Employment6 Jun 2023
Measuring the success of your Employer Branding efforts
Employer Branding is a valuable business tool for any organisation to help it portray its reputation as an employer to all stakeholders. It is through Employer Branding that the human resources of the company are both attracted and retained. By measuring your Employer Branding strategy against a range of key metrics can help you optimise your approach and improve the efficacy of your efforts.
How to measure Employer Branding
To measure the success of Employer Branding, you need to establish your Employer Branding objectives and the KPIs against those objectives to measure its success. For example, if your Employer Branding objective is to increase awareness, since the talent pool does not know you, then the relevant metrics to measure are the reach and frequency through various media analytics tools.
Employer Branding involves a top, middle and bottom-funnel approach, like creating consumer brands. The top of the funnel pertains to the industry's awareness and perception, the middle of the funnel deals with the candidate experience and the bottom of the funnel is concerned with the employee experience. These three components are pivotal in comprehensively assessing and gauging the efficacy of your Employer Branding initiatives. In order to evaluate industry awareness, key metrics like social media mentions, website rankings, and search volume can be measured.
Measuring metrics that match your recruitment goals
Employer Branding metrics cannot be universally applied or standardised across all organisations. Instead, the metrics to be measured are contingent on the specific objectives that a company seeks to attain through its Employer Branding initiatives. It is essential to have a clear understanding of the desired outcomes to gauge these endeavours' success effectively.
Typical Employer Branding objectives include establishing a favourable reputation as an employer, which enables companies to distinguish themselves from competitors while showcasing their distinct vision, values and culture. Another primary goal is attracting top-tier candidates who possess the requisite skills, qualifications and expertise.
A strong Employer Brand can also help reduce the overall cost per hire, yielding significant cost savings.
The metrics to get tracked are contingent upon the specific Employer Branding goals that an organisation seeks to accomplish. By clearly defining these objectives, companies can effectively measure the outcomes of their branding efforts and optimise their approach in order to achieve the desired results.
Employer Branding metrics to measure success
In crafting a compelling Employer Brand, it is imperative to establish a clear set of objectives. To gauge the efficacy of your Employer Branding efforts, tracking the appropriate metrics against these objectives is crucial. Employer Branding aims to deliver both short-term and long-term outcomes, so it necessitates a continuous refinement process. Precise measurement of the Employer Branding success metrics not only enables an accurate evaluation of the progress but also allows for strategic enhancements.
Below are several key metrics that can be used for measuring the success of your Employer Branding efforts:
In the current employment landscape, exceptional candidates hold power to select their preferred employers rather than settling for a job that aligns with their credentials and expertise. As an employer, it is paramount to establish a prominent brand presence that resonates with top talent during their job hunt. Measuring the calibre of your candidates can help you assess the efficacy of your Employer Branding strategy in attracting the right talent.
To this end, several metrics can evaluate candidate quality, including:
1. The proportion of candidates referred by existing employees
2. The ratio of candidates selected for interviews against the total number of candidates
3. The ratio of interviews conducted to employment offers extended
4. The job performance and retention rate of recently hired employees
The calculation of recruitment expenditures divided by the number of employees hired within a designated timeframe yields the aggregate cost per hire. An extensive overview of prospective candidates' origins gets established by analysing the cost per hire on a source-by-source basis, facilitating the assessment of their suitability for the company. The fluctuations in cost per hire following the completion of an Employer Branding campaign within a predetermined time frame serve as an effective benchmark to gauge the campaign's efficacy in attracting candidates who satisfy the hiring criteria of the organisation.
The quality of hire serves as a key indicator of whether or not your brand is attracting candidates who are aligned with your organisational culture, values, and mission. Although your Employer Brand may communicate your EVP to a wide audience, it must become calibrated to draw in talent to drive sustainable business success. Focusing on the quality of hire is essential for organisations to ensure that they are attracting applicants and hiring exceptional individuals who will remain productive and committed team members. Measuring the quality of hire can vary across different organisations, but it should primarily account for the length of time a new hire remains a valuable asset to the organisation, without experiencing any significant performance issues or leaving prematurely.
A valuable tool for evaluating Employer Branding is to examine the average salary for new hires. This metric can provide an immediate and telling indication of reputation. Companies with a favourable reputation are more likely to attract top-tier talent, who may accept lower salaries than less reputable organisations. By comparing the average new-hire salary against industry benchmarks, employers can determine whether they are overcompensating candidates due to a subpar reputation or if their branding efforts have successfully established them as a desirable and sought-after workplace where candidates are willing to accept lower salaries.
Brand awareness, though somewhat abstract compared to other Employer Branding metrics, holds significant importance in determining the scope of an organisation's reputation as an employer. The extent of an organisation's recognition and popularity can significantly impact the quality of job candidates it attracts. Hence, it is crucial to maximise the number of people who know about your brand as an employer.
While brand awareness is difficult to quantify without expensive research, you can gauge its improvement through social listening techniques. Tracking social media mentions and interactions can provide a comprehensive understanding of brand awareness and sentiment, encompassing the public's perception of an organisation as an employer. This analysis can further assist organisations in making informed decisions regarding their Employer Branding strategies.
Employers are better placed when they gain insight into the origins of their recruits and the avenues through which they discover their organisation. This invaluable information can equip recruiters with the tools to enhance their acquisition channels. To accurately gauge the recruitment source, it is crucial to identify the primary outlets from which most hiring took place and evaluate resource allocation's efficacy. An insight may be to remove an entire channel and shift resources to a new one that is performing better.
A strategic Employer Brand draws qualified candidates to your organisation. By establishing your company as an attractive employer, you can elevate the number of unsolicited applications and expressions of interest, building a talent pool. To know the effectiveness of your Employer Branding, it is crucial to monitor the volume of potential candidates approaching your HR department. Analysing whether this number rises or declines can offer valuable intelligence on the resonance of your Employer Branding strategy with active job seekers, even if there is not a role suitable for them right now.
A higher job offer acceptance rate is a testament to the efficacy of the recruitment processes and a positive reflection of the appeal of the Employer Brand to potential candidates. Additionally, gathering feedback from candidates who decline job offers would provide valuable insights into the reasons for the rejections. What is the gap in your Employer Brand? Is it real or perceived? This feedback would enable organisations to differentiate between dismissals from extraneous factors versus negative perceptions towards the company.
A crucial aspect of cultivating a strong Employer Brand is to ensure that the expectations of prospective candidates align with their actual experiences upon joining the organisation. When expectations and reality are misaligned, employees may experience disappointment and resentment, negatively impacting their willingness to be productive, let alone promote the Employer Brand.
There are several methods to know how the employee experience and the reality of the Employer Brand match, such as through employee interviews during onboarding, regular catch-ups and at the end of the life-cycle at exit.
By leveraging these feedback mechanisms, organisations can proactively address areas of misalignment and foster a culture of transparency, accountability and most importantly authenticity.
The volume of employee referrals that traverse your recruitment pipeline can serve as a reliable gauge of your Employer Brand's efficacy in eliciting high engagement levels. Your current workforce, being well-versed with your company's work culture and ethos, can offer invaluable insights into the appeal of your brand. Their enthusiasm towards your organisational mission and work environment, two fundamental tenets of your Employer Brand, is evident when they initiate referrals of their friends, family and acquaintances. Such proactive behaviour reflects positively on your business's overall health and your Employer Brand's efficacy. Notably, your employees can become ambassadors of your brand and spread the word through various social media platforms or even informal ‘screening’ conversations, augmenting your reputation and connecting better fit talent to your organisation.
An attributable measure of an organisation's Employer Brand is the rate of employee engagement. Contented employees are more likely to endorse their workplace as an excellent place to work in.
A practical approach to measuring employee engagement is through structured, regular employee surveys. When designing the survey questions, it is vital to cover all facets of employee engagement such as leadership, training, development, employee appreciation, interpersonal relationship with colleagues and superiors, safety, belonging, diversity, flexibility and workload management.
Beyond the previously mentioned indicators, evaluate and analyse your organisation's digital reputation as an employer of choice. Online platforms such as Glassdoor, Comparably and Indeed offer transparent, employee-led assessments of your company's overall performance, including feedback from current and former employees. Leaving this to chance is not ideal. Responding to comments, maintaining your company presence and encouraging employees to share feedback can all be valuable tactics to help influence your online reputation.
Why should you measure Employer Branding?
Developing a strategic Employer Brand is a critical aspect of business strategy. As such, monitoring and analysing progress regularly is also imperative to make the most of your investment. This evaluation entails determining whether the brand's value increases over time by measuring the growth, positivity, or negativity of candidates' and employees' awareness and perception of the brand.
By keeping track of key metrics for the measurement of Employer Brand, business leaders can gain valuable insights that will aid in determining the effectiveness of current tactics and deciding whether to pivot and adopt a different approach. The cost of attracting, engaging and retaining the right talent for your business is at stake.
Frequently asked questions
Q. How do you measure the success of your EVP?
Evaluating the efficacy of an Employer Value Proposition (EVP) is equally imperative as its creation. An organisation can measure the alignment of its culture, benefits, initiatives and other provisions with the market's priorities only through conducting research. Initially done internally to obtain firsthand employee feedback through surveys, focus groups and interviews, which help to make necessary improvements before and subsequently after you go to market. Don’t forget, your EVP should be developed so that it has its own clear space in the external competitive environment in order to stand out.
Q. Is EVP the same as Employer Brand?
No. Your EVP sums up your employment offer and is expressed as a framework of key messages. While it is a foundational asset for your Employer Brand, it is not the same. Your Employer Brand is your reputation as an employer. It is influenced by bringing the EVP to life through colour, imagery, video and coherently across all your employment marketing channels. It helps tie your EVP intrinsically with your brand and ultimately resides in the hearts and minds of the general public, potential candidates and employees. Which is to say, when people think “what’s it like to work at Company X” - what they think and feel - that is your Employer Brand!
Q. Which KPIs are best for Employer Branding?
Employer Branding is a long-term investment, with many factors influencing it, both internal to the organisation and external such as socio-economic and geo-political factors. So try and stick to the KPIs that matter most to your business right now. Some common KPIs for Employer Branding are quality and cost of hire, employee engagement, employee referral rates and employee experience satisfaction, all which can be heavily influenced by the strength of your Employer Brand.
