What Happens When You Help People Make Better Career Decisions? Working Evidence and Employer Brand Research

Everyone wins, and that's not too shabby.

Summary: When people size up a job or employer, they run through private questions: Will I matter there? Will this lead somewhere? Can I believe what they're telling me? This article argues those questions are the most important part of employer brand and EVP research, and that ranking and preference questions undermine insight. It introduces working evidence, WorkingTheory's term for whatever a person reads, watches, hears, or interacts with to judge what's good in their working life, and explains how scorecards and working evidence profiles for each career path guide message, creative, and content strategy. It closes on why better career decisions benefit the job seeker, the employee, and the employer.

Why are the questions people ask themselves the core of employer brand research?

When someone sizes up a job, an employer, a team, a culture, or any other part of work, they run through a set of questions, mostly in their own head. Will I matter there? Will this lead somewhere? Can I believe what they're telling me? Will I be able to pay my bills and still have a life? And a lot more. With work as unsettled as it is lately, those kinds of questions get asked more often and with more at stake.

Those questions are also the most important part of employer brand or value proposition research. Don't sprint past them, and definitely don't think of ranking or preference questions as the solution. They do the opposite and undermine finding insight. Why does a job seeker want good pay? Sounds like a silly question. Who doesn't? But knowing that someone wants it is different from knowing why, how, and what it means to them, and getting at that takes a different protocol. The same goes for how, where, when, and what questions. If we don't ask them, we don't learn the important stuff. Why is something scored high, or low? How is value felt in an experience? What does authenticity mean in the day to day? Decisions are made in a context, and context has nuance.

Two people on the same career path will weigh things differently, but they ask similar questions about the path itself. That was a powerful insight I came across years ago, and I kept pulling on that thread. How does a career path grow? That's a different question than how an individual grows within a career path. We know managers and leaders are important in people's experience, but is it one size fits all? It can't be, so again, which questions help us understand how different management styles, or the lack of any, affect engagement, growth, productivity, and so on? That insight meant a career path can be studied one path at a time, giving a vastly different picture of what everyone on all sides (candidate, employee, employer) values at any given moment. And that was wicked cool.

What's the difference between a finding and an insight?

A finding tells you what people said. For example, an NPS score that went up last quarter. It's interesting, but not actionable by itself. An insight tells you the why, how, and when behind the score, creating a kind of map to a desired future. That's where it gets fun.

It's hard, just like any complex problem is hard, but not unsolvable. When we ask employees the questions job seekers ask themselves, including the hard ones about emotion and intent, we get a scorecard of what we call working evidence.

Working evidence is a deeper way of expressing all the signals, markers, interactions, and experiences that go into a judgment, which is a decision: whatever a person reads, watches, hears, or interacts with that they use to judge what's good in their working life. Those things are carriers. They carry messages, information, stories, and content.

Back to the art of the question. If we have a map of what all sides value, then we have a pretty clear picture of strategy: message strategy, creative strategy, content strategy, and everything that follows from them. That lets a touchpoint become much more than a carrier. At touchpoint 1, say a job posting, we'll know what someone on that career path needs to see to reach their decision threshold, whether that's A, B, or C. They come away with working evidence, and it helps them understand the decision they have to make. Go through touchpoints 1, 2, 3, and so on, and those personal insights add up to aggregate insights, and aggregate insights lead to actionable ones. We map it all out as scorecards, first individually, then collectively as working evidence profiles for each career path. It might sound like an enormous undertaking, but with experience it often takes the same amount of time as conventional ranking and preference research, or less. You get better answers in about the same time.

What does a working evidence scorecard show?

We've probably all seen a claim like "We have an inclusive culture." The employer who shared it believed that was enough to count as working evidence. It isn't. Published workforce demographics are working evidence. The scorecard shows, for each career path, which questions produce working evidence, or to put it another way: what matters most, what counts as evidence for each one, how strong that evidence needs to be, and where the company already has it or falls short. And to add nuance, some companies would define inclusion as more than demographic head count, and say it's how they include people in the decisions that affect their careers (which feeds into building career path insights).

Nobody reaches certainty about a job. There's no single truth to dig for, and no one magic phrase that creates trust. People reach proven enough to move forward, whether they're deciding to apply or to stay. A scorecard of working evidence shows what "enough" looks like for the people you need, and that makes it a far more useful guide for the work than a slogan, a set of pillars, or a list of values. Those are fine, but if big performance is the goal, they'll leave you shorthanded.

Why is working evidence hard to see from inside a company?

Which evidence counts, how much it counts, and where your company is coming up short are hard to see, especially from inside your own company, where everyone already believes a good part of the claims. There’s an inherent bias to see our own company and situation in a better light than it might really deserve, because it feels safer than admitting what’s wrong. We don’t want to admit the place isn’t that great, so we tell others it is, partly to feel better about it ourselves. That gap between what we say and what we live with turns into anxiety and stress, and it doesn’t get talked about nearly as much as it should. For example, it’s pretty common to hear “It’s very friendly here” in public, and then hear in private that it can be cliquey, and that favoritism plays a part. How would any job seeker find that out? And once an employee finds it out, they’re stuck managing a bad situation they didn’t expect, on top of all their other responsibilities and ambitions. Finding that out is only hard when it’s not clear where and how to look.

Is making better career decisions a good thing?

It sounds silly, but let's not assume anything. If people make career choices knowing what they're getting into, that has to show up in morale, productivity, camaraderie, and other measures of engagement. The people who join expect the job they get, and the people who stay know why they're staying. Everything else a company says about itself gets easier to believe after that, and the elusive thing we call reputation gets built. So yes, better career decisions help the job seeker on the front end, then again as an employee, and further still, they help the employer: in conventional metrics, EB economics, quality of hire, corporate brand equity, reputation, and more.

Getting there depends on asking the questions people already ask themselves, and the ones they should ask but might not know how to. After that, a little craft and rigor go a long way toward knowing an honest answer when you hear one. It's hard, for sure, but getting it right produces rewards that show up in nearly every metric we use to measure employer brand, EVP, and talent health. Keep getting it right, and it compounds like a savings account.