Your employer brand reflects the company’s image to the public. A strong brand lets you stand out from the crowded job market so you can capture top talent.
Moreover, it's proven to decrease recruitment costs while boosting employee engagement and retention.
Building and sustaining good employer branding requires constant tracking and fine-tuning. Employer branding metrics provide HR teams with a quantifiable way to measure employer branding strategies.
Why should you measure employer branding?
As you work on creating a stronger employer brand, you need to track your progress to determine whether your strategy adds value to your brand over time.
You must evaluate whether awareness and perception of your brand are growing; or, are they becoming more positive or negative among candidates and employees.
Knowing your metrics gives you insights to determine if your current tactics are on point or if you need to take a different approach.
10 examples of employer branding metrics
1. Employee referral rate
Your current employees can be influential employee brand ambassadors. Why?
They know what it's like to work for your company and are satisfied with their experience. They also believe their referred candidates have the right qualifications and cultural fit. Thus they are happy to invite these people to join your organization.
In addition, many studies pointed out that referrals are less expensive than traditional recruitment, and they’re loyal employees.
Studying your employee referral program can help you understand if your employees are happy with your organization and willing to advocate for you.
A high referral of suitable candidates and accepted job offers from referred employees mean you’ve got a successful employer brand.
On the flip side, having only a handful could indicate a bad employer reputation. Job seekers are less likely to apply for a company with weak branding.
Discover how using employee testimonials can be a secret recipe to help with recruiting top talent.
2. Employee engagement rate
Employee engagement rate is another good employer branding metric. Happy and satisfied employees are happy to promote their organization as a great place to work.
Employee engagement can be measured with employee surveys. When crafting questions for your survey, ensure they cover all aspects of employee engagement like leadership, learning, and development, employee recognition, employee relationship with peers and managers, and workload.
Survey questions examples:
Survey questions examples:
- Do you feel your job is important in helping the company achieve its goals?
- Do you feel that your ideas and suggestions are listened to and appreciated?
- Do you feel motivated to be successful at your job?
Engagement scores are calculated using the Likert scale. ‘Strongly agree’ answers get 5 points, ‘agree’ with 4 points, neutral with 3 points, ‘disagree’ with 2 points, and ‘strongly disagree’ with 1 point. To calculate the score, combine all the ‘strongly disagree’ and ‘agree’ scores by the number of responses obtained.
For example:
For example:
If you have 75 employees and 40 responded with ‘strongly agree’ and ‘agree’ to a question about employee motivation, your positive response score would be 40.
3. Social media engagement
52 million people use LinkedIn to search jobs every week. And Facebook has become popular for skilled tradespeople to find work. So it's common sense to track your social media presence to boost your employer brand.
To track your social media performance, you first need to determine your social media goals. Are you on LinkedIn to generate leads or raise brand awareness for your employer brand?
Based on your goals, you can start to use the following KPIs to measure your performance on social media:
• If you want to drive recognition for your employer brand, track your following, impressions, and reach. Following represents the people who see all of your updates and posts. Impressions are the total number of times your content was displayed. Reach is the total number of people who saw your content and posts.
• If you want to increase your interaction with target candidates, monitor the likes, comments, and shares on your posts. And if you want to learn candidates' sentiments about your organization, review their comments.
These KPIs can be found on your social media analytics dashboard. Look at your performance over a period of time (weekly, monthly, or ideally every quarter), to evaluate how your content performs, and observe trends over time so you can track your metrics against your goals more effectively.
Useful tip:
Useful tip:
If you notice you are losing followers or getting a small number of likes on your posts, check out your content. Experiment with different types of content: videos, images or blog posts. Check out the content that is getting the most likes or comments and produce more of that content.
Timing is also crucial, so make sure to post on days of the week and the time when you post will likely be seen by your target candidates to boost your engagement.
4. Employer Brand Index
Developed by Link Humans, Employer Brand Index (EBI) measures your employer brand by what employees say about your company online: employer review sites, social media platforms, and online forums for 3-12 months.
EBI is measured against 16 employer brand attributes:
- Balance and well-being
- Benefits and perks
- Business reputation
- Company culture
- Change and sustainability
- Diversity and inclusion
- Environmental, social and governance
- Innovation and technology
- Job satisfaction
- Learning and development
- Management and organization
- Mission and purpose
- Remuneration
- Team and people
- Workplace
EBI classifies and analyzes the results categorized by employer branding themes. It focuses on the specific parts of your employer brand that has the most positive and negative impact, based on your employees’ opinions shared online.
EBI can be used at an organization-wide level to assess your employer brand's overall health and performance. You can also use it to compare your brand across different business departments and countries.
5. Glassdoor interview experience
Almost 85% of employees and job seekers research company reviews and ratings to decide where to apply for a job, according to Ceridian. In addition to social media, candidates look for employer review sites like Glassdoor to get detailed information about a company: current jobs, salary, company culture, and hiring process.
Reviewers (who previously applied and work for the company) are anonymous, so you can guarantee that the feedback provided is honest and authentic.
Looking at your Glassdoor reviews and ratings can give you insights into what candidates and employees think and feel about their interactions with your company. High ratings and good reviews signify positive sentiment with your employer brand.
Useful tip:
Useful tip:
Pay attention to the qualitative feedback. This can help you to realize your strengths as an employer and identify what needs to be enhanced.
6. Source of hire
Source of hire determines the percentage of total number of hires that entered in the pipeline from a specific source.
Examples of source of hire are job boards, career fairs, employee referrals, etc.
Measuring your source of hire can help you learn which sourcing channels brings the most number of applicants, the highest quality of candidates or where you are getting them the least.
If your website isn't attracting a lot of applications, maybe you need to overhaul it. Employer branding covers the candidate journey so make sure that applying for jobs via your career site is an easy and seamless experience.
Discover simple tactics and tips for optimizing your careers site and attracting more candidates with Recruitee.
Provide the option for uploading resumes instead of asking them to fill out candidate information. Announce future job openings by allowing them to sign up for job alerts via email or text.
Inversely, when candidates come in droves via job boards, invest more budget into this source. Or double down on other job boards, those niche ones, to increase your application rate.
7. Number of open applications
A strong employer brand is crucial in enticing future employees. The more job seekers are aware of your brand, the more likely they recognize you as an employer.
And if they have good impressions of what your company does, or what it stands for, they’re also inclined to think positively about what you offer in terms of employment.
Analyzing the number of applications received will help understand the visibility of your employer brand. You're on the right track if there’s a surge of resume submissions after implementing several employer branding strategies.
8. Hiring Manager satisfaction
One of the best ways to determine if your employer branding is effective is to ask your hiring managers. Are they happy with the candidate selection process? Are the chosen individuals qualified based on the job description? Are they a good culture fit for the organization?
If the hiring manager is doubting the qualifications of the shortlisted candidates or the selected person underperforms once they’re hired, you must take a closer look at your employer branding. Send out surveys to measure hiring manager satisfaction.
Improve your hiring with collaborative hiring.
Based on their feedback, tweak your employer branding to increase the quality of candidates you attract to meet hiring manager needs and expectations.
9. Offer acceptance rate
The offer acceptance rate refers to the probability that a candidate will accept your job offer. A high acceptance rate means your recruitment marketing and employer branding resonates well with potential hires.
Collect feedback from individuals who’ve accepted and rejected your offer to track your acceptance rate.
Find out why they decided to work for you or with other companies. It could be poor candidate experience or delays in your hiring process. Or maybe your competitor is doing something better or offering something you don’t.
Reviewing your offer acceptance rate lets you see people’s perceptions of your brand and your organization as a whole.
10. Employee experience
A significant part of employer branding is ensuring that what the candidates anticipate from working in your organization matches their actual experience once they’re employed. Misalignment of expectations and experience results in employee disappointment and resentment.
You can’t expect them to promote your brand if they feel they can’t be proud of where they’re working. Worse, they can tell others about their bad experience, ultimately damaging your reputation.
Bridge the gap between expectations and reality by collecting employee feedback from employee surveys, focus group discussions and exit interviews.
Set realistic expectations with candidates about what it means to be employed in your company and explain what it looks like on a daily basis. Communicate these expectations from your recruitment up to their present employment status.
Measure employer brand ROI
Now that you know ways to measure employer branding, you also need to know the return on the investment for doing such. What’s in it for you?
The most obvious signs your employer branding is working are if you notice a dramatic uptick in your brand awareness (people who know your company), brand consideration (people who would consider working for you), and brand preference (people who dream of working for your organization).
But the real ROI of your employer branding should be seen and felt in your:
- Recruitment efforts - a good employer brand reputation can lead to higher quality of applicants, reduced hiring costs because you don’t need to spend much on job advertising, and high referral rates.
- Employee engagement - employer branding provides individuals with a sense of purpose and belonging. They feel connected to the company’s values. These things increase employee engagement and productivity, which impacts your bottom line.
- Employee retention - a strong employer brand means a good employer reputation. If you have a good reputation, the higher the quality of candidates you’ll attract and the less turnover you’ll experience. Again, you save more money and resources if you keep and develop existing employees rather than trying to find and hire new ones.
Employee retention metrics are vital to analyze and reduce your turnover.
Conclusion
A strong employer brand is essential in attracting top-notch candidates and retaining high-performing employees. Tracking your employer branding metrics empowers you to evaluate your employer branding initiatives' full, long-term value so you can see what works and needs improvement.
Stand out from the crowded job market and capture top talent with the help of Recruitee.
