You can't market your way out of a poor employee experience.

There's a line that gets credited to Steve Jobs: the best marketing campaign is a great product.

When I put it on a slide at the EVP Summit this year, I sourced it as "not Steve Jobs", because honestly, nobody's quite sure who said it first. But the idea holds up, and it translates perfectly to what we do.

The best employer brand campaign you'll ever run is being a great place to work.

That sounds obvious. It's also the part most employer brand projects skip.

Why our framework is an infinity loop.

Our Integrated EVP Framework has two sides. On the left is your employer brand, which is what people think it's like to work for you. On the right is your employee experience, which is what it's actually like.

We drew it as an infinity loop on purpose. The two sides never stop feeding each other. A great experience creates great stories, and great stories bring in people who expect a great experience. Round and round it goes.

It's also the simplest way I know to explain EVP vs employer branding. Your EVP is the promise, and it has to be true on the experience side first. Your employer brand is how that promise is seen from the outside.

Which means the loop can also run the wrong way.

EVP vs employer branding, and which comes first.

Whenever I walk a leadership team through the framework, I start on the right-hand side. With the experience. Every time.

The questions are simple. Do your people feel like they're growing? Do they feel valued? Do they feel like their work matters?

When the answers are yes, you get something marketing can't manufacture. Real stories. Promotions that actually happened, managers who actually called, projects people are genuinely proud of. Those are what you take to market.

Inside out. That's the order.

Running it backwards costs more.

The reverse is where it goes wrong. You start by saying amazing things about the organisation, and the experience behind them isn't there yet.

In our framework, that's called a Glossy Brochure. The marketing writes cheques the experience can't cash.

People join on the promise and leave on the reality, usually fast. When ELMO surveyed Australian workers, about one in eight said they'd left a job within the first year. Four in ten of those said the job didn't match the expectations set during recruitment.

That's the expensive version of employer branding. You pay to attract someone, then you pay again to replace them. And the people who stayed get a front-row seat. There's more on why the first 90 days decide so much.

You don't have to be perfect.

Now, before anyone panics. This doesn't mean your organisation has to be flawless before you're allowed to talk about it.

No organisation is. Trust me on this. I've interviewed thousands of people across a lot of organisations over my career, and everyone assumes every other organisation is more organised and better prepared than theirs.

They never are. Nobody's as together as they look on LinkedIn.

What you do need is to be authentic. Find the bits your people genuinely love. Work out where you excel and what makes you different, and build your promise around that.

And please, be specific. "Collaborative culture, great people, room to grow." If your EVP could be dropped onto a competitor's careers page without anyone noticing, it isn't an EVP. It's wallpaper.

Most organisations are better than their brand.

Here's the good news, and it's something I see all the time. Plenty of organisations already are a great place to work. They just haven't told anyone.

That's a Best-Kept Secret: strong experience, quiet employer brand. It's also the most fun problem to have, because the hard part is done. The stories already exist. The job is finding them and getting them in front of the right people.

Richard Crookes Constructions is a good example. It had grown into a major builder that talent didn't yet recognise. Social Futures is another. It didn't realise how strong an employer it already was.

Find out which side of the loop needs you first.

Here's a quick gut check you can do right now. Write down the three biggest promises on your careers page. Next to each one, write the name of an employee who'd tell a friend it's true without being prompted.

Any promise without a name next to it is where to start.

If you want something more structured, try the EVP Strength Finder. It's a free diagnostic that walks you through both sides of the framework and scores you across six pillars. It then shows you whether you're a Magnet, a Glossy Brochure, a Best-Kept Secret or a Blank Page.

It's your view rather than your people's, so it's not as strong as proper employee consultation. But it's a great place to start, and it'll show you whether the experience or the brand needs you first.