In today’s tight labour market, it’s no longer a question of how you should be measuring your employer brand, but what measures of your employer brand you should be focusing on. Mike Parsons, Universum’s Head of Brand Activation, APAC, shares the three categories you need to start measuring now.
Two disciplines that are still trying to shake off their old reputations for being “fluffy” are Human Resources and Marketing. So, for a business strategy such as employer branding, which straddles them both, is the writing already on the wall?
Luckily not. Not only have both functions been covered in a landslide of data and performance metrics over the past few years, so too has employer branding. The discussion is moving away from, “how do you measure your employer brand?” to, “what measures of our employer brand should we focus on?”
When people ask me where to start, I always advise them to break things down into three clearly defined pots. All three pots are important in their own right, it just depends where you are in the execution, or to which stakeholders you’re talking to as to which is the most important.
Your content
The first pot in your content. This is the first level of measurement and something you should be tracking daily, or as regularly as you’re able to. This is where you’ll measure the performance of the content you are publishing and the impact of your campaigns.
What you’ll measure in the content pot will depend on the platforms that you’re publishing your content on. It’ll also depend on where in the recruitment funnel you are aiming and what your campaign objectives are.
Here’s an example. If you were using your Facebook careers page to help build awareness, you would probably focus on measuring reach and impressions, and their associated costs (CPM). If you don’t have your own previous benchmarks to measure your improvements against, you can use industry benchmarks as a starting point.
The content pot is the most useful for setting KPI’s for your employer branding project team or agency, and for tracking their performance. This pot also gives you the most real-time snapshot of how you’re doing.
Your brand
The second pot is your brand. If you are conducting employer branding, naturally you want to know that the brand itself is improving. So, how do you do that? The two measures that I recommend focusing on are brand equity and brand association. The best way to measure these metrics is through surveying comparable groups of talent over set intervals, ensuring your methodology is robust and can be easily replicated for comparisons sake (such as Universum’s ideal employer framework).
Brand equity in the world of employer branding takes on a very similar guise as it does in the consumer branding world except your customers are now talent, existing or potential. You can measure brand equity all the way through the recruitment funnel – tracking improvements in awareness, consideration, desire and actual applications. For example, if being an employer of choice is your goal, you will probably want to focus on improvements in your desirability as an employer.
Brand association is also highly important. If you have taken a robust and data-driven approach to your employer branding strategy you will be creating and publishing content that communicates the themes and pillars of your EVP, or brand promise. As we know, a strong brand is not one that tries to be known for everything, it’s one that focuses on just a small, select handful of key attributes. Therefore, it’s the association that your brand has with these specific attributes, and the improvements in these brand association that you’re able to drive through your communications, that you should be measuring.
To track these metrics, a robust and comparable survey, administered to both internal and external target talent, should be conducted every six or twelve months – depending on how much branding you are conducting and the resources you have available.
The brand pot is usually the default for conversations with departmental heads, especially your CHRO and CMO.
Your business
The final pot is the business pot. This is the real ‘so what’ of employer branding and where your CEO and CFO will focus their attention. Up until now, you could still argue the case for employer branding as being a little fluffy – here is where that notion dies.
Nowadays, it’s not hard to go online and find case studies from top employers, or studies rolled out by research firms, that show hard dollar savings brought about by well-executed employer branding – but where do these improvements come from?
In the business pot, more than in the others, you will really need to decide what metrics are the most important in the context of your organisation, as the list is endless. The most clear-cut metrics, those that can be measured directly in dollars, are commonly:
- reductions in the average cost per hire
- increases in surplus talent budget
- productivity
- the impact on top and bottom line growth (where possible).
Tracking these metrics and mapping them against your employer branding programs can often produce a powerful and data-driven justification for your employer branding program.
However, there is still a lot of business value to be derived from a host of other measurables. These other metrics are likely to still have a significant quantifiable impact on your business, just less directly so. These include things like:
- engagement scores
- quality of hire
- time to fill positions
- net promoter scores
- referral rates
- volume of applications
- attrition rates
- candidate experience
- etc.
If we take something like attrition rates as an example, most practitioners now accept that the true cost of attrition is somewhere between six and nine months of the leaver’s salary. If an employer branding program can show a clear correlation with improving fit and reducing attrition, as it should be able to, tracking this back and demonstrating an estimated dollar saving to the business should be very possible.
If done well, measuring your employer branding efforts will help open the door to anything from more funding to well-deserved credit. Just decide early on what metrics you most want to impact through your programs and what, therefore, you will be tracking. Keep the three pots in mind to ensure you’re ready to show gains at all the various levels.
Lastly, don’t forget to start measuring from ground zero to ensure you have a benchmark. Then, after that, let the fun of the branding execution commence!
Good luck.
Mike Parsons, Head of Brand Activation, APAC, Universum
Mike Parsons is the head of brand activation (Asia Pacific) for the world’s largest and longest running employer branding specialists, Universum. Based out of the regional HQ in Singapore, Mike and his team take a data-driven approach to building and maintaining the brands of many of the region’s most attractive and progressive employers – from local champions to multinational giants.