Measuring employer brand has notoriously been tricky. You ask employer brand managers all around the world how they do it, and everyone has a different answer.
So we’ve collated 10 ways to measure your employer brand from 10 employer branding masters. Each with its own KPI’s, metrics, and solutions. Measuring your employer brand will help you monitor your reputation as an employer and determine if your employer brand resonates with your target audience.
Jennifer Johnston
We measure the success of our employer brand in terms of both attraction and retention. When our recruiters do reachouts, have we built enough awareness around our reputation as a best place to work that cold prospects are at least a little curious and take our call? When candidates go to Glassdoor, does what they read make them more, or less, likely to accept our offer? When recruiters from other companies call our employees, is our brand magnetic enough to help us hold on to our people? We also look at social shares, awards won, and ratings on reviews sites
Jennifer Johnston, Senior Director of Global Employer Branding, Salesforce
Estela Vazquez Perez
I have documented KPIs that are priority to the business, people and brand strategies. This framework allows me to be flexible to select the outcome and put my focus on the chosen targets. The KPIs in the employer brand scorecard also have dimensions according to the team leading the conversation, for instance, recruitment seeks transactions and conversions, communications seeks more approval from the social, economic and political system, brand seeks memory imprints, hr wants engagement. You need to craft a combination that will satisfy the team. There is no one fits all scorecard. Although some measures are a must every time, 50% will be relative to the situation.
Estela Vazquez Perez, Global Employment Brand Director, Royal Bank of Canada
Carmen Collins
I see a lot of people ask “what is the one way to measure employer branding?” Or “what is the one KPI that you use to show the impact of this benefit program?” If that’s your approach, you’re asking the wrong questions. First, start with your goals. Without clear goals, you’ll never be able to measure success. If your goal is to retain employees by adding a benefit package, your measure of success would be employee retention and feedback on that package. If your goal is to drive awareness, there’s a metric for that. If your goal is to get clicks to job openings, there’s a metric to that. Set clear goals and measure against them.
Carmen Collins, Social Media & Talent Brand Lead, Cisco
Jörgen Sundberg
What are the metrics that matter to the business? Those are the ones you want to focus on for your employer brand measurement. Try to keep them to no more than three main ones, or else it gets confusing. You’ll want to start with establishing a baseline, it doesn’t really matter what the result is. What matters is the brand’s trajectory over time. We have developed the Employer Brand Index to help companies measure their reputation as employers over time, sometimes a 3rd party evaluation can have more gravitas than one made in-house.
Jörgen Sundberg, CEO, Link Humans
Hannah Fleishman
Most companies I talk to about employer branding do one of two things: They measure everything, or they measure nothing. Tracking every email click-through-rate, web page view, and application conversion rate is a good idea in theory, but what does that actually tell you about the impact of your efforts? Pick metrics that you know you can have an impact on, but that also move the needle on your overall recruitment goals. For example, increasing visits to your jobs website month-over-month might be a good goal because your employer branding efforts will drive traffic to your site, while that traffic can lead to an increase in job applications over time.
Hannah Fleishman, Inbound Recruiting Manager, HubSpot
Ton Rodenburg
There are direct and indirect results to measure. Being an evangelist myself of branding inside out, I see ‘engagement’ as the ultimate measurement. A spirited team is the source and success factor to spreading the virus and ensures authentic and real great experiences. From this engagement you can measure ‘performance’ and ‘advocacy’ in all distinct KPI’s. These are the main results from having an engaged workforce; they perform better, and are enthusiastic to communicate about their work and club. And of course, in our daily reality, of employer branding being in the recruitment or HR department (alas), the key success indicators are about recruitment KPI’s; quality of hire its most significant (and hard to measure), and other more tactical indicators such as cost of hire, time to hire, cost of empty seat, open applicants, number of quality applicants, satisfaction with hiring managers, a.o.
Ton Rodenburg, Employer Branding Strategy Director, ARA M/V Human Resource Communications
Audra Knight
This is tough because it really depends on your team goals and company business goals. If you open a new office in a new country, brand awareness in that area can be a success. Quality hires is always ideal with your recruitment marketing efforts but getting people in the top of the funnel is important too! I would start by asking what success looks like to your boss and planning your recruitment marketing around that.
Audra Knight, Recruitment Operations Manager, Tenable
Sarang Brahme
I think it really depends on what the objective of your employer brand programme is. If it’s only about hiring more people then traffic, number of applications and diversity can be a good measure. However, if it’s about hiring, engagement and retention then we need to look at a broader set of measurements like the share of voice of your employees on social channels, social media engagement / talent brand scores, impact on hiring and retention, review site rankings. Some companies also work with consultants to build a dedicated review / survey by employees and external talent community to measure the brand impact.
Sarang Brahme, Global Social Recruiting & Talent Brand Manager, Capgemini
Shaunda Zilich
Reach, engagement, and action are the simple ones to measure. I think we have greater things to measure in sentiment analysis but also beyond that in behavior analysis of those that promote our brand (brand ambassadors – not just those we hire or even just employees). This measurement will show deeper areas of strengths and weaknesses.
Shaunda Zilich, Global Employment Brand Leader, GE
Jaclyn Campbell
Specifically with LinkedIn, I track monthly analytics very closely. I look at engagement, growth rates, and clicks through to job postings and our careers page. Google Analytics is also very helpful to measure the traffic on our careers page. I regularly monitor Glassdoor to track our employer and CEO ratings, as well as pageviews. Lastly, I track time to hire, source of hire, candidate satisfaction scores, and retention rates. To tell the best story, I recommend tying together the data from multiple sources that paints the overall picture of impact.
Jaclyn Campbell, Employer Brand Consultant, Optus
