It’s not necessarily an expression you hear too often, and you may have never heard of candidate value propositions (CVPs) before.

However, they have to be the way to go in a difficult recruitment market like China. How can you differentiate yourself from any other company in China? How else can you get to the root of what makes people choose your company over others?

All of us are fighting the good fight, and victory goes to those companies that can hone their job offers into what appears to be the best offer available in the Chinese market. If the match is done well enough. and honestly, you will match the aspirations of active and passive candidates in the market and offer the best career progression in your industry.

The end result is obviously not just a series of pretty photos and ads. It’s a statement or series of statements that tap into the wants and needs of candidates and position your company as the solution.

But, how do you get to produce a candidate value proposition (CVP)?:

get help – The methodology involved in producing a candidate value proposition (CVP) depends heavily on the skill set of the marketing department. It’s just another way of looking at branding and marketing, but with recruiting in mind as the ultimate goal.

Marketing people have knowledge of the 4 Ps (Product, Price, Promotion, Place) and can help you create a CVP that is effective in the marketplace. The good news is that they’ll need your HR and recruitment knowledge to flesh out the actual details, but to have a successful cooperation, you’ll need to start thinking like a marketer. Only a little.

Candidate Research – This is the starting point and possibly the most difficult thing to do. It requires a time commitment and a budget, two things that are in short supply for any HR staff member in China. [http://www.talentinchina.com]. You know the candidates, but you’ll need the help of someone who can actually bring people together in some kind of focus group situation. Someone who can decipher the information you know is there but can’t get to.

Analysis of results – For this problem, I suggest again that you need the help of a company that does competitive intelligence or a market research firm. You need someone with the subtlety of interpretation necessary to understand what candidates in your industry really want, how they view your company, and how they might be drawn to see it in a better light.

Segmentation – No matter what industry you are in, and no matter your size, there will need to be some form of segmentation of your hiring market. If you don’t have any notion of segmentation at this point, you probably don’t have the depth of analysis and understanding you need to be successful. Not only do you need to segment the market, you also need to decide how to position your own company within that market.

This is where the tough questions arise: Do they offer high salaries? Or a balanced work-life scenario? Which one do you feel more comfortable with and which one best suits the market? There are no easy answers here, but your answer will determine how successful you can be. Clearly, there is no such thing as a perfect positioning, but not all positionings are guaranteed to fail.

Career and Hiring Message – The key to this is to solve the question: Why do people want to work in our company? What do they value most?

If you look at a company like Microsoft, they can do a CVP that says something like ‘Define breakthrough technologies that will change the world.’ But are not the only ones. Even small businesses or old industries can take the same course.

Take for example something as mundane as automotive lighting. You may see it as pieces of clear plastic with a light behind it. But the true interpretation would lead to a CVP that focuses on the fact that anyone in the automotive lighting business is ‘defining the future look of a new generation of cars’. Take a look at the cars on your street and you’ll notice that the lights dominate the look now, so this isn’t a sales spiel. It’s the truth, but expressed in a way that makes automotive lighting attractive as a career.

So you’re looking to craft a message that precisely defines the features and benefits of your product, a job, but in such a way as to maximize your advantage. The CVP has to be a real assessment and not a marketing idea of ​​what is hot and trendy. This might work for mass media soft drink advertising, but racing is too important to be trivialized.

Delivery – You must now choose where to present your newly created message. The obvious places are recruitment portals and newspapers, but now that you have a method with a fancy new acronym, why not go all out and put it on blogs, YouTube, social media, job fairs, radio, TV , etc.? The possibilities are endless but, again, each medium may or may not reflect the type of positioning you are seeking.

What are we waiting for here? Developing a candidate value proposition feels more like a game than a job.

Go have fun and call it your job.