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With candidates more familiar with Sun Life than Sun Life Grepa, the company turned to employee feedback to uncover an authentic employer brand – and is now working to make that promise consistent across the employee experience.
For Sun Life Grepa Financial, the post-pandemic period brought both a market opportunity and a talent challenge. As health and protection became more important to Filipino consumers, life insurance became a higher priority. To maximise this opportunity, the bancassurance company needed to ensure it had the right talent onboard at the right time, amid intense competition for talent.
Yet candidates often knew Sun Life while being less familiar with Sun Life Grepa. With 45% of its total hires coming from passive sources, the company could not rely only on candidates actively seeking it out. It needed to proactively engage talent and communicate a clear, credible reason to join.
Rather than invent an employer brand, the HR team looked to the experiences and sentiments of its employees. This work resulted in its employee value proposition (EVP), “Unleash Your Brightest Self”, and earned the company the gold award for 'Excellence in Employer Branding' at the HR Excellence Awards 2026, Philippines.
In this edition of Winning Secrets, Pilar Genebelle Moreno, Human Resources Head, Sun Life Grepa Financial, Inc., shares how the company uncovered an EVP grounded in employee sentiment, and how it is working to ensure that the promise made to candidates is consistently experienced by employees.
Q What was the “lightbulb moment” behind your HR initiative?
Post-pandemic was a time of intense talent competition, especially for bancassurance companies. Health and protection became of primary importance, and consequently, life insurance became a higher priority for Filipino consumers. Maximising this opportunity required ensuring that we had the right talents onboard, at the right time. Sun Life Grepa, having been formed a little over 10 years only at that time, did not have a strong employer brand recall among our candidates.
Candidates know about Sun Life as the top life insurance company but got confused when they hear 'Sun Life Grepa'. This posed a big challenge during hiring discussions. In fact, 45% of our total hires came from passive sources, suggesting that talents were not actively seeking us out. We had to actively search for talents, invite them to have a conversation with us and convince them to entertain an interview with Sun Life Grepa.
Q What was the biggest challenge your team faced, and how did you overcome it?
There was no lack of great things happening inside the organisation.
"Our employee engagement scores were at record high. New hires felt the positive energy when they join and they feel welcomed by their teams. Employees appreciated the people programs and the development opportunities given to them."
Our EVP did not need to be invented. It needed to be uncovered. But we needed the guidance of an employer branding expert to capture the employees’ positive sentiments and encapsulate these in an engaging EVP that resonates with our internal talents and help us stand out in the talent arena. We evaluated several experts and chose to work with Talent View.
With their research and branding expertise, they helped ensure that our EVP was authentic and data-based, as well as attractive to our talent market.
Q How has this initiative influenced your people and organisation, and what conversation do you hope it sparks across the HR community?
Our EVP tagline, 'Unleash Your Brightest Self' was born out of data coming from our employees themselves. With this tagline, came our Employer Brand promise – that our employees are indeed able to unleash their brightest and best selves in Sun Life Grepa. The HR team therefore continuously analysed feedback across the employee lifecycle, including candidate & onboarding surveys, engagement surveys, recruitment and exit interview data. We looked for patterns in what employees genuinely valued, experienced, and where the organisation could improve.
Our focus now shifted to making the Employer Brand promise visible and consistent across the entire employee experience. As a result, our latest employee survey shows that the strengths uncovered during the research phase of our Employer Branding journey continue to be our strengths up to today. This is a testament that our EVP is indeed authentic and experienced consistently across the employee life cycle.
Q What's next - how are you planning to build on your progress and keep the momentum going?
We will ensure that our EVP, 'Unleash Your Brightest Self', continues to become visible and is consistently experienced by our employees – that they will continue to thrive with the Sun Grepamilya, flourish with the development opportunities available to them and be inspired through purpose-driven work.
Our employees will continue to be our best Employer Brand ambassadors. We will also continue having stronger and more targeted employer branding materials, improved recruitment touchpoints and candidate communication to have stronger presence in the talent arena.
To ensure that we retain and continue to engage our internal talents, we are launching a more structured onboarding experience, well-designed development opportunities, internal mobility opportunities, engaging employee activities that focus on their holistic wellbeing and competitive rewards that provide value to our employees.
The objective is still the same: the experience we promised candidates should match the experience of employees inside the organisation.
Q What do you believe will be the next big opportunity for HR leaders, and how is your organisation preparing for it?
Much has been said about how AI is influencing the talent landscape. Organisations indeed need to prepare for this now and ensure that employee capabilities work alongside AI tools.
"More importantly, we need to establish sound AI governance frameworks to protect the integrity of our work and our information. For us, we are crafting our AI roadmap to ensure that we are ready for these changes."
The company has likewise started rolling out AI tools to boost employee productivity and enable employees to focus on more value-adding work. We are also designing career pathways that consider the possible impact of AI on the different roles in the organisation.
We intend to be successful in age of AI by combining technological readiness and innovation with genuine focus on employee needs and organisational purpose.
Read more interviews on why organisations have won trophies for their HR practices - head over to our Winning Secrets section!
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