Getting an external view of how you are perceived as an employer. It's generally the hardest, and most expensive, part of your insight or measurement programmes.
Very often, it’s worth that difficulty and cost, because it’s the most valuable insight you’ll get.
The success of your employer brand strategy depends on whether you can shift the perception of people outside your organisation, specifically those people who you'd like to consider working for you. It's a measure you need to make.
Proxies for external views
Given the difficulties, you can use proxies. In my time, I've often talked to:
· New employees – who have reference outside, and remember their first reaction to the employer
· Candidates in process – as above, with a view on what is making / keeping them interested
· In-house and external recruiters – who get first reactions on a regular basis
And at times also:
· Customers / service users – how does their view of the “brand” influence their view of the organisation as an employer?
· Candidates that dropped out of process – what interested them and what dissuaded them from joining?
External research options
You may have used your proxy views, but you might not feel they give you what you need. Or you may not feel you can use them to accurately measure how perception changes over time.
So, what are your options? Broadly speaking: Survey or Focus Groups
And your compromise is: Survey will be faster, cheaper, includes more opinions … but will give you less depth of insight.
In the worst case, a survey can leave you with as many questions and answers. Why did they say that? Why did they choose this over that? What do they mean by that?
Good design will help, but if total understanding is what you need, then a survey – by itself – may not do the job.
Survey Considerations
If you are confident you can get what you need from a survey, you’ll need to be assured that the audience your panel provider can access matches the people you’d like to speak to.
Now, unless you are big - ubiquitously big - and offer a huge range of roles, it probably doesn’t make sense to go for a Nationally Representative survey.
And unless you’re paying the panel provider to directly recruit a LOT of people that exactly meet your spec, you’ll have to accept that the Venn of “want to speak to” and “can reach” won’t always overlap entirely. It’s just whether you can accept the level of overlap.
But once you have your audience nailed – you should be good to go, and to find out what people really think about you as an employer.
Use your questions wisely. Your audience – even if they are paid to complete the survey – have a natural level of energy. Fewer, more stimulating questions = more energy = better insight.
Focus Groups
Perhaps you’ve used a survey, or perhaps you didn’t feel you could select the audience accurately enough, or perhaps you just want to dive deeper. Either way, you’re now using focus groups.
It may be you are able to recruit participants from your survey. That’ll depend very much on how your panel was formed, and the terms of the provider. Evidently, there’s advantages of speed, ease and cost in doing this.
Typically, you’ll be using a “recruiter” to populate your focus groups. And they can get you whoever you need.
There’s a time and a price to that. The more specific – or more in demand, like tech roles – the longer and more expensive the process.
You’ll want therefore to strike the right balance. You want your role specifications to be broad enough so that this doesn’t become a headhunting exercise, but not so broad that you’ve lost sight of the specific audience.
And a small note of caution: be totally specific. If you don’t specify it should be an equal male / female split, then you might get it, or you might not. And the odd group could be very skewed.
Think about all of the skills, experiences, demographics that are important to you. Because only then will you be assured of hearing from the right type, and the right spread of people.
And then you’ve got access to what your true audience thinks about you – and the opportunity to explore until you truly understand why.
Maximising your research
How are you going to use the survey or focus groups you’ve set up? As we've seen, you’ve got limited questions, and they must be used wisely. But you still need to give people space to surprise you.
You want to use the funnel approach.
It can be tempting to start straight away with: “What do you think about working for us?” “What do you think the culture/development/flexibility will be like?”
Instead, start from the broadest, most wide-open questions, and work down to the most specific.
The number one thing to remember is you can’t anticipate what people think or what’s important to them. You need to allow them the opportunity to say things that you don’t expect.
My funnel will generally be along the lines of:
· What’s important to you in your work / career?
· (If appropriate) What do you think about working in this industry?
· What do you think about this organisation? As a whole? Then as an employer?
· What do you think [specifics] would be like at this employer?
· How well does this employer match what’s important to you?
· What do you need to know about this employer?
· What do you need to be reassured of?
Your audience then has every chance to express themselves, whilst you are also getting all the answers that you need.
Use of prompts and education
You want to discover a lot in your research. And you want to give the space to discover what you hadn’t considered before.
That’s already a lot of participants’ energy. But, if possible, and having assembled and paid for this audience, keep going.
Decide if you also have the opportunity to educate them about you and your employer brand. And then decide if you can measure their reaction to that.
You’ll need to judge how much you can do of this. But there is the chance to show your audience: the experiences of your people, data, or proposed / actual employer branding materials.
And having exposed people to this, you can ask questions like:
· If we told you this, what’s your reaction?
· Did you know this? How do you feel about it?
· Take a look at this. Does that surprise you? Does it feel credible?
Now, you not only know their initial, unprompted reaction to you – you can also start to understand how people would feel after first contact.
· What do they still need to know?
· What are they unconvinced about?
· What questions remain?
And now you can anticipate reactions, and provide more targeted evidence and answers.
Measuring shifts
In an ideal world, you are looking to shift people’s perceptions from where they were, to one that matches the reality of working for you.
That’s your EVP and your employer branding working in perfect harmony.
Evidently, you’re not going to shift everyone’s opinion all at once. (If you do, please put me in touch with your employer branding team!)
That means that there needs to be continued listening, so you can see how perceptions change over time.
Which means you have two main considerations: Talking to the same people each time OR talking to similar people each time. (And I mean similar in the mathematical sense – sharing the same properties.)
If we’re talking about similar people, you want to recruit them in as close to the same way each time. But then you have more freedom. As long as you have a core if questions that stay the same over time (and you don’t influence them differently at different times) you can compare responses, and measure shifts. And you can explore lots of other subjects around that.
If we’re talking about the same people, then we need to be more cautious. If I talk to you every three months telling you in detail that WidgetCo is awesome, the chances are you’ll think better of WidgetCo. But that is nothing like your average punter’s experience.
You need to be much less leading. And it might very well be that you can’t ask as many direct questions, or do as much education about your brand as you’d like.
You may not even choose to declare which brand you’re working for. And that means you might need to add more comparative questions in as well, to conceal your objective.
Whatever route you take, you now have the ability to track perception. What hits home and inspires. How that changes, and ideally, how it improves over time. Which also tells you when you don’t cut through, or where people still don’t quite believe or understand what you’re telling them.
And that is, ultimately, the insight you need to better activate your employer brand, and show them the reality of your EVP.
Why book in for a free, no obligation chat about EVP adn employer brand?
Comments