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Calculating the return on investment of your employer brand has notoriously been very tricky. The value and impact of your efforts can be hard track. Therefore justifying investing your company’s time, money and resources on your employer brand to your boss becomes a real issue.
As employer branding experts, we know that investing in your employer brand can improve your talent attraction and company culture in so many different ways. But we need to justify this with real data.
Traditional methods
There are a number of traditional ways to measure your employer branding efforts, here are a few important ones:
- Retention Rate: How many of your employees are you retaining per year?
- Employee Engagement: Is there an increase in productivity of your employees?
- Quality of Hire: Are you getting an increase of quality applicants?
- Cost Per Hire: Have you saved money on each hire?
- Number of applicants: Has your talent pool increased?
Sure these are important and don’t completely disregard them, but more often than not these data points are not solely based on your employer brand. Other factors might come into play. You might have a change in your consumer brand focus, that in turn effects of employer brand. Or you might be relocating the business due to unforeseen circumstances.
So how do you actually measure your employer brand?
For example, how do you measure if your work/life balance is improving, or if your benefits system truly works? Or even more important, how do you measure if the strategies you have put in place to improve your candidate and/or employee experience have actually worked?
This is where the Employer Brand Index comes in. It dissects what people are saying online about you as an employer on user-generated sites, such as online forums, social media, and employer review sites, where employees, past and present, feel free to discuss their employers openly, without being in the confines of their office space.
The Employer Brand Index categorizes and analyzes these findings into employer branding themes and highlights the specific aspects of your employer brand people are talking about the most, positively or negatively.
Numbers matter!
The Employer Brand Index then quantifies these findings into a single number on a 1-10 scale, 1 being the best and 10 being the worst, to easily equate what areas work and what areas don’t.
Because if you then periodically measure these areas over time, you can see how things are changing. You are able to find out if the employer brand objectives and strategies you have put your effort into have actually have benefited your company’s employer brand.
It’s critical to know if the time and resources you put into your talent attraction program actually works right? The Employer Brand Index gives you a single, tangible number you can use to articulate the status of your employer brand.
So what’s the ROI of EBI?
- Finally, you have a tangible measure of how your Employer Brand ranks in the marketplace as a single number that can be tracked over time. You can use this to justify spend on Employer Brand and can measure the effectiveness of your initiatives.
- This will save money spent on employer branding efforts and strategies that DON’T work and allows you to focus your budget on those that DO!
- It will help you identify what your pros and cons as an employer truly are and allows you to concentrate your messaging on the reality rather than assumed core values.
- The Employer Brand Index action plan will help you form or refresh an EVP that represents your true reputation as an employer and to fix any issues highlighted.
Want to have your company’s employer brand online reputation evaluated? Learn more here.
