When employers activate their employer brand, they need to know the impact they are having. Not in terms of vanity metrics in terms of reach and clicks – they are easy to come by.
They need to see financial or performance impact – because those are the numbers that matter.
Measuring the impact made
So, how might we measure the financial or performance impact of a better-activated employer brand?
I’m thinking of this ss a dashboard, with a variety of indicators. Each of these will come with their own measure. Some translate into money saved or improvements made.
Ideally, as many of these indicators as possible will all build to one number – and ideally that number will be money.
I have thought about this with three categories of measures
Indicators – Perception Shift
If your employer branding exists to shift people closer to the perception you’ve defined in your EVP, then measure that shift. Understand and quantify how people felt, and how they feel now once they have been exposed, educated, or had questions answered.
You can’t put monetary or efficiency value here – but it’s a crucial part of testing your hypothesis. It’s showing whether or not if-you-build-it-they-will-come.
Quantifiable – Talent Acquisition
Ultimately, you want to demonstrate that you have an impact on the entire organisation. That what you are doing is worth of discussion in the boardroom. Improving your TA metrics are not going to be that. You might save a huge amount of your budget ... but it's only a sliver of the organisational budget.
But those TA metrics are relatively easy to quantify, and they start to come quickly. You don't have that lag you will on organisational measures.
Crucially, they'll give an early indication if your activation is working, which means you can start to draw correlation with the other metrics. We did this, we straight away saw this effect, so we can be confident the later effects are related.
Quantifiable – Organisational
This is where you ultimately want to get to. Demonstrating that your work has an impact on the bottom line. Whether that is making or saving the organisation money, getting greater engagement or performance or retention, or all of the above.
Of course, this takes time to demonstrate. Other factors are in play during that, that’s a fact. And it can be easy for your efforts to be dismissed as one of the causes of an uptick.
That’s why it’s so important that you’re tracking all the way through, and bringing all of these measures together.
These are the ones you want to focus on, and you want to be able to show that it’s your efforts that have made a significant contribution.
The potential measures
You’ve activated your employer brand.
In any almost any other marketing or brand scenario, you are looking to attract more “customers” (and therefore create more work at your end)
Here you are looking to attract better, or perhaps even fewer, candidates.
You are looking to create less work, now, and ultimately higher retention and performance.
That there will be savings in time and money, and there are many ways to quantify that. They could well be quite difference for different employers. I give some examples here.
Indicators – Perception Shift
Attitudinal: Making an informed decision
It would be useful to measure if you are shifting perceptions. Answering the question: Do you see now that more people are making an informed decision to join, rather than merely accepting a job here?
Likely to be done in a survey, and likely not to have a cost saving put to it in the short term.
But by measuring this now, it may be possible to see the correlation of effect. I.e. as more people make an informed decision, retention goes up, and money is saved. By measuring this now, and establishing likely future effect, you may be able to make faster measures in the future.
Attitudinal: Making an informed decision - extended
The ultimate measure is if you see a shift in attitude from your target population.
Rather than just people you have reached and inspired to contact you, this is taking a step further back and seeing the shift in perception from people who haven’t yet applied. Before and after being exposed to your messages: have their perceptions changed?
This can be achieved through surveys or focus groups – “recruited” internally or externally.
Again, without a cost saving attached, but this is a key test of whether your campaign has the desired effect. It’s also an early opportunity to validate, or rework.
Behavioural: Making an informed decision - ATS/Web analytics
There should be some key indicators that you can take from your ATS/web analytics
· Are you seeing people with more of the relevant experience or skills you need?
· Are people engaging with more content before they apply?
· Are more people applying organically?
· Are you seeing more people from direct /most relevant competitors?
· Are you getting a greater % that you would shortlist?
· Are you getting fewer applicants, while still having strong shortlists?
This is now a direct measure of whether you are getting more of the people who are making informed decisions.
Immediately, these may only be indicators to future success i.e. you can’t ascribe a direct, monetary saving, yet.
What you can do is establish which measures are most indicative of future success, and measure those – and start to show how they change. This gives you fast feedback on whether the dials are moving in the right direction.
In time, once you know the monetary effect of your better brand activation, then you may be able to put a monetary amount on the measures that most closely correlate to future success (in terms of retention / performance).
E.g., we know that people who come to us directly and engage on 3+ careers pages go on to stay longer. So, if we can get more organic visits, who research first rather than immediately reply, that’s a great indicator.
DE&I
In all of your work, we can assume that DE&I is a priority.
Initially, it may be useful to show that you are able to increase the reach of people you are able to attract AND increase performance and cut costs.
Further down the line, and with more data, it may be possible to prove that DEI success translates into business success.
Quantifiable Measures – Talent Acquisition
The TA team remains the same
As a simple, and immediate example, you shouldn’t need to expand the TA team to cope, even though you’ve spent on marketing. There’s a simple, demonstrable saving there.
Attraction Campaigns
New or revised attraction materials should be needed less often. You should also be using less inventory on job boards / programmatic and less time on social media.
Again, there should be a quantifiable cost to this.
Hiring Managers
Hiring managers should spend less time on recruitment – because it is less difficult or they need to recruit less often.
If not captured in individual “timesheets”, the cumulative effect can be seen by usage of the HR systems that support recruitment. You should see less time being used.
It should be possible to put an aggregate number of hours on this. As we see those hours drop, that has freed managers for more directly productive tasks – and that should now be quantifiable.
This measure will increase in power over time.
Time to productivity
Assuming that an average time to get to full productivity will be known, and therefore the lack of productivity can also be estimated – and a cost put on that.As fewer people are needed to be recruited, because attrition declines, then this cost will decrease.
It may be that in time, as more of the right people are recruited, that the overall time to full productivity itself is reduced – and this would have a big compound effect.
Quantifiable Measures – Organisation
Effect of backfill
It may be possible to estimate the amount of time other colleagues need to backfill roles and the impact on their own productivity too.
As fewer people are needed to be recruited, or better people come in, then this cost will decrease.
If time to fill comes down – because more are coming to you directly rather than a delay in being attracted – then this will also have an effect, and this too can be shown.
Retention / Intention to Stay
This is what we are ultimately looking to measure, but will only truly be seen a number of years down the line: are we consistently achieving better retention from these new staff?
However, intention to stay is a frequent question in engagement surveys, and we can see if this begins to rise, especially among the shorter-tenured.
If we see that trend, then it’s possible to quantify the effect of that: if more people stay longer, then – for all of the reasons documented here – that gives a monetary saving of £x.
Engagement
Those who leave, especially if they leave quickly, are less likely to be fully engaged, and hence less productive. Perhaps they were never fully engaged.
It’s likely that there isn’t a £ per % more engaged cost– there are too many variables.
But there ought to be a correlation between teams / functions with more engaged colleagues and performance. And there should be enough teams / functions to make good comparisons.
If you looked at this as a measure you would likely remove the top and bottom x%– where the effect of a great / poor manager, or other aspects of the employee experience, has a disproportionate effect.
Concentrating on the middle of the bell curve: are there differences between those attracted post-activation to pre? This would be a strong indication that more of the right people are coming (and this then drives performance).
Performance
Over time we can also look at performance results by tenure:
Again, looking at the average team: Do teams with more new staff start to outperform others? If we start to see a pattern, then we’re able to make a case. People attracted via brand activation = more informed decision = better business performance.
And if we have an average amount of greater performance – then that can be a highly convincing measure as the connection is made.
High Performance
Another impact of recruiting the right people is that you would see more people in higher performance brackets. It would need to be examined how to quantify this.
It may be that performance reviews are quantified in a way that can be used.
It may be that instead you would need to look at time from joining, to applying for higher-level training or roles. If that time comes down, that’s a strong signal that the right people are in place.
Or perhaps look at the negative indicators. If you can reduce the numbers of people on performance plans, or reduce levels of absenteeism – then there’s the cost saved of better performance and the management HR time to administer that process.
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