If all you offer is pay, you'll always pay more.

Picture two job ads for the same role, sitting side by side on SEEK.

One offers $150,000. The other offers $140,000.

Both promise competitive super, flexible working and a great culture. Both list the same six dot points of responsibilities, written by someone who clearly had somewhere else to be.

Which one would you apply for?

Exactly. If that's all a candidate can see, the higher number wins.

If all you offer is pay, you'll always pay more.

That's the trap a lot of organisations fall into without meaning to. Salary becomes the only part of the offer anyone can actually see, so it becomes the only thing anyone compares.

And once you're competing on price, you're a commodity. You pay above market to hire the people you want. You match counter-offers to keep the ones you've got. And when a competitor offers one of your best people another $15,000, there's very little standing in the way, because the career, the team and the work they'd be walking away from were never made clear to them.

For most organisations, people are already the biggest line item in the budget. A salary war makes it grow every year, because every premium you pay becomes the new benchmark for the next hire, and for everyone already in the team.

Salary matters, but it's rarely the whole decision.

Let's be honest, pay matters. You need to be competitive, and you should be upfront about it. SEEK has found that job ads with a visible salary receive up to 47% more applications on average.

But salary is rarely the only thing a candidate is weighing up. In SEEK's research into what Australians look for in a new role, work-life balance came out on top, with salary a close second.

People are making a much bigger decision than who pays more. They're deciding where their career goes next, who they'll spend their days with and how the job fits around the rest of their life.

Most job ads only answer one of those questions.

The value of a role sits in five EVP components.

When we work with organisations on their EVP, we look at the value of working there across five areas.

Rewards beyond salary. Super, salary packaging, parental leave, study support, wellbeing programs, a day off on your birthday. All the good stuff buried somewhere in the policy library.

Career velocity. How far and how fast someone can grow with you. The experience they'll get, the skills they'll build and where a few years with you can take them.

The organisation. Stability, culture, leadership and reputation. What it means to say you work there, or what I call the barbecue test.

The impact on their life. Flexibility, working from home, a short commute, predictable hours and the room to have a life outside work.

The work itself. The problems they'll solve, the autonomy they'll have, the people they'll learn from and the difference the work makes.

Only the first one is mostly about money. The other four already exist in your organisation. They just aren't written down anywhere a candidate can find them.

Most organisations undersell what they already offer.

This is the part that tends to surprise leadership teams. When we ask them what makes the organisation worth joining, the answers are often fairly modest. When we ask their people, the list gets longer, and a lot more specific.

We saw this with Social Futures, a regional community services organisation that didn't realise how strong an employer it already was. Employee interviews and an all-staff survey brought those strengths to the surface, and the EVP was built from there.

Internal teams tend to undervalue whatever feels normal to them. The manager who genuinely backs their people. The 20-minute drive to work. The fact that people get to own their work from day one. To someone sitting in two hours of traffic each day, reporting to a micromanager, those things are worth a great deal.

When candidates see the full value, the comparison changes.

Go back to those two job ads. Now imagine the $140,000 one also shows a clear path to the next role, a team known for developing its people, genuine flexibility and work that matters to the community it serves.

The candidate isn't comparing $140,000 with $150,000 anymore. They're comparing a well-paid career with a slightly bigger pay cheque.

You'll still lose some people on salary. Everyone does. But you'll lose fewer, and you'll have a much better chance of hiring well without always paying the premium. The same applies to keeping your best people when someone waves a bigger number at them.

Try it with your next job ad.

Take the next role you're hiring for. Under each of the five areas, write down one specific, true thing about working with you.

Skip the generic lines like "great culture". Go for something a candidate could check, such as "most of our team leaders were promoted from within" or "every role comes with $2,000 a year for study".

If you can't fill an area, that's useful too. It tells you where to dig, and where to go and ask your people.

Then put the best of it into the ad, the careers page and the offer conversation. Our post on job advertisement examples has more on getting ads to do that work, and you can see it in practice with the NSW Treasury talent acquisition team.

If you'd like help defining and expressing the full value of working with you, that sits at the heart of our EVP consulting work. And if you're still building the case for an EVP at all, start here.