Employer Brand Measurement: This is How it’s Done, Son

Like most things in the business world, we can write about the importance of employer branding  until we’re blue in the keyboard; but, at the end of the day, it’s the bottom line that matters.

On the other hand, 41 percent of companies have developed an employer brand strategy, so we know it’s important, but how do you measure the effectiveness of your brand once you’ve established it?

So, what are we looking at as far as your return on investment when it comes to employer branding. This is a tough one to measure, but, luckily, others have come before us, and they can give us some good insight on how to effectively measure the ROI of employer branding.

Let’s Start at the Very Beginning

There is no doubt that employer branding has become a staple in our HR departments; in fact, the past two years reported a 10 percent growth in employer brand manager job listings. However, many of these efforts fail due to a lack of clearly defined strategy. An EBI study found that only 14 percent of companies have a clearly developed strategy for their employer brand, while 84 percent of respondents from that same study believed that a clearly defined strategy is the key to achieving employer branding objectives. The point here is you have to know what you’re measuring before you can measure it.

Align your Priorities with your Metric System

According to a great article from Exaqueo, there are several different possible metrics to use when considering your ROI of employer branding:

-Retention Rate (38% of companies use this as their number one metric)

-Employee Engagement (33%)

-Quality of Hire (29%)

-Cost Per Hire (27%)

-Number of Applicants (26%)

These statistics were found in the 2011 EBI study.

Now that that’s covered, which one do you use? Well, it’s pretty common sense, which one of these metrics fits your objectives? If you’re business is filling top executive positions, the number of applicants might not fit your particular business objective. If you are filling positions for an industry with a traditionally high turnover rate, you might want to focus on cost per hire.

Look at Your Return from all Angles

If you find that most of your long standing employees are coming from your local university, perhaps your money would be best spent there. If you see that you’re spending a large amount of money on generating employee referrals and have gotten little outcome, perhaps you should consider relocating those funds. Where are your employees coming from, where are you spending the money, these are the top two places you should start to look. Look at the top and bottom numbers here, and start working it out.

Part B

Now that you have established where your money would be better allocated, you can study if the assumptions you gained through your research are correct. Have your reallocated funds proven worthwhile in their new position? Has your increased investment in other areas shown an improvement in talent?

As a General Rule…

According to Employer Branding Online, companies that invest in developing their employer brand can expect an increase in employee engagement and ease in attracting candidates. Additionally, these two areas were rated as the main benefits of their employer branding by 38 percent of companies implementing one.

First comes the how and why of employer branding, and then finally, we need ways to measure our success at this relatively new project. In order to have a successful go at building your employer brand, you have to have support, and that support is going to need hard numbers to look at in order to justify the investment.

Now that you have the skills to report back, don’t be afraid to report the failures along with the successes. The whole point of gathering and studying this information is to improve. If all you have to report is that everything is going splendidly time after time, you aren’t creating any room for improvement. The whole idea is to grow your employer brand by using these measurements to shape it.