How To Measure Your Employer Brand With Your Candidates?

If you deploy employer-branded actions to students or recent graduates, chances are, you want to know if these actions are effective! For that, it will be necessary to measure the effectiveness of your employer brand actions with your candidates. In this article, FP Recruitment & Executive Search explains what performance indicators you can exploit.

Definition: What is the employer brand?

The employer brand is not limited to recruitment; it also covers candidates' experience once they have joined your company, and even once they have left. The employer brand is composed of the employer image (how the external actors project the company, as the brand image), the employer identity (the DNA of the company: its mode of operation, its culture ...), and employer practices (recruitment process, HR policy, etc.).

What is the employer brand?

The employer brand is particularly useful for recruitment: with a good employer brand, you can more easily attract good candidates, capture their attention, get answers, etc. The employer brand gives context to your recruitments, it will facilitate your actions and you help recruit. Measuring your employer brand goes hand in hand with measuring the effectiveness of your recruitment actions.

What performance indicators for the employer brand?

Depending on how you have designed your strategy and your HR offer, you will want to rely on different types of criteria: not all strategies are based on the same KPIs!

There are quantitative and qualitative criteria.

Quantitative criteria

These criteria are based on the exploitation of encrypted data, which you must collect in sufficient numbers to obtain a significant result. The advantage of these data is their reliability; on the other hand, they are sometimes harder to harvest and more complex to exploit.

Some of the quantitative criteria you can use include:

• Number of unsolicited applications received (overall, or only on internships or courses, or only on an offer or a trade type)

• Number of visits to the career site

• Number of candidates responding to an offer

• Number of days during which a position remains vacant

• Number of candidates present at a presentation in their school (e.g. lecture hall)

• Number of candidates who pass by your stand at the job fair or apply at a school show (physical or virtual)

Also, some criteria will be more oriented towards your visibility:

• Number of subscribers to your newsletter or job board

• Open or click rate on your sent emails

• Subscribers on different social; for young people, it can be Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Snapchat ...

• Number of likes on your publications and evolution over time

Finally, with more in-depth analysis, do not hesitate to hunt down as well:

• The cost per job

• Cost per application received

• The acceptance rate of your offers (overall, or by type of job)

• And one last factor more related to the internal aspect of the employer brand: the conversion rate of the rest periods

This list is not exhaustive, and your objective is not to follow all these indicators at once, but rather to choose the ones that will be best suited to you and your challenges.

The qualitative criteria

With this second type of criteria, the objective is to obtain information more related to the feelings of the candidates, to their subjective impressions. These criteria may concern both your employer brand globally or the effectiveness of certain more targeted actions.

The advantage of qualitative data is that they are often easier to collect; on the other hand, their processing is more complex because they require the formulation of global hypotheses based solely on isolated impressions, which each person will tend to transcribe with his own words.

You can first measure your reputation using the Internet:

• Google search on press sites and setting Google alerts

• Mentions on social networks

• Go read reviews and tips on your business on social network

Then, it is also possible to directly question candidates, for example by deploying a survey at the end of your recruitment process. Otherwise, simply enjoy a recruitment event where your target candidates are present to exchange with them and collect their opinions (you must temporarily leave your position as a recruiter).

For example, during the recruitment sessions that Fischer & Partners organizes, our team discusses a lot with the candidates to recover this type of qualitative elements. Here is a list of the most frequently asked questions:

• Which companies pushed candidates to apply?

• Which companies they know or do not know?

• What image they had of a company?

• What changed after knowing about the company?

• What has changed after meeting with a recruiter or an operational company?

• If they planned to apply to the company before meeting?

• If they changed their mind after meeting, and why?

Conclusion

In the end, these qualitative and quantitative elements make it possible to get a better idea of both its employer brand and the effectiveness of its actions. Once you have chosen the most relevant and effective criteria for your strategy, you can start measuring them regularly. Thus, you will be able to follow the evolution of your employer brand over time and measure the effectiveness of your actions!

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