by Lovisa Öhnell (for Universum Quarterly)

Regardless of industry, country or position, it seems those that work with employer branding have at least one thing in common: the need for solid measuring tools for their employer branding activities. This need is particularly pressing now, since employer branding has gone strategic. Not having good measuring tools has an adverse effect on budgets, number of recruits and the quality of the recruits. But the suffering is unnecessary. There are plenty of tools you can use to correctly measure the results of your work.

Measuring employer branding (EB) is to your strategies what regular health checkups are to your body. Even if you don’t feel sick, you should do regular checkups to confirm your good health, and to catch potential problems early. Only if the initial tests indicate a problem does the doctor send you for an MRI or a CAT scan. It’s the same thing with EB strategies. A simple dash board of three key performance indicators should be used annually to gauge the overall health of the employer brand.

Attractiveness

When measuring your attractiveness, make sure you do it amongst relevant target groups. Second, set a goal for the ranking. Being number one is not realistic for most. But perhaps being amongst the Top 20 or Top 10 is. Third, changing rankings take time. So when you do set the goal and define your target groups, make sure that reflects future recruitment needs beyond six months.

Brand Perception

Proper brand perception reflects your Employer Value Proposition (EVP) in the right way. You have to define what characterises your employment offer, and in what ratios. If the brand perception and your EVP aren’t aligned, you may run into a similar problem as a global soft drink company did whilst recruiting staff to a manufacturing plant in Asia. The company’s brand is strongly associated with international atmosphere. But the manufacturing plant had none of that global flair. It was basically a local,
independent, factory. Hence, the plant required a completely different set of recruits than the company as a whole did.

Conversion

Measuring your conversion means measuring the strength of your relationship with your target group. How well they know you, and how strongly they want to join your organisation. At Universum, we have a funnel to illustrate this. At the widest point, we have those who are familiar with you. Further down are those who consider working for you. On the next level in the funnel, we find those who think of you as an ideal employer. And at the narrowest point are those that have also applied. Defining where you want to be will help you track your communication with your target group and also measure progress in a clear way.

Following this health check ABC will hopefully generate a clean bill of health for your EB. If there are problems, they will be
discovered early. And early detection increases the chances of effective treatment. In addition, if ailments are discovered early, the treatment will be considerably cheaper. So when you sit down to measure your EB, do as your doctor. Start with checking your vitals!