The Connected Brand — an employer brand and EVP worldview for the unrest of us.

Summary: McKinsey named the war for talent in 1997. In some industries it now looks closer to a war against it — AI screening before any human sees a candidate, roles drawing tens of thousands of applications read by no one, ghosting in every direction. The EVP, built as a late-nineties recruiting slogan, was never equipped for this. This piece argues the fix isn’t another refresh: it’s rebuilding value around career path profiles, the small unit that finally connects corporate brand, employer brand, and the actual employee experience.

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I was presenting findings on company values to senior leadership at a large university. The full project was EVP and employer brand, but we started with values because the case had been made that values are usually where an EVP eventually gets built from. President, deans, the works. About fifteen minutes into walking through key findings, manager and employee perspectives, one of the deans pulled out his iPad, started googling other organizations’ values statements, and read a few aloud. Then he looked up and said, “why don’t we just pick one of these, they all sound good.”

He wasn’t being dismissive. He was being honest. They did all sound good. They also all sounded the same. And I remember thinking, if a leader treats a values statement as interchangeable, the EVP built on top is going to land in the same place. Maybe worse. Values, EVP, slogans, pillars, all of them are downstream of whether a company actually means what it says it means. When they don’t, the artifacts get treated the way the dean treated them. Pick one, they all sound good.

The real problem isn’t the list of values. It’s what gets left to chance when it’s hollow. Whether you get a decent manager. Whether you’re recognized for the work. Whether the opportunity to grow shows up. Whether you’re working with people you actually like. None of those things have to be a coin flip. But in a lot of organizations, that’s exactly what they’ve become, because the company never decided what it was actually offering anyone.

I’ve worked on many employer brand programs across nearly every major industry. After all of it, to put it plainly: the EVP, as it’s practiced, is anything but a value proposition. It’s a campaign slogan at best, and if that’s what it was meant to be, you can stop reading here.

The bigger problem is what’s happened around it. The infrastructure of work has shifted under our feet, and what companies built to attract and retain people still assumes a model of mutual trust that is breaking down. In some industries it now looks less like a competition for talent and more like a system arrayed against it. The EVP didn’t cause that. But it isn’t equipped for it either. And what comes next isn’t another refresh.

What was the EVP actually supposed to be?

An investment thesis — a two-sided one. The Employee Value Proposition was meant to function as a clear-eyed statement of what an organization offers in exchange for the time, energy, and ambition of the people it hires. That proposition, or investment, was always two sided. Work isn’t transactional. We collaborate, share responsibilities, work together, solve different kinds of problems, apply ingenuity or kindness, learn, grow, and even stumble. That’s a lot of things to add up, and a lot of things to value in return. Work is mutually shared investment in trusting each other. The real value proposition says put your trust in us, and you can trust we’ll make it worthwhile. That may sound idealistic, but overall, it works. Or used to.

What EVP became, in so many of the programs I’ve seen up close, is a mashup of vague values (real, aspirational, or sadly fictional) and a handful of pillars that I can’t see helping anyone make an informed, let alone inspired, investment decision. I’ve asked scores of managers and recruiters whether their EVP helps them in the actual work of hiring or developing people. Most give me blank stares, nod ever so slightly, or change the subject.

Why is the data underneath most EVPs unreliable?

Because it’s gathered from people who can’t afford to be honest. A week before that SLT meeting, I’d moderated employee focus groups at the same university. The satisfaction scores were suspiciously high, which was strange because the institution was a month past a large round of layoffs and mid-reorg. I asked the group why the ratings were so positive. Long silence. Eventually a woman said, “we’re all afraid that if we don’t give positive scores, it’ll make things worse.”

That’s the input most EVPs are built on. Surveys taken by people who can’t afford to be honest, focus groups where the safest answer is the agreeable one, interviews where the question itself signals what the company wants to hear. Then a PowerPoint gets built, pillars get named, a slogan gets approved, and the whole thing gets called a value proposition. Value to whom.

The point isn’t any single client. The point is that the inputs are often compromised, the outputs all sound the same, and somewhere in between we didn’t ask whether any of it was producing value.

Don’t we already know what people want?

Yes — and that’s exactly why the standard list isn’t where differentiation lives. What do employees and job seekers want? You already know. Universum, Gallup, Gartner, the World Bank, McKinsey, LinkedIn, and more, all publish the same type of list every year with tiny percentage shifts. People want fair comp, good benefits, interesting work, room to grow, and people they enjoy. The real question isn’t what people want. It’s whether companies still care to deliver it. There are still many, many good companies. Big tech? Fewer and fewer by the week. That list isn’t where differentiation, or trust, or purpose lives. It’s the default setting.

I once added a question to an employee survey at a large tech client, asking whether their employer brand slogan was influential in how people decided to join, or stay at the company. Nearly 100% didn’t know they had an EVP or EB slogan. That doesn’t mean don’t make a slogan. It means the slogan should produce something better than near-zero impact from the people it’s talking to.

Employment is one of the most emotionally charged decisions any of us makes, somewhere just behind choosing a spouse. Set that next to a “future lives here” slogan and pillars no one remembers and the gap between the decision and the reality is obvious. The EVP model worked in the late nineties and early 2000s because, one, it was novel, and two, recruiting was the primary use. It was used as a campaign slogan, and it worked. Of course it did. The Great Resignation confirmed for me that it isn’t novel anymore, and the world since has shown me it’s a terrible tool for recruiting, creating more mismatches, overwhelmed ATS systems, and a near total breakdown of trust.

Is this still a war for talent?

In some industries it now looks closer to a war against it. Look at what the field has become. AI screens candidates before any human sees them. Roles get tens of thousands of applications, most read by no one. Recruiters ghost, hiring managers ghost, candidates ghost back. Jobs get compressed, eliminated, then replaced with prompts. The infrastructure built to compete for people now mostly processes them, filters them, and rejects them in language no one’s sure was written by a human. That isn’t a war for talent. It’s closer to a war against it. And the EVP, with its slogan and pillars, is the artifact of a different era trying to do work it was never built for.

The original argument from McKinsey’s late-nineties work was segment-specific. To convey value, to actually function as an investment thesis, is to be valuable to someone’s career path, life stage, career stage, and with some really smart research, even get into what quality of life means. Sales, operations, administration, IT, finance, accounting, logistics, engineering, R&D, all at the same company, are all different career path profiles, all judging value through different criteria shaped by what their path looks like over time. A nurse and a marketing associate at the same hospital system do not measure value the same way. They shouldn’t be sold the same one.

What replaces the slogan?

Career path profiles — the unit small enough to individualize value and stable enough to act on. Real insight comes from career path patterns. Those are the qualities that signal the work itself, the team, the challenges, the trust, all in line with what makes, not the employer, but the job itself worth paying note. Career path patterns, or profiles, get very close to individualizing value. We can all be unique in our perspectives and perceptions, but if we’re in a career path, the attributes of what is desirable are generally consistent. If a career path is Teacher, there are many ways to do that. Elementary, middle school, high school, public vs. private, community college, university, and so on, but the influences that would signal “great job” for teachers will be recognized by all of those different people. Then the work of signaling “great employer” has to match the defaults: fair comp, good benefits, interesting work, room to grow, people they enjoy.

This insight can shift the goal from messaging value to creating value. People who choose restaurant management, or robotics, or landscaping, or insurance claims, tend to think similarly about what makes their path worth committing to, even though they can all have completely different definitions of what a good job and life is. Layer in individuality through integrated social science research, pair it with the path patterns, and you have a starting point that isn’t a slogan and isn’t a pillar. It’s a description of the deal the company is actually offering, to the actual people it’s trying to attract or keep.

How does this make the EVP problem not an EVP problem?

By connecting the three streams that normally never speak. EVP is a problem when three things are running in parallel and barely speaking to each other. The corporate brand, which marketing generally owns. The employer brand, which HR or talent acquisition generally owns. And the actual employee experience, which sits with people operations, managers, and whoever happens to be running culture work that quarter. Three workstreams, three sets of measurement, three sets of goals, and almost no reconciliation between them.

A career path profile is a small enough unit to actually connect those three. You can’t reconcile a catchy slogan with what a retail associate or home health aide lives. You can reconcile what marketing says about the company, what the employer brand promises, and what one’s career path experience is likely to be day to day. That reconciliation is where the EVP-as-investment-thesis idea finally has somewhere to go.

Walk back through the failures we started with. The compromised survey input happens because the research asks the wrong unit, the company in general, instead of the specific path that would let people answer with something more honest than fear. The near-zero slogan awareness happens because one line can’t speak to a nurse and a marketing associate at the same time, so it speaks to neither. The AI screening pile-up happens because there’s no shared definition of value across the corporate brand, the employer brand, and the actual experience, so the system defaults to volume. The Big Tech drift toward processing rather than valuing people happens because no one is accountable for the contradiction between the three. Connecting them at the career path level doesn’t fix all of this. It does make the breakage visible, which is the first time most organizations have had a chance to see it.

This is what we mean by a Connected Brand. It’s not a refresh. It’s a rethink about value, to whom, the different points of view on the same brand and how those relate to each other. Corporate brand, employer brand, and employee experience treated as one brand, different views. All the way down to the level where someone is choosing whether to stay another year. Even if there’s recently been tough news.

If this is obviously better, why hasn’t it happened?

Because the organization is structured to keep it from happening. Part of the answer is structural. Marketing budgets and HR budgets sit in different cost centers, with different metrics and different definitions of success. A CMO is measured on growth and brand health. A CHRO is measured on retention, time-to-fill, and engagement scores. Neither is incentivized to fund work that helps the other. Part of the answer is measurement maturity. The tools and benchmarks that exist for marketing don’t exist for employer brand and culture in any comparable form. Connected Brand isn’t hard because the idea is hard. It’s hard because the organization is structured to keep it from happening.

Inside that structure, when those three streams operate independently, a dollar spent on the marketing side has no idea the employer brand exists, and a dollar spent on employer brand has no idea what marketing just said about the company, and the employee experience is left to absorb whatever contradictions result. The dollars cancel each other in small, invisible ways. Reputation, which I’d argue does more to convey value than any EVP, gets built or eroded in those gaps.

When the three are connected, awareness of each other’s signals built into the work, those dollars start reinforcing instead of canceling. A marketing dollar lands on a workforce that confirms the message. An employer brand investment lines up with an experience that delivers on it. Reputation accumulates. That’s the compounding.

Right now, there’s almost nothing that tracks whether any of that is happening. EVPs almost never get measured against whether they produced value, which is part of why the model has drifted so far from its original premise. Making the leap to Connected Brand thinking, treating this as more than a better-sounding idea and instead as a strategy for the world we’re actually working in, is what makes the measurement possible. It gives power to the investment thesis, shows how employer brand investment creates value, and the brand marketing threads that weave between them reveal where the compounding is actually happening. That’s the kind of visibility that can transform how companies invest in their people and their reputation. That’s what fuels growth in an age of do more with less.

That’s the work that’s worth building. The war against talent isn’t a metaphor for some companies. The answer isn’t another slogan. It’s a brand that knows, top to bottom, who it’s for and what it’s actually offering them.