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What is a Candidate Value Proposition (CVP)?
Similar to an Employee Value Proposition, a CVP is all the reasons a candidate would want to join your business, from the perceptions of diversity, to salary, company culture, benefits, and style of working. An Employee Value Proposition is why, upon being hired, a member of the team sticks around.
I recently spoke to a candidate who was made redundant a month before the pandemic. He was desperately looking for a job — foreseeing that employment wasn’t going to be easy to come by.
After almost 100 applications, the candidate was invited to an interview. The catch? The salary was £8k less than his previous position and it wasn’t his ideal role. But he needed the job.
“After the online interview, I read their terrible Glassdoor reviews and got upset. They had been terribly rude to me, raised their eyebrows at my, fairly standard, salary expectations, and scoffed at my answers. But if I’d been offered the position, I’d have taken it and kept looking for something better when the pandemic calmed down.”
It got me thinking. What a waste of time this was for both the company and the candidate.
By July 2020, 1.48 million people in the US had filed for unemployment for the first time. And nearly 200,000 people in the UK were made redundant within the first four months of the pandemic.
With More Candidates than Jobs, We’re in an Employer’s Market
Unfortunately, many businesses are low balling salaries and treating prospects poorly because they can. People are desperate for jobs and they’ll do anything to get one. But many businesses can’t afford the same salaries as before and have the impression that they hold all the cards.
However, think back to that candidate at the beginning of this post.
He told me that, had he taken that job, he’d have spent all his spare time looking for another one.
It’ll only be an employers’ market for so long, and eventually, people who took your job out of desperation will start looking around. When the market inevitably picks up, they’ll be looking swiftly for another role, like our candidate.
That’s why it’s more important than ever for companies who want to hire the best employees, long term, to maximise their Candidate Value Proposition.
Make it part of the process
At Solutions Driven, we do this on behalf of organisations that are recruiting using the 6F Process Methodology.
Keeping it simple, it’s kinda like a scorecard where we look at various factors that are important to candidates to ensure they’ll be the right fit and successful when they join your organisation.
Fit – is this candidate a cultural fit? This will make work feel more like a choice than a chore.
Family – we look at the balance between the private and the professional because for many people, some things are more important than work.
Freedom – does this candidate want freedom and flexibility? Will a company provide it for them?
Fun – life’s too short not to have fun along the way. Ensure you understand what drives people, professionally and personally.
Fortune – this could be money, success, satisfaction — whatever makes the candidate feel like they’ve made it.
Future – what are the candidates ambitions for the future? Are they in the right place to achieve them?
Building a culture of satisfaction
In 2019, Glassdoor’s Mission and Culture Survey found that over 50% of respondents said company culture is more important than salary when it comes to job satisfaction.
Facebook’s workforce studies have shown the three most important aspects across all age groups are career, community, and cause.
It can be really easy to think your candidate and employee brand isn’t currently important. But, if you’re one of the businesses who can’t afford to pay the high wages you used to, or you can’t wax lyrical about your “office culture” because everyone’s working from home — why would people want to work with you?
It’s time to put a plan in place.
Talk to your current staff and ask them what they like and what they dislike about the company. Act on those changes. Look at what is said about you online.
Can you respond to any bad reviews (and good ones)? What about your careers pages? Are they updated to reflect “the new normal” and to show people what’s so great about your (currently remote) company?
After all, pictures of everyone hugging and high fiving after completing a project won’t cut it right now.
Covering all the angles
Externally, if you work with recruiters, are they living and breathing your CVP at every stage? Are they ensuring that a candidate’s values align with your company’s? And does the way they deal with candidates align with how you want to be seen?
