How to measure the impact of your employer branding efforts

Being able to follow up and measure the effects of your employer branding work is crucial to demonstrate the success of your efforts. Therefore, we have compiled everything you need to know to make your Employer Branding work measurable.

What is Employer Branding?

Employer Branding is how you actively work to influence the perception of you as an employer among potential candidates, existing employees and former employees. When working with employer branding, it is common to distinguish between internal and external employer branding. Internal Employer Branding is about actively working to be perceived as an attractive employer among your existing employees. External Employer Branding is about building awareness of you as an employer among potential employees and getting them to consider a future career with you. By working smart and strategically with Employer Branding, you can reinforce, improve or change the perception of you as an employer.

For further reading: What is Employer Branding? Why is it important?

Why is it important to measure the impact of your employer branding efforts?

Employer branding works like any other type of marketing investment. For the investment to be considered successful, it is crucial that you can demonstrate a return on investment and that you understand the real purpose behind the investment. Doing so will help you free up more time and resources for your employer branding efforts.

However, in order to demonstrate a return on investment, it is important to first identify what actually counts as 'return'. Even though Employer Branding is about being perceived as an attractive employer, the underlying purpose of wanting to become an attractive employer is usually to be able to more easily attract, recruit and retain the right employees. Therefore, it is very important to measure both key figures linked to brand awareness but also key figures linked to your ability to recruit and retain the right employees.

Measuring the impact of your employer branding efforts is not only important to demonstrate the return on investment, but also to identify which methods, messages and channels are most effective - and to identify areas for improvement.
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Which Employer Branding KPIs are important to measure?

When measuring the impact of your employer branding efforts, we recommend seeing them as part of your overall recruitment strategy. This means measuring relevant KPIs throughout the entire recruitment funnel - from awareness to retention. This way, you ensure that you get a good overall picture of your work, can easily measure the change between steps and find opportunities for improvement.

Examples of what you can measure at each stage:

Step 1 - Awareness: How effectively have you managed to build awareness of you as an employer? Examples of KPIs: number of ad impressions, reach of advertising, % increase in brand awareness.
Step 2 - Consideration: How effective has your advertising and other employer branding activities been? Examples of KPIs: Number of visitors to the careers page, average visit time, % scroll on the careers page etc.
Step 3 - Interest: How many of the candidates who visited your career site have shown interest? Examples of key figures: Number of spontaneous applications, number of job subscribers.
Step 4 - Application: How many applications have you received for your vacancies? Examples of key figures: Gen. applications per position, cost perapplication....
Step 5 - Selection: How is the quality of the applications you received? Examples of KPIs: Gen. relevant applications per position, cost per relevant application etc.
Step6 - Offer: How many job offers have you sent? Examples of KPIs: Number of offers sent, number of offers sent perposition
Step 7 - Hiring: How many people have you managed to hire and what percentage of your vacancies are filled? Examples of KPIs: Number of employees, fill rate, recruitmentcost
Step 8 - Retention: How is your ability to recruit and retain the right employees? Examples of KPIs: Employee satisfaction, eNPS, average tenure, Glassdoor ratings, employee turnover.

Key employer branding metrics to measure at each stage of the recruitment funnel from awareness to retention. — ‍

How do you measure the impact of your employer branding efforts?

Depending on what you want to achieve with your employer branding initiatives, there are different ways to measure the impact of your work and the KPIs you choose to report on. What challenges have you identified related to your recruitment and what goals have you set? For example, has it been to strengthen your employer brand, to change the image of you as an employer or to improve the image of your employer brand?

What we recommend looking at to measure the impact of your Employer Branding work is:

Overtime effect
Objective
Benchmark

Measure the impact over time

Regardless of the challenge you have identified, our recommendation is to always have some kind of baseline value that you can relate to your ongoing results with an active employer branding strategy. This way you can measure the impact over time as a result of your initiatives.

If you want to create presence and interest in you as an employer within your chosen target group, a good metric to measure is how many visitors on average per month you had on your career site before you started to appear on social media compared to now. The same works for starting values further down the funnel, such as how many applications on average you usually get for a certain type of position, and how relevant they usually are - compared to now.
Example: what change do we see in traffic to our careers page month after month, or what change do we see in the average number of applications month after month ?

Working towards defined objectives

While looking at the impact over time, we recommend that you also set a target with your work and monitor your current values against these set targets.
‍ Example: we want to increase the average monthly number of visitors to the careers page or we want to increase the average number of applications per position by x percentage % .

Compare yourself with your competitors

The third recommendation is to look at your key figures and your performance against your competitors, also known as a benchmark. Working with We Select gives you the opportunity to track how your employer branding campaign performs against your competitors. Together we can look at competitors who are in the same industry as you or who target a similar audience with their employer brand.
For example: how high is our CTR (Click-Through-Rate) compared to our competitors or how engaged is our target audience compared to our competitors?

Through We Select, you simply find out how strong your employer brand is in the market compared to your competitors. This is then continuously monitored and used to improve your employer branding strategy.

Summary

Employer branding is incredibly effective in attracting and retaining top talent, so it's important to measure and demonstrate its impact. To start measuring the effect of your Employer Branding work, it is first important to understand the underlying purpose of working with Employer Branding: To more easily attract, recruit and retain the right employees . It is therefore important that you focus on measuring both key figures at the top of the funnel (e.g. brand awareness) and also key figures linked to successfully recruiting and retaining the right employees.

Overall, it is very important to focus on KPIs that are valuable, relevant, helpful and sustainable. That is, KPIs that clearly demonstrate a value linked to cost, KPIs that are clearly linked to your company's challenges or goals and KPIs that you will be able to follow over a longer period of time. Would your management be able to interpret the KPIs you have developed and understand the positive effects of your work? Then you are on the right track.