(a) Brand awareness and familiarity

What percentage of your target audience has heard of your organization and knows what your organization does?

It's important to distinguish between familiarity with your products or services, and a familiarity with the kind of employment opportunities you might offer. In many cases potential candidates may exclude themselves from considering your organization as a potential employer because they only associate you with the jobs they can see or imagine. People typically underestimate the range of positions available in support functions. For example, from L'Oréal to P&G, STEM graduates often fail to consider the range of scientific and engineering roles required to deliver familiar products and services. This is one of the reasons that a favourable impression of your brand may not equate with consideration of your company as a potential employer. It's also important to distinguish between perceived familiarity and accurate knowledge. People may hold a negative view of your organization because they have a misguided impression of what you or your industry does.

(b) Employer brand image

How strongly are your EVP pillars and other desired image associations perceived by your key target audiences?

To fully understand the vitality of your external employer brand image it is important to understand the strength, consistency and relative appeal of each image dimension and how it compares with your leading talent competitors.

(c) Image strength

Moderate strength of agreement scores often result from general ‘halo’ positivity if your corporate, customer or employer brand is generally well regarded. They are also more likely to result from general associations with your industry sector. To be sure your employer brand marketing efforts are getting your desired message across it is therefore important to put greater focus on the ‘top box’/‘Strongly agree’ scores.

(d) Consistency

If an organization has grown through acquisition or has operated a high degree of local autonomy, associations with the brand can vary significantly from place to place. In some cases this may remain part of the plan, but if there is a desire to establish a more consistent global brand it is important to track and measure these potential inconsistencies in order to target and rectify them. This need not conflict with efforts to tailor the EVP to local target groups. There may always be a benefit in highlighting some image attributes more than others to match local preferences; however, the primary image components of the brand should always be present and positive.

Another aspect of consistency that is important for you to consider is any potentially significant gaps between external perceptions (brand reputation) and internal perceptions (employment experience). Where external perceptions fall short of positive internal perceptions you can communicate these strengths with confidence. Where external perceptions are significantly more positive than internal perceptions, you clearly need to tread more carefully in making employer brand claims. These findings should also prompt action to address internal weaknesses that are likely to lead to post-hire disappointment and attrition.

(e) Attribute appeal

If the EVP has been developed effectively, the chosen pillars and communication themes should be appealing to your key target audiences. However, it is important to both validate and track the appeal of these image dimensions over time as they are subject to change. In addition to tracking the ongoing appeal of your chosen EVP attributes, it is also useful to keep an eye on other dimensions that you have chosen not to emphasize. It may be possible that the growing strength of appeal of a particular dimension among your target audience may prompt you to consider incorporating it into your EVP at some point, or including it in your messaging and content marketing to a particular target group.

(f) Competitor benchmarking

This will enable you to confirm and track your points of parity (POPs) and points of difference (PODs) over time. The competitive environment is constantly changing and it is vital to keep a weather eye on those areas where your relative advantage may be under threat. To preserve the vitality of your brand reputation you need to be continually strengthening and distinguishing your own offer to ensure it remains differentiated from your leading competitors. As discussed in Chapter 10, this requires a broad understanding of your relative standing in relation to general image dimensions like teamwork, innovation, autonomy and learning and career progression. However, it should also ideally include a more specific evaluation of the more specific points of difference you are communicating. This is more challenging from a research perspective as these are unlikely to be incorporated within syndicated research studies like Universum's global student survey, and will therefore require more tailored research.

Universum is the leading source of employer brand reputation data among students. They can provide company specific data relating to:

• Brand awareness
• Employer brand image (relative to key competitors)
• Drivers of employer attractiveness
• Awareness, consideration, preference and intention to apply.

This data can be tailored to the individual needs of the organization by country, competitive set and broad student target groupings (Business; Engineering; Natural Sciences and Humanities).

A number of companies, like P&G, make use of Universum to track their overall favourability and their relative standing among business and engineering students in their key markets around the world. Since they refreshed their EVP and employer brand marketing campaigns in 2008, P&G's global ranking among business students has steadily improved from 14th in 2007 to 6th in 2009, to 3rd in 2012.

(g) Tailored brand image surveys

Establishing your brand reputation among the wider target population is far more challenging. It may be possible for you to incorporate employer brand related questions into other forms of brand survey that your organization may conduct. It is now common for corporate image surveys to include a perspective on the company's reputation as an employer. Companies like McDonalds also use their customer satisfaction survey to track people's perceptions and consideration of the company as a potential employer.

(h) New joiner surveys

Represent one of the most under-used potential sources of employer brand image data. The disadvantage of this data collection method is that it will clearly not represent the broader potential target population, and there will inevitably be a positive bias. The advantage is that it should represent a highly distilled sample of the people you most want to hire. The questions you should be asking new hires are:

• What qualities did you first associate with our organization before you started looking for more information? (What does the analysis tell you about the relative strength of the EVP pillars in relation other image associations?)
• In what ways, if any, did your image of the organization change as you gathered more information? (Were EVP pillar associations strengthened?)
• Which other organizations did you consider joining? (Competitive set)
• Why did you choose to join our organization? (How important were the EVP pillars in making the decision to apply and join?)

(a) Talent pool reach and engagement

Consideration and application are not the only measure of employer brand strength and recruitment marketing effectiveness. Organizations are increasingly taking a longer term view in building relationships with potential candidates. This may take the form of a proprietary talent database, or LinkedIn company profile pages and interest groups. It should be possible to create a measure of your talent pool quality by assessing the proportion of people within your identified pool who meet your overall target profile requirements for key roles.

LinkedIn's Talent Brand Index tool can provide a useful measure of your current levels of ‘reach/familiarity’ and ‘engagement/active interest’ within LinkedIn's membership base (compared with your key competitors) (Figure 20.4).

This analysis should be combined with an assessment of other environmental factors affecting talent availability, particularly general levels of employment and recruitment activity (particularly among key competitors). When they are both high then talent will be less available and more expensive to recruit. Most governments provide data on levels of employment and unemployment. There are also a number of regular sources of hiring activity data including Manpower and LinkedIn.

(b) Consideration

What percentage of your target audience would consider you as a potential employer? If possible you should try and determine relative levels of consideration among active job seekers vs passive targets. High levels of consideration among active targets could be driven by the perception that you hire a lot of people rather than your relative merit as an employer. The true test of your employer brand equity is consideration among targets who are not currently active in seeking a job. Another good indicator is the proportion of target candidates who agree to a job opportunity conversation on the strength of your brand name.

(c) Preference

What percentage of your target audience rates your organization higher than your immediate talent competitors as a potential employer? While a high level of overall preference will no doubt be satisfying, the key question to ask is which image dimensions appear to be most important in driving this differentiation and preference? Once you've established this insight, you can then consciously feed it back into your marketing activities.

(d) Application volume, diversity and quality

Are you receiving the kind of applications you're looking for? The ultimate test of your employer brand reputation and marketing activity is their ability to generate the right volume of applications meeting your desired target profile, quality standards and diversity objectives. The ‘right’ volume means sufficient high quality applications to fill your position. Anything beyond this point results in greater time, cost and rejection, so make your KPI the optimum number not the absolute number.

(e) Quality of hire

Are you making the right hires? This measure should ideally be a natural output from the pre-hire selection process and post-hire performance management and retention data; however, only a minority of organizations appear to collect and analyse this vital information effectively. In a recent Staffing.org survey, C-level executives rated new hire quality as the most important HR performance metric out of 20 possible metrics; however, a variety of recent research surveys suggest that only between a quarter and a third of organizations track quality of hire.¹³

The typical components of a ‘quality of hire’ metric are:

• % Satisfying the needs and expectations of the hiring manager (HMS).
• % Meeting performance expectations within the first 12 months (PE).
• % Retained for a minimum of 12 months, or long enough to provide a return on performance, if this calculation exists (ER).

This can be translated into a quality of hire index, to judge the overall recruitment marketing effectiveness or the relative effectiveness of different channel and campaign content sources.

• Quality of Hire = %HMS + %PE + %ER

It should be noted that HMS and PE will always be subjective scores. In many organizations PE will also be rounded out over time if the company uses a distributed bell curve to rate performance (i.e. they use relative measures of performance not absolute/variable measures). Nevertheless, this calculation should still provide a useful measure of the relative contribution of different channel and content sources to the quality bench strength of the organization. To this you may also choose to measure and track whether your selection process is delivering an appropriate level of diversity among final hires.

(f) Conversion rate and conversion premium

What percentage of people accept your job offers, and at what conversion premium?

When talent markets get competitive, it is not unusual for some candidates to be receiving multiple offers, and the conversion rate (% increase in people's salary from their previous employer) can rise significantly. Your ability to convert offers into hires at reasonably low conversion rates is an important indication of the strength and value of your employer brand reputation.

(g) Positive word of mouth

How do you score in terms of positive social sentiment (likes, shares)? If your employer brand is of relevance and interest to people, they are more likely to participate in your content marketing activities and help to amplify your brand messages and reputation through sharing this content with their friends and professional contacts.

(h) Social listening

A number of companies now undertake research to analyse online mentions of their brand, what people are mostly talking about and whether their overall sentiment towards the brand is positive, negative or neutral. This can provide a useful indication of your social ‘brand footprint’ as it is sometimes called, but you need to bear in mind that most of the commentary generally comes from people within your organization rather than outsiders looking in. Some sites like Glassdoor's primary reason for existence is to facilitate this ‘insiders’ view'.

(a) Target profile fit

How well are you defining the skills and abilities your organization requires to maximize performance, in broad terms and for key (‘pivotal’) positions and roles? In other words, are you targeting the right people? This is clearly a shared responsibility between HR and line management, and both sides should review the degree to which ‘quality of hire’ attrition and performance failings are due to poor target definition, rather than poor selection.

(b) Workforce planning accuracy

How well are you predicting the type and volume of talent you need? This can be measured more objectively by comparing advanced hiring estimates with actual hiring needs. The most important linkage in this case will be with your ‘time to hire’ and ‘time to fill’ metrics, since the better your advanced planning the more you should be able to minimize this performance downtime.

(c) Impact and influence of marketing content

How effective is your marketing in getting your message across and prompting desired behaviours? This can include measures relating to specific marketing content elements (individual adverts, social posts etc.) or combinations of content falling within a defined ‘campaign’. The most appropriate metrics for most individual content elements would be measures of engagement (comments, likes, shares, click-throughs etc.) but it may also be possible to measure direct impacts on the application rate if the execution includes this call to action. It's seldom possible to measure the impact of individual content elements on brand image, but it should be possible to do this for sustained forms of campaign activity, either though some form of tailored ad hoc survey or syndicated research, like Universum's Global Student Survey.

(d) Impact and influence of marketing media

Which of your media channels are delivering the greatest value at the lowest cost? (Table 20.2)

Hiring managers should ideally complete an ‘origin of hire’ record for every open position that has been filled. This would help to provide a more complete answer to the following key questions.

• How many open positions/job opportunities have been generated?
• How many of these open positions were the result of creating new roles or positions and how many were replacements?
• How many were advertised beyond the immediate business unit?
• How many were advertised externally? Of these, what proportion was filled internally?
• How many internal hires involved a move within the business unit or division and how many involved moves between business units or divisions?
• How many full-time hires were made from contract or contingent workers or interns?

Recruitment metrics have conventionally assumed that one channel can be identified as a dominant ‘source of hire’. As Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler make clear in CareerXroads 2013 Source of Hire Survey, this form of measurement is becoming increasingly difficult. Their honest and constructive perspective on the subject is worth reading in full:

‘Today, the medium AND the message are blurred in ways we never imagined when we insisted that each hire be attributed to only one source. … It would be just as hard to imagine a hire that wasn't intertwined with multiple sources located at varying points on a stretched out recruiting supply chain that reaches from early education to talent community. Mapping how prospects navigate the early stages of the recruiting supply chain IS possible but not without significant changes in what employers currently require and accept from their technology partners.’

Rather than combining everything together into the over-simplistic term ‘source of hire’, organizations should aim to determine and differentiate between:

• Source of Awareness (Where did applicants become aware of the potential employment opportunities offered by your organization or a specific position?)
• Source of Influence (Which media or types of contact did they regard as primary and secondary sources of influence?)
• Source of Application (Which channel did they apply through?)
• (Segmented by applicant type: e.g. on-profile vs off-profile, subject to offer etc.)

To achieve this, organizations need to establish a system that is capable of recording, consolidating and validating the influence of data from multiple sources (e.g. ATS, Recruiter, IP measurement AND Self-Reports, developed with I/O expertise).

Unfortunately candidates tend to be a very unreliable source of data on their media influences. TMP Worldwide has conducted a considerable amount of research on this subject for many different clients, and has concluded in most cases that only a small minority of candidates can provide an accurate account of the media through which they have made an application when cross-checking against more objective sources of data.

Social media provide an important example of channels that may provide a strong source of influence but not register as prominently in terms of source of application. In the 2013 Career XRoads Survey respondents only attributed 2.9% of their hires directly to social media, for example; however, they also believed that social media influences, drives or combines with 7 out of 11 other sources: Referrals, Company Career Site, Job Boards, Direct Source, College, Temp-to-Hire and Career Fairs.

(e) Recruitment analytics

Given the increasingly complex nature of media interactions, it has become very difficult to conduct detailed and accurate analyses of the total marketing system; however, there are some broader areas in which a judgement of the relative cost and effectiveness of different recruitment marketing activities can be made. In recruitment as in many other areas of business it is tempting to focus on the more immediately tangible variables like cost and time rather than more complex (but ultimately more important) variables like quality of hire. Ideally you should attempt to link both types of measure to your most significant marketing decisions, so that for any major content investment or media spend, you can calculate:

• Cost per application and cost per hire.
• Time to hire and time to fill (plus the estimated cost involved in excessive position vacancy days, particularly in relation to key revenue generating positions).
• Quality of applicant and quality of hire.

In broad terms this should at least enable you to calculate the relative cost and quality of:

• Direct sourcing hires vs agency hires.
• Referral vs SEO vs Job-boards etc.

(a) Candidate experience

Companies should monitor candidates' experience of the application and selection process to ensure that it leaves a positive and professional impression. Ideally this should also include some form of image analysis to determine whether the process has reinforced the expectations of the employer brand communicated through the company's recruitment marketing. You should be aiming to leave unsuccessful candidates as positive about your employer brand as successful ones, and where suitably qualified ensure that they remain in your talent pool ready to take up more suitable positions if they arise in the future. Research suggests that the overwhelming majority of candidates reporting a positive candidate experience also claim that they would refer others to apply to the company. Given the ease with which people can now broadcast a dissatisfactory experience across their personal and professional networks, the potentially negative consequences to your employer brand are also significant. Despite the clear benefits of monitoring candidate experience, the evidence surprisingly suggests that this form of research is still only conducted in a minority of cases. Even among the 95 ‘forward-thinking’ US companies taking part in the 2013 Cande Awards survey, less than a third reported asking candidates for feedback, with only 15% percent doing so routinely.¹³

(b) On-boarding experience

As above, the basic tracking measures should include satisfaction with the on-boarding process and an evaluation of whether the experience reinforced desired impressions of the employer brand. Ideally, as discussed in Chapter 19, the feedback period should be extended to include the longer period of orientation that takes place over the first 3–6–12 months (depending on the importance and complexity of the role).

The three key outcome measures which should be used to determine the overall success of on-boarding and orientation are:

• Engagement. There is a tendency in many organizations for engagement levels to decline during the first year of employment. While it's understandable for the initial ‘honeymoon’ period to produce very high levels of engagement, the organization should keep track of the decay rate, and rectify sources of dissatisfaction.
• Retention. Attrition levels within the first 12 months can indicate a number of potential issues that may need to be addressed by the organization. These could include hiring people with the wrong cultural fit, significant gaps between employer brand expectations and the reality of employment, or a poor on-boarding process.
• Speed to Performance. While this can be difficult to measure, some organizations calculate how long it takes an employee to ‘get up to speed’ with their new job, and the time it takes to make a return on the investment involved in recruitment and on-boarding someone to a new position.

(a) Employee engagement

While the organizations that run employee surveys define employee engagement in a number of different ways, they tend to share a number of common components.

• Motivation. Do employees feel motivated to go the extra mile for the organization?
• Loyalty. Are employees committed to building their career with the organization?
• Advocacy. Would employees recommend the organization as a good place to work?

The most important measure from an external employer brand reputation and recruitment perspective is advocacy, since the preparedness of employees to communicate positively about their employer through social media and refer good candidates has increasingly become the bedrock of effective social marketing. The other common term used for this measure is the Net Promoter Score, which represents the net sum of positive employee advocates and negative detractors.

This Net Promoter Score needs to be kept in balance with employees' motivation to perform, as it is possible that the wrong kind of advocacy could also result from a comfortable but low performing work environment.

Some people have begun to question the inclusion of ‘loyalty’ in the definition of engagement, as it tends to be more influenced by the external context. Over recent years it could be argued that employees' intention to stay with their employers has been more influenced by the poor economic environment and a risk-adverse desire for stability, than heart-felt loyalty and commitment to their employer brand. Likewise, in fast growing emerging markets, engaged employees may still be highly vulnerable to the many alternative opportunities open to them elsewhere.

More recently, Towers Watson has introduced the concept of ‘sustainable engagement’, which includes measures of wellbeing. Given that employees can sometimes be too engaged, prone to over-work and burn-out, I believe this is a welcome addition to engagement thinking.

These engagement measures represent the desired behavioural outcomes of a strong employer brand, in the same way that application and positive word of mouth represent the desired outcomes of a strong employer brand reputation and effective recruitment marketing.

(b) Talent retention and bench-strength

Another key indicator of the success of your employer brand management efforts is your organization's ability to build and maintain a strong talent pipeline. You should be keeping a close eye on retention levels among your key job roles and high potential population as they are likely to be the most prone to competitive poaching.

(c) Performance

As demonstrated in the RBS cases study highlighted in Chapter 2, it is possible to analyse the linkage between your employer brand index, employee engagement and key performance metrics like customer satisfaction and sales. This is an extension of the ‘Service Profit Chain’ Model established by James Heskett and a number of other business academics from Harvard University in the 1990s. This should establish the same kind of performance linkage internally that quality of hire metrics establish for your recruitment marketing efforts externally.

(d) People management processes and practices

One of the most common and well established forms of talent analytics is engagement driver analysis. The majority of employee research agencies now provide this form of analysis as standard. In simple terms this enables you to identify which of your people management practices appears to be most important in driving employee motivation, advocacy and loyalty. This same analysis can be applied to evaluating the potential engagement value to be gained by improving the fulfilment of your employer brand promises.