Notes for owners · Branding and communication
How to write an employer value proposition from what your team says
Five questions to ask five people, how to turn their answers into a short statement in their own words, and how to test it against what your recruiters and managers tell candidates.
The GullySales team · Updated 17 Oct 2026 · 5 min read
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Your job post says "a young, dynamic team with great learning". Your five best people would not describe the place that way. An employer value proposition is a short, true statement of what working for you gives a person and what it asks of them. Write it by asking five people why they stay, keeping the reasons at least two of them gave, and then checking the result against what your recruiter and managers tell candidates. If the two do not match, a candidate who talks to your staff will notice.
Why the team goes first
Owners tend to write this from the top: growth, learning, ownership. Candidates have read those words on many other pages. What they cannot read elsewhere is the specific reason your own people turned down a better-paying offer from down the road.
Your staff already know that reason. They give it on a WhatsApp group when a friend asks whether the firm is worth joining. The job is to collect it, not invent it.
Five questions for five people
Hold the conversations separately. Ask in this order and write the answers down without correcting them. Do not interview your direct reports yourself. Ask a manager from another team, or someone people trust, to do it.
- What did you expect when you joined, and what was different?
- When a friend asks whether to join, what do you tell them?
- What was the last thing at work that made you glad you were here?
- What would make you leave?
- What would you not want us to promise a new person?
Question five keeps the statement honest. It lists what a candidate must not be told, which is a part owners rarely collect.
Choose five who differ in role and in years served, with at least one who joined recently and one who has been there long.
Sort the answers
Lay each person's answers in a table, one row per theme, and mark who said it. Keep a theme only if two or more people gave it. Keep the wording that sounds like a person speaking.
A wedding-photography studio in Jalandhar
This is an invented studio, not a client. It has eleven people: three photographers, two videographers, four editors, an album designer and an office coordinator. The owner's job post speaks of "a creative family". The five interviews give a different picture.
| Theme | Said by | In their words |
|---|---|---|
| Shoot second before you shoot lead | 4 of 5 | "I carried the bag for a month, then they put a camera in my hand at a sangeet" |
| Credit on the studio's page | 3 of 5 | "My name is under the album, not the studio's" |
| No free Sundays in the wedding months | 4 of 5 | "From November to February, forget Sundays" |
| Editing hours stretch after a big wedding | 2 of 5 | "Delivery week is long, and nobody pretends otherwise" |
| Slow rise in pay | 2 of 5 | "It comes in steps, and the steps are fair" |
The fifth question gave the most. Two people said: do not promise new joiners that they will lead shoots in the first season. The owner had been promising exactly that.
The statement the studio wrote: "You will carry the bag and then shoot second for a season, and your name goes under your work. From November to February, weddings take your Sundays, and delivery weeks run long. Pay rises in steps. If you want to lead shoots in your first year, we are not the place."
The first draft of the post was adjectives. The corrected paragraph has a season, a day of the week and an honest limit, and the limit is why a reader believes the rest. It came at a cost: in the first month fewer people applied, and one of the five was uneasy at seeing the Sundays line in print. The owner kept it.
Test it against what candidates are told
A statement is only as good as the conversations behind it. Ask your recruiter, hiring managers and whoever answers the phone about jobs to describe the role in their own words. Compare.
- A manager says "flexible hours", the statement says no free Sundays. One of them is wrong.
- The post lists duties no one on the team mentioned. Either the post is old or someone is smoothing the truth.
- The owner promises quick growth on the phone and the team calls it slow. Fix the pitch before you publish anything.
Resolve differences by changing the wording that is false. Never edit the team's answers to match the pitch. If a theme only one person gave is vivid, you may use it as an example, but not as the claim.
Where the statement goes
At the top of the careers page, in the first sentence of each job post, and behind what a recruiter says on a first call. Do not turn it into a slogan or a poster. It is a working paragraph, and it should survive being read aloud to the five who gave you the material.
When this is not worth doing
Skip it if you have fewer than three people; the answers will sound like you, so spend the time on one carefully written job post instead. Skip it if the honest answers all describe a job you are ashamed of, because that is a job to fix, not a statement to polish.
Ask your five this week
Ask your five questions this week and keep the sheet. The employer branding hub has the wider material. If you would like a second pair of eyes on the wording, value proposition development is the service for that, and you can tell us what you need.
