Create Your Employer Brand Measurement Dashboard

HR Metrics

Traditional HR metrics should be used in your measurement dashboard. For some data points, you might not necessarily claim that the data change is based solely on your employer brand; however, you can correlate it to different attributes within it. For example, a change in your retention rate can be influenced by several reasons. Still, if one of your employer branding objectives is to increase employee retention, you would want to ensure that the retention rate is part of your dashboard.

• RETENTION / ATTRITION RATES – Track how many employees stay/leave every year and their average service length. Determine if any identifiable trends or common characteristics explain why employees are leaving. Do they cluster on an age range or skill set? Or can the change be attributed to a specific job family or area of the organization?
• EMPLOYEE OPINION – Analyze your employee survey results, establish benchmarks, and compare year-over-year results. However, the traditional employee survey is not enough. Conduct focus groups, review exit survey results, and interview senior leadership and people managers to better assess employee opinion.
• NUMBER OF APPLICANTS – The number of applicants is simply the number of applicants applying for jobs with your company. While it’s good to see if there is an increase, it is not the same as the quality of the applicants, nor is it an indicator of whether you’re hiring the right candidates for the right roles.  If you are filling positions for an industry with a traditionally high turnover rate, you will also measure the quality of hire, cost per hire /or predictive analytics.
• QUALITY OF HIRE – If your objective is to attract new talent and the right talent for the right roles, then quality of hire is an important metric. Measure your current average profit contribution per employee, and you can benchmark what top talent should be able to contribute. You should also use pre- and post-hire performance objectives/assessments to test your success.
• COST PER HIRE – When calculated correctly, cost per hire pulls together all of the costs associated with filling an open position and determines the average amount spent to hire a new employee for that role. To calculate, simply divide the external and internal hiring costs by the total number of new hires. If your employer brand is working, you should see a decrease in the cost per hire.

Brand Awareness

You’ll find that many traditional brand marketing metrics also relate to employer branding. This makes sense since you’re doing talent acquisition marketing to potential employees. Awareness metrics help you determine to whom and where your employer branding is getting through. In short, they can help you allocate your resources to reach the target audience with the most significant degree of penetration possible.

• BASIC AWARENESS — This metric determines what percentage of a very targeted group (in this case, your potential candidate pool) is familiar with your company. To use this metric, ask, “Are you aware of XYZ Corporation?” and record the percentage that says yes.
• RECALL AWARENESS – Similar to basic awareness, recall awareness measures what percentage of the target audience names your organization when asked to list organizations that match some criteria (one or all of your employee value proposition attributes). This metric can also be used to see if you are recognized as a leader concerning specific criteria, such as innovation. To use this metric, survey your target group and ask them to list the companies they know in your industry. It is essential that the survey not come directly from your organization. Recruit a staffing agency or research firm to deploy the survey for you. Count what percentage of the respondents listed your organization.
• TOP-OF-MIND AWARENESS — An offshoot of recall awareness, this metric determines what percentage of the target group who can recall your organization recalls yours first.
• BRAND FAMILIARITY – The most complex of the awareness measures, familiarity further breaks down the percentage of the target group that is aware of your organization by weeding out those who have already formed an opinion of you, whether positive or negative. To use this metric, survey the target group with a series of questions that determine if they are aware of your organization and if they have either a positive or negative opinion of your organization.

Brand Differentiation

Through differentiation, you can determine if your target group believes your organization is significantly different from other employer options or relatively the same. For the most part, metrics that measure differentiation measure to what degree your organization is seen as meeting some characteristic (e.g., this organization is one that I would trust).

• BRAND VALUE – This metric determines whether the value proposition of working for your organization exceeds that of working for someone else. Measure the attributes and differentiators outlined in your employee value proposition (EVP) to see if they resonate with potential and current employees.   To use this metric, first, develop or optimize your EVP – the benefits and offerings you, as an employer, provide to your employees. Second, create a similar list for at least two of your competitors. Be sure the list of EVPs reflects the entire employee lifecycle, including not just benefits (or total rewards) but also culture and organizational performance attributes and differentiators. Survey the target audience to determine what percentage of the population would choose your organization over the other options.
• BRAND PERSONALITY – Every company leverages an employer brand to describe itself – the personality traits or characteristics that make your company unique (e.g., innovative, friendly, flexible, inclusive, etc. are all adjectives that many companies use to describe their corporate personalities). The goal is to determine if your target group assigns the same personality characteristics to your employer brand as you strive to communicate. For example, let’s say you desire to be known as the most innovative company in your industry. Then, one personality metric would measure the percentage of those surveyed who identify innovativeness concerning your brand.
• RECRUITER PROMOTER SCORE – Recruiters are an excellent barometer for knowing where you stand as an employer — not just in what potential employees say but also in whether recruiters, specifically executive search firms, recommend your company to their candidates. For this metric, interview external recruiters and search firms to determine their probability of promoting your company as an employer of choice versus your competitors.

Other Metrics

• EMPLOYER REVIEW RANKINGS—Evaluate your company ratings on employer review sites (e.g., Glassdoor, CareerBliss, Simply Hired, etc.) and Best Places to Work lists to see how you rank against competitors in your industry. Establish a benchmark before activating your employer brand, and then conduct another review post-activation to see if your ratings/rankings have changed.
• SOCIAL MEDIA – If an employee advocacy program is part of your employer branding activation, tracking social media metrics gathered from shared content that specifically promotes an EVP attribute or differentiator is vital. Track the traditional social media metrics (e.g., amplification, shares, likes, retweets, etc.) and see what content engages/doesn’t engage your employee advocates and their external social networks.
• EMPLOYEE REFERRAL – If you have a strong employer brand, the number of employees who recommend and refer you to their professional contacts and networks will increase. Start with a baseline of your current employee referrals and see if the number of referrals increases due to the employer brand.
• NET PROMOTER SCORE – A Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a customer relationship/ “word of mouth” marketing metric derived from survey responses to a ‘how likely are you to recommend…’ question. Respondents who provide a rating of nine-10 are ‘promoters’ while those who give ratings of six or lower are ‘detractors.’ The NPS is found by subtracting the proportion of detractors from the proportion of promoters. Not all companies track their NPS, but if yours does, you should note what is being said about you and determine if you can correlate it to your employer brand.

The “Employer Branding Measurement Dashboard” was created by Elizabeth Mull at ConnectedTrifecta and is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are welcome to download and use it with proper attribution: Elizabeth Mull, Connected Trifecta, http://mda.klr.mybluehost.me, @connecttrifecta