Your EVP already exists, and your people know what it is.

You're at a barbecue. Someone hands you a drink, asks what you do, and you tell them where you work.

Then you watch their face.

Back in my LinkedIn days, working with clients on their employer brand, we used to talk about this moment. We called it the barbecue test.

Work somewhere people admire and you get the eyebrows. A genuine "wow", a lean in, three follow-up questions and possibly a request for a referral. Work somewhere with a less shiny reputation and you get a polite "oh", followed by a sudden and intense interest in the sausages.

Both of those reactions are an employer brand.

Nobody at that barbecue has read your careers page or your brand guidelines. They've picked up what it's like to work at your place from mates, from reviews, from the cousin who left last year. The perception already exists.

So does the experience. Every person on your payroll knows exactly what it's like to work there, and they're telling people. At barbecues, mostly.

A strong employer brand keeps paying you back.

We all understand the value of this, even if we don't always say it out loud. If you're known as a great place to work, you get the luxury of choice. The best people want to join you.

And then something useful happens. Great people do great work, which makes the place more interesting to be part of, which makes it easier to attract the next lot of great people. You can probably name a few Australian organisations that have been riding that cycle for years.

It runs in the other direction too, sadly. Nobody wants to be the "oh".

Where most employer brand projects go wrong.

Here's the pattern we see when an organisation first gets in touch to "do" their employer brand.

The instinct is to go aspirational. Paint a picture of what it could be like to work there. Or, if we're being honest, what the leadership team wishes it were like.

I get it. It feels ambitious. It reads beautifully in a brand guide.

The problem is the gap. Promise one thing in the job ad, deliver another in the first month, and people notice fast. That gap turns into disengagement, then into resignations, and replacing people is a far more expensive problem than attracting them ever was.

Australian employers are feeling it already. In AHRI's Quarterly Australian Work Outlook, average turnover for 2024 sat at 16%, and roughly a third of organisations were losing one in five of their people or more each year.

That gap is where a lot of EVPs live or die, and it deserves a post of its own.

You're not writing it. You're uncovering it.

So if you're wondering how to create an EVP, my advice is simple. You already have an employer brand. The work is finding it.

Which is why the first thing we do on almost every project is employee consultation. That doesn't mean a workshop where the leadership team decides what the EVP should be. There's merit in hearing from leaders, don't get me wrong, because the promise has to reflect where the business is heading. But we want to go straight to the people.

It's literally why we called the business It's the People.

You ask your people what they love about working there. What they'd tell a friend. What keeps them going on a bad week. And what drives them up the wall.

When we validated the EVP for the City of Sydney, that meant going to where people work, including sausage sizzles at the depots. For Levande, it meant one promise, built from what their people said, that works across 60 retirement villages and corporate teams.

You'll hear two kinds of things. Some you'll love: the strengths you're already getting right and probably underselling. Some will sting. That's the friction, and the stuff you've been hearing for years and politely setting aside.

Both are gold.

The stinging bit matters more than most leaders expect. The same AHRI survey found three quarters of Australian employers collect data on why people quit. Which is great. It's also a bit like asking for directions once you've already arrived.

And the reasons aren't mysteries. Excessive workload topped the list, followed by roles that had lost their appeal and conflict or poor relationships at work. None of that would surprise the people still sitting at their desks.

Your people will tell you what's wrong while there's still time to fix it. Most were just never asked.

How to create an EVP from what you hear.

Once the listening is done, you know what's true. More importantly, you know what's true and good. That's a promise you can make to new people with a straight face.

That becomes your employee value proposition: the promise, the pillars and the stories, told in your people's own words.

The stinging half has a job too. It's your to-do list for the employee experience. Your people are telling you how to make it a better place to work. How to help them do their jobs well. How to help them feel like they belong. And, surprisingly often, how to say thank you more.

That's why our Integrated EVP Framework puts employer brand on one side and employee experience on the other. You can't work on one and ignore the other, because the brand only holds up if the experience behind it is true.

Run your own barbecue test this week.

You don't need us to start this. Grab five people from different parts of the organisation, ideally not all from head office, and ask them two questions.

When you tell someone at a barbecue where you work, what do you say?

And what do you wish you could say?

The first answer is your employer brand as it stands today. The gap between the two is your roadmap.

If you'd like a more structured read on where you stand, the EVP Strength Finder scores you across six pillars. And if you want help doing the listening properly, at scale, that's what our employee consultation work is for.