When I talk about recruitment marketing and employer branding with people who are new to these disciplines, the topic of “employer value” comes up quickly in the conversation. My explanation challenges people to think beyond pay and benefits for the reasons why people not only decide to work for them but stay with the company.

I once read that the biggest compliment you can give a teacher is to create something new with what they taught you, and that’s what I did with Adele Revella’s Buyer Persona framework. I learned Revella’s process for talking to buyers to find out about their decision-making process from reading her book and taking her Buyer Persona Masterclass. I synthesized what I learned into the framework that I use to talk to employees and find out what they value.

As I was creating my online course – Better Message. Better Talent Pool. – I had to think hard about the process that I was using to interview employees and turn what they say into compelling recruiting messages. The challenging part was taking what I did intuitively and distilling the process so I could teach other people how to do the same thing.

When I was at the beginning of my learning path in recruitment marketing, I came across the concept of “employer value.” The idea of communicating with value isn’t any different from what I had been doing for years for my marketing clients and employers. I just never intentionally applied the concept to creating messaging for job candidates.