How much of our EVP should aspirational vs. reality?
Are you trying to figure out how much of your EVP needs to be grounded in the reality of your current employment experience versus aspirational?
Communicating an authentic and real version of your employment experience is important for obvious reasons – you don’t want to sell a dream that you can’t deliver on.
By being real, you give talent a truthful glimpse into your business – the culture, the opportunities – so they can imagine themselves working there and decide for themselves whether they’re a good fit for you. This helps to lift the quality of candidates that you attract because you’ll have more right fit candidates self-selecting into your process and importantly, more wrong fit candidates self-selecting out.
However, if you have a strong vision of where the organisation is going, you can include an element of aspiration to attract people who want to be part of that vision AND re-inspire your current team to jump on board the journey.
You definitely want to be more real than aspirational. At the end of the day it depends on how far down the track your organisation is towards making those future focus messages a reality.