As counterintuitive as it sounds, to make your employee value proposition most valuable you need to repel the many. I want you to think of your employer brand and your EVP as a smart filter that sits between your recruitment marketing and your recruitment, helping to weed out the people who are unsuitable. For the good of the organisation, and for the good of those candidates too.
That is the line most talent teams flinch at, so let me defend it. A good EVP attracts talent. It lists the benefits, describes the culture in warm terms, and pulls people towards the door. A great EVP does something harder and more useful. It attracts the right people and, in the same breath, gives the wrong people a clear reason to keep walking. Attraction on its own is a blunt instrument. A filter is a precision one.
The problem with an EVP that only attracts
When your proposition is designed purely to appeal, it appeals to everyone, and everyone is not who you want. You end up with a large, undifferentiated pool of applicants, most of whom are a poor fit, and a hiring process that spends its energy screening people out rather than drawing the right people in. Worse, the ones who do get through arrived on a promise that was tuned for maximum appeal rather than maximum truth. When the reality of the job shows up, so does the disappointment, and shortly after that, the resignation.
A generically attractive EVP is also, by definition, a copyable one. Great people, meaningful work, competitive package, room to grow. Every competitor is saying the same words. If your proposition could be lifted and pasted onto a rival careers page without anyone noticing, it is not doing its job. It is not helping the right person recognise that this is the place for them.
Think of your EVP as a smart filter between your marketing and your recruitment, weeding out the unsuitable for the good of everyone involved.
What a great EVP does instead
A great EVP is honest about the give as well as the get. It tells people what the organisation offers, and it tells them what it will ask in return: the pace, the standards, the pressures, the things that will be hard. That honesty is not a deterrent to the right person. It is a signal. It says, we understand this work, we respect you enough to be straight with you, and we are confident enough in what we do to let the wrong fit walk away.
When candidates read a proposition like that, the serious ones ask themselves the only question that matters: do I have what it takes, and do I actually want it. The people who answer no remove themselves quietly and early, which is the cheapest and kindest outcome for both sides. The people who answer yes arrive already committed, because they were not sold a softened version of the job. They chose the real one.
This is what repel-to-compel means in practice. You are not being difficult for the sake of it. You are building a filter strong enough to protect the fit on the other side. The stronger the filter, the stronger the belief among the people who make it through, and belief is what turns a workforce into something a competitor cannot simply outbid.
Building an EVP that filters this well is a discipline, not a slogan, and it is the method I set out in full in Give & Get Employer Branding. If you would like help turning your own proposition into a smart filter that compels the right few, you can work with Bryan directly.