter communicates different messages. Every hiring manager describes the organisation differently. The careers site says one thing, the interview experience says another, and the onboarding process says something else entirely.
When you do need one
There are moments in an organisation’s life where not having EVP clarity can become problematic.
You’ve been through a merger or restructure. Two cultures are becoming one and you have a workforce that’s unsure what this place stands for now. An EVP process forces the honest conversation about what the new organisation is actually offering and exposes the gaps that need closing.
Attrition is telling you something. If a high proportion of people are leaving within a year, that’s worth paying attention to. Now, some will challenge me here and say their exit survey data shows people left because they wanted a career change or because they moved house, not because there was anything “wrong” with the organisation. And gently and respectfully, I would counter by asking how honest they think people really are when they fill out that survey, or sit down and look their manager in the eye when they ask the question in an exit interview. People don’t want to burn bridges, so the lack of answers that “blame” the organisation doesn’t mean those reasons aren’t there. (And while I’m on it… pet hate; many exit surveys only let you choose one reason for leaving. We really must design these surveys so that people can select multiple reasons.). Anyway, back to the point, if you’re worried about attrition, an EVP process can help you identify what’s really driving people out and start fixing it.
You’re scaling fast or entering new talent markets. You’re expanding internationally or into new revenue streams, hiring for capabilities you’ve never recruited for before and probably competing for skills in short supply. You need to articulate what makes you worth considering to people who’ve, frankly, never heard of you.
Your employer brand feels disconnected. The content team is producing LinkedIn posts, and the careers site has been refreshed but the narrative is completely different to the internal engagement narrative. There’s no unifying thread; a robust EVP can be that thread.
When you might not
We all know honesty cuts both ways. There are situations where a formal EVP process might not be the right investment right now.
If you’re a fifty-person scale-up where the founders actually are the proposition; where the culture is the people in the room and everyone knows why they’re there, codifying an EVP would add process without insight. Your EVP is your story, and it’s told every day by the people living it.
If you’re an organisation that already has deep clarity about what you stand for, lives your values so naturally that employees articulate them with ease and your retention and engagement data backs that up, you might already have an EVP in practice, even if it’s not in a document. Formalising it could still be useful (especially as you grow), but it’s not urgent.
But I’d add a caveat to both: most organisations outgrow these stages faster than they expect. The scale-up that was fifty people is suddenly 150 in 4 countries, and the founders can’t be in every interview. The values-led culture that felt natural starts to fray as new leaders join with different instincts. The EVP you didn’t need becomes something you realise could have helped along the way.
The real question
So, do you need an EVP? Honestly, and I hate a fence-sitter as much as the next gal, it’s the wrong question.
The right question is: “do you have a clear, honest, distinctive answer to why someone should work here and stay here?”
Not a vague sense of it or a collection of half-formed messages. A clear answer that’s grounded in evidence, that employees would recognise as true, that candidates would find compelling, and that the whole organisation can get behind.
If you have that, genuinely, you might not need a formal EVP process. You might just need to write it down and activate it.
If you don’t, then that’s exactly what an EVP gives you, because it answers that two-word question. ‘Why here?’ It gives you a clear, usable answer that actually changes how you attract, keep, and engage the very people your business depends on.
Key Takeaways
- ✓Not every organisation needs a formal EVP process, but almost every organisation needs what a strong EVP gives: a clear, honest, distinctive answer to “why here?”
- ✓The sceptics are often right about bad EVPs — expensive, generic, and disconnected from reality. But that’s a case against poor execution, not against the concept itself.
- ✓The real question isn’t “do we need an EVP?” It’s “can we clearly answer why someone should join and why they should stay?” If we can’t, that’s exactly what a good EVP process delivers.
Not sure if you need a formal EVP?
If you’re weighing up whether a formal EVP process would actually help, or whether there’s a better starting point for where you are right now, feel free to reach out for a chat. If you don’t need an EVP, I will tell you honestly.
