Employer Branding Metrics: How to Measure Your Employment Brand
measure-employment-brand

Employer Branding Metrics: How to Measure Your Employment Brand

Employer branding has become top of mind for many organizations looking to attract and build trust with quality candidates, increase retention rates and improve workplace productivity.

You may have taken steps such as defining your employer value proposition (EVP), building out a careers website, and managing your profile on Glassdoor, yet you still don't know if it's working. As the old adage goes, "You can't manage what you don't measure." So it's essential to build measurement into your employer branding program.

Getting Started with Employer Brand Metrics:

Gather baseline data

Your company probably already captures metrics related to employment and recruiting. Typical measures include:

  • Cost-per-hire
  • Time-to-hire
  • Candidate quality (ratio of qualified applicants to total applicants)
  • Cost-per-qualified-candidate (if using job posts or paid sourcing)
  • Retention rate
  • Employee engagement
  • Employee satisfaction
  • Quality-of-hire

In addition to these internal metrics, consider the metrics available on your Glassdoor account that reflect your company's reputation. These include:

  • Overall company rating
  • CEO approval rating (% that approve)
  • Business outlook (% positive)
  • Recommend to a friend (% yes)
  • Profile views over time
  • Demographics

Numerical measures and quantitative data are not the only way to measure your employer brand. You'll also want to track anecdotal feedback from employees and candidates via Glassdoor reviews, employee surveys and/or focus groups. Make sure you document key issues on a regular basis so you can monitor trends over time.

Consider your goals

As you examine your metrics, consider the overall goals of your employer branding program.

For example, if your goal includes improving culture by offering development opportunities, pay close attention to retention rates and employee engagement. Also consider adding a metric specific to that goal, such as time-to-promotion. All these metrics can work in conjunction with your Glassdoor ratings and review sentiment; ideally, as you work on improving your culture, you'll notice an upward trend of employee satisfaction.

If your goals are primarily recruiting-based, such as reducing hiring costs or making many hires to fill out a specific team, you'll want to track metrics like cost-per-hire, time-to-hire and quality-of-hire. Then carefully monitor your Glassdoor profile views and demographics to see if you're attracting more candidates to your profile and if they match your hiring targets. Finally, don't forget to check how your company ratings fare against the competition.

Set a reporting schedule

Without a time-based plan, you may forget to monitor your employer brand and miss out on key successes or opportunities for improvement. We suggest the following schedule:

  • Weekly: candidate quality.
  • Monthly: Cost-per-hire, time-to-hire, applicant-to-hire, candidate demographics, recommendations, ratings against competitors.
  • Quarterly/annually: Overall themes and sentiment, retention rate, quality-of-hire, employee engagement, ratings trends, CEO rating.

With a clear picture of the metrics to track based on your goals, and a schedule for monitoring, you'll learn what efforts worked, and how well. Best of all, you'll have real-world data to inform and build the case for next year's employer branding programs (and budget).

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Learn more

For an up-close look on managing all the data associated with your employer brand, download our eBook Talent Analytics for Dummies®, Glassdoor Special Edition Talent Analytics for Dummies®, Glassdoor Special EditionTalent Analytics for Dummies®, Glassdoor Special EditionTalent Analytics for Dummies®, Glassdoor Special Editionand flip to Chapter 5, "Employer Brand Analytics 101."