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Pioneer Profile: Vicki Saunders

Meet Vicki Saunders, founder of The EVP Consultancy. With extensive experience in Employer Branding from roles at M&S, Royal Doulton, Boots, and BAE Systems, Vicki is passionate about creating purpose-driven work environments. She helps clients build EVPs that evolve with societal trends, ensuring they remain impactful and aligned with today’s diverse workforce needs.

12th Nov 2024

• 5 minutes

It’s time that we recognise the people behind the evolving world of work. Our working lives have shifted to being more inclusive, more people-centric, more flexible, and just plain better for both employees and companies. 

These changes didn’t just happen: they were put into place and upheld by individuals and teams working to create a better working future for everyone. 

So we’re finally putting the spotlight on the people who make great companies great: the people-people.  

People-people are crucial to the success of every company. They find you the talent that drives you forwards, and they’ve taken on an increasingly strategic role in the past few years – often taking on responsibility for mental health, diversity and inclusion, culture, EVPs, Employer Branding and team happiness. 

Read more about the Pioneers List and go behind the scenes to understand how and why we’ve selected our Pioneers.

We were lucky enough to speak with Vicki Saunders, founder of The EVP Consultancy

Tell us a little bit about your career history, and how you got to where you are now. What were the key milestones?

I started out on the grad scheme at M&S and became a store manager with a £15m turnover store at 23. I then became a regional manager in the luxury sector for Royal Doulton and randomly became the Marketing Manager for the UK and Ireland. I fell in love with marketing there! 

I then jumped across to Boots and led on the seasonal campaigns like Soltan and Xmas and made 64 TV ads in my time and many of the ‘here come the girls’ series. I then had my daughter and no longer wanted to be on speed-dial from the ExCo about fragrance sales being down, so I went over to pharmacy in a customer proposition development role. I developed new pharmacy services like diabetes risk assessments. It was there that I got the “purpose” bug – to my surprise, from the girl who used to get excited about advertising suncreams, I found I loved pharmacy for the tangible impact it makes to people’s health. So I went into a Corporate comms role next partnering with the NHS and Dept of Health representing Pharmacy and Opticians and launched a white paper on kids' eye health in Westminster. It was then that the penny dropped that corporate reputation and employer brand were so connected so I moved across to lead on all EB for Boots. That was 12 years ago and I still utterly love the world of EVP and EB. 

From Boots I went from ‘suncreams to submarines’ and stood up a new EB function at BAE Systems where I found EVP was so pivotal in attracting more women into engineering. I then went to lead on EVP, EB, Employee Experience and Culture at Currys for a while before I decided to set up The EVP Consultancy. I wanted to sprinkle EVP magic across multiple brands and industries and have more flexibility for my two daughters. I’m 49 and my youngest is only 6, so this is a perfect balance of keeping my brain stimulated and having time when I want it to do other things.

When did you become interested in the future of work?

To be successful in my roles, I have always had to be across upcoming trends to evolve what an organisation offers in line with them. When I started in EB 13 years ago, it was before gender pay gap reporting began, and we were ahead of the game at Boots showcasing and celebrating the women in our business in senior leadership positions. But the world changes fast and on top of the work we were doing on gender, our sustainability and social impact activity became really important to highlight, then Covid and Black Lives Matter brought new focus on work/life balance and DEI for many. The future of work is intrinsically linked to societal change and I now invest a lot of time staying on top of future of work trends. I have to be able to guide my clients through their EVP development in a way that they don’t end up with an EVP that is out of date in a year’s time. To be honest that probably means less repeat business for me, but for me it’s important for my professional integrity.

What is the most impactful change that you’ve implemented?

I think probably putting measurement in place in every role I have had. A big company like Boots has to be able to demonstrate ROI and invests a significant amount in econometrics analysis to measure and optimise their media spend. When I landed in Employer Brand at Boots, we had so little data and insight into what was actually working and what wasn’t. In fact we were probably generating too many applicants because we hit a million applications in a year for 20,000 vacancies. So I started a long and challenging process of putting tagging in place so that we could track the source of hire. From a Facebook ad through to the Careers site, into the ATS. We got to see what our paid spend was yielding versus our organic, which platforms were working for which audiences and what messages and content formats were performing best. It took a solid 18 months to get all the tech platforms to line up, and it wasn’t a sexy “Ta-dah!” project like a new creative campaign, but it was fundamental to us being able to continually evolve our strategy.

What’s the biggest challenge of being in your role/industry right now?

Probably prevailing confusion and misunderstanding about what an EVP is, what it does and how it is different to employer branding. I use an analogy about Mars bars which I find really helps clients and helps them engage their stakeholders too. I love the moments when you can see the lightbulbs go on in people’s heads as things start to make sense and they realise how fundamentally powerful a strong EVP can be. They then get really excited about creating theirs knowing that they have a guiding hand to support them through the journey. 

What do you think the next big trend is in working culture?

I expect personalisation will be big. It’s what we have come to want and expect as consumers and employees are looking for the same. They need to be recognised, met and included in the employee experience. The “E” in DEI comes into its own and ensures that the experience for employees is equitable but tailored to different needs. I get frustrated when I hear of EVP work done superficially, by segmenting the workforce and pigeon-holing people by their current role and nothing more. And I love nothing more than working with clients to create EVPs that resonate with everyone in their organisation but also flex across their needs as parents with caring responsibilities or folk at the beginning of their career wanting great training and development. That’s when an EVP can truly attract and retain top talent. 
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Personal storiesFuture of work pioneersWorkplace cultureBuilding an EVP