Building an EVP That Works Across SF, London, and Hyderabad (Not Just One)

Here's a mistake I made early on hiring across DigitalOcean's distributed teams.

We built an EVP. It was well-written. Genuine. It tested well with the US team.

We rolled it out across India and Pakistan. Same messaging, same emphasis, same order of priority.

We wondered why it didn't land.

Here's the reality:

An engineer in San Francisco is being recruited by Google, Anthropic and a dozen well-funded startups offering equity, remote flexibility and brand name. Your pitch needs to answer: why here, not them?

An engineer in Hyderabad or Karachi is often asking a different set of questions entirely. Stability. Technical depth. Global exposure. The chance to work on problems that put them ahead of the local market. Equity might matter, but it's rarely the top of the list.

The same pattern plays out across every market. A senior engineer in London is weighing comp against cost of living, scrutinising your remote policy, and trying to figure out whether your US leadership team actually respects European autonomy or just treats this office as a timezone extension.

One pitch does not answer all three sets of questions. And yet most companies try.

Here's what actually works:

→ Anchor on what's universal, localise everything else.
There's a core story every location should be able to tell: what the company does, why it matters, what kind of problems engineers work on. That's your brand consistency. Everything beneath it (what growth looks like, what the team culture feels like, why this market specifically) needs to be adapted for where you're hiring.

→ Hire local TA knowledge before you start.
The fastest way to understand what an engineer in Hyderabad actually wants is to ask someone who hires them every day. A local recruiter, even a contractor, will tell you things no amount of market research will. They know which competitors are winning on what promise. They know what candidates are wary of. That context shapes your pitch before you waste time testing the wrong message.

→ Let the CTO shape the market-specific story.
CTOs don't usually think about EVP, but they absolutely care about talent attraction in markets where they're competing. Work with them on this.

What can an engineer get from joining here that they can't get elsewhere in this market?

In some cities, that's working on infrastructure at a scale that doesn't exist locally. In others, it's global exposure from day one. In others, it's ownership of a product area they'd be middle of the stack at a FAANG. That's a compelling, honest pitch. Build it location by location.

→ Test your message before you commit.
You don't need a major rebrand to validate an EVP. Run the localised message for 4–6 weeks. Track response rates to outreach, conversion from first call to second and offer acceptance. If your Hyderabad acceptance rate is 60% but London is 30%, your pitch isn't the only variable, but it's worth looking at first.

Get it right and the results are hard to miss. The right people land in the right roles, ramp faster and grow. Hiring stays within budget because you're not inflating titles to compensate for a pitch that doesn't fit the market. Time to fill drops because you're searching for the right talent, not a unicorn. And attrition through performance management, one of the most expensive problems in distributed teams, becomes far less common.

A localised EVP isn't a branding exercise. It's a hiring strategy.