How to choose the right employer branding metrics to improve your EB performance
As the saying goes: you have to measure in order to improve.
So how do you choose the right employer brand metrics that genuinely tell you something about your employer brand and bring you closer to your employer branding goal(s)? In this blog post, I’ll go through three tips to help you choose the right metrics for you!
1. Define your general employer branding goals
First, you need to stop and clarify what you want to achieve with your employer brand (marketing) strategy. Do you want to increase the overall visibility of your entire organization, or just reach a very specific target group with your messaging?
Unclear employer branding goals can lead to costly mistakes like chasing vanity metrics in visibility campaigns. It might feel good to tell people that your employer branding campaign was seen by 200K people, but did the post actually reach your ideal target audience? Was your campaign seen by 200K truck drivers or the Java developers that your organization actually needs?
Answer these three questions to help target your employer branding work and decide which metrics you need to track:
Do I want to gain overall corporate visibility through my employer branding work, or do I just want to increase awareness amongst a specific target audience?
Who exactly should our employer brand address: who are the people we are trying to reach with our activities?
Who are the key professionals we need to engage and start career discussions with?
2. Less is more
Google “employer branding KPIs” and you will get pages and pages of potential metrics with weighted ratios and calculations. We’ve gathered a few handy example metrics below - can you think of any others?
a) recruitment metrics:
Relevant applicants / new career discussions versus the total number of applicants
Recruitment duration (time-to-hire)
Recruitment diversity
Successful recruitment % (measured after probation)
The number of internal recommendations
Candidate experience
b) employee experience metrics:
Employee engagement
The likelihood of staff recommending your organization to people outside the organization
Staff turnover at specific waypoints: after 6 months, 12 months, and 2 years
c) general metrics:
Social media followers
Visitors to the careers site
Number of events
Glassdoor reviews
Employee referral activity
Phew - that's quite a list! At Finders Seekers, we constantly remind ourselves that when it comes to measurement, less is sometimes more. I think the same applies to EB work! For measurement to be truly effective and in order for you to get started at all, it makes sense to hone in on and invest in a few key metrics to start with. Later, you can mix it up and introduce more tracking.
Go through the list above and analyze them in light of the following points:
We are already successfully measuring this data and are tracking our performance
We need more metrics in X
These metrics are easy to collect data for
Remember, you’ll already be doing really really well if you are able to implement three (3 !!) employer branding metrics a year and accurately monitor the results. And don’t forget: if a specific KPI isn’t working for you after the first quarter, switch it out!
3. I recommend you choose these two metrics:
When you’re choosing your metrics, I hope two of them will be:
At the end of the day, what you want from your EB marketing is more relevant career conversations and applicants in the recruitment funnel. Nothing more, nothing less. Track them.
Internal commitment: employer branding is as much an internal as an external commitment. By investing internally in a good employee experience, your people will naturally communicate positive messages about your brand with the outside world, and your employer brand message won’t be diluted by poor employee engagement.
I hope these three tips are helpful to you when it comes to thinking about your employer branding metrics. If you want someone to bat ideas back and forth with, get in touch with me, my colleague Vivi Brooke, or join the EB living room 🏡 group on Facebook to continue the discussion!