Employer branding is one of the most efficient recruiting tools companies can use. A strong employer brand helps your team create a more efficient hiring process, while a bad one hurts your ability to recruit top talent.
Why? Because employer branding affects every stage of your hiring funnel.
Here’s how employer branding can make—or break—your recruiting efforts, and the metrics you can use to measure its effectiveness.
You need to understand your sourcing effectiveness. According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), companies attend an average of 41 career fairs per year. Yet only 53 percent of Gen Z use career fairs in their job search. A strategy that’s overly tilted toward on-campus recruitment can hit your team’s productivity, effectively reducing your reach.
Digital recruiting, on the other hand, allows you to share your company’s employer brand with candidates throughout the country. It also gives you more control over when and how candidates engage with your employer brand. So when your team posts your open positions on digital platforms, you can measure which one drives the right candidates for your team.
Just look at ThermoFisher. They partnered with WayUp to create strategic employer branding campaigns that improved the quality-of-hires of their 2018 intern class. And they did it without pouring more resources into their on-campus recruitment.
Ultimately, telling your company’s story the way you want it told helps your team attract more qualified candidates.
Google Analytics (GA) allows you to see how website users interact with your site. Are they leaving your site after seeing dedicated employer branding pages that showcase company culture? If so, there are two possibilities: Your company is effectively showcasing what it’s like to work there, so the site is filtering out candidates who wouldn’t excel. In this case, great. The other possibility is, your site doesn’t paint enough of a picture of what it’s like to work there. Your team can judge which scenario it is by the quality of job candidates.
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Also, are potential applicants exiting from your Careers page without ever applying? This can be a sign that your application process—a big aspect of candidate experience—is too lengthy, onerous, or cumbersome. Remember, a positive candidate experience helps your company build a strong employer brand. Your company’s reputation will improve, and applicants—regardless of whether they were ultimately hired—will have a positive sentiment toward your organization. This helps push candidates through the interview stage of the funnel because they’ll want the opportunity to work for your company.
Be cognizant of your hiring team’s acceptance rate. While alone it’s not the most revealing metric, it does—in conjunction with other indicators—reveal your company’s employer branding health.
According to Gallup, company culture (which is a major aspect of employer branding) is the deciding factor for whether the top 20 percent of candidates accept an offer. That’s why it’s so important to share information about your company culture throughout the hiring process. When candidates accept an interview, your team can send them articles that highlight what it’s actually like to work for your company. This will help drive a better acceptance rate, since qualified candidates will know what life at your company is like.
On the flip side, a strong employer brand can mask inefficient hiring processes. Candidates are more likely to accept a job offer from an organization with a strong employer—or consumer— brand like Google or Netflix compared to businesses that are outside this upper echelon. So even if these organizations aren’t the best at pushing candidates through the funnel (we’re not saying they’re not!), top talent will still accept the job because of the company’s reputation.
Bottom line: Make sure you measure acceptance rate as a piece of the puzzle, and not the whole picture.
Does your company’s internship program actually live up to the way you sold it? Your team’s conversion rate of interns to full-time hires helps you evaluate if your employer branding is accurate or not. Similar to acceptance rate, companies with strong employer brands will more likely have interns accept full-time job offers, regardless of how the internship was sold. It’s important, therefore, to understand that this metric is one part of your evaluation criteria.
For the most part, though, an intern won’t want a full-time job at a company that’s dishonest about day-to-day tasks or the culture. Currently, the average conversion rate for turning interns into full-time hires is 56 percent. If your team’s conversion rate is higher, that’s a good sign for your company’s employer brand.
According to NACE, the average cost-per-hire for companies that recruit on campus is $6,275 (a figure that includes personnel costs). The cost without on-campus personnel? $2,027 per hire.
A strong employer brand can drive an additional 50 percent reduction in costs, according to the Society of Human Resource Management. When taken together, that’s a lot of money to save!
Conversely, a weak employer brand can fuel your cost-per-hire by prolonging the hiring process. In fact, 69 percent of job seekers won’t accept a job offer from a company with a bad employer brand. That’s why monitoring your cost-per-hire can shed light on the health of your company’s employer brand.
One of the most often overlooked branding metrics is employee satisfaction, claims Recruiting Daily. It’s true—making sure your employees are happy and engaged at work will lead to a stronger employer brand. But how?
Happy employees become brand advocates and share their experiences, similar to a positive candidate experience. They’re also more likely to drive referrals, which rank among the most effective hiring methods.
If you focus on these six metrics to measure your company’s employer branding, your team will not only hire top talent, they’ll do it more efficiently.
