Webinar:
Measuring your Employer Brand

Welcome and why measuring employer brand is so hard

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to this webinar on measuring your employer brand. I'm your host, Yves Pilet, and today I want to talk about how to do this properly. It's an impressive and difficult subject, so we'll start easy.

We'll cover four things. The foundation of data-driven employer brand management. Why data needs to be a focus, but not your only focus. The difference between recruitment marketing KPIs and employer branding KPIs. And the holy grail everyone in this field is chasing: the KPIs that matter most when it comes to employer brand.

If you have ever failed at measuring your employer brand, it isn't really your fault. It's a difficult area. Even big specialised organisations get it wrong. I've seen it from the inside, and I've failed at it myself. My goal today is to share what I've learned, so you can avoid the mistakes I made and move forward.

A short personal background

A bit of background. About twenty-five years ago, I came out of university with an economics degree and no clear idea of what I wanted to do. I started in labour market research as a quantitative economist, working with data, learning where it fails and where it shines. From there I moved into marketing and communications, working alongside my father at his agency. He led on creative concepts and I brought the data-driven layer.

In the early 2000s I came across the theme of employer branding and got hooked. It sat exactly at the intersection of marketing, communications, HR, and the labour market. There weren't many specialists in the field yet, so I put a lot of time into developing my own methodology. I still use it today and I keep improving it. I wrote a book about it. And I now use it to help organisations around the world.

A few examples. I helped Terumo, a global medical company, develop their Employer Value Proposition for the EMEA region (about 1,300 people in Europe). I did a similar assignment for SABIC Europe with their global headquarters in Saudi Arabia. More recently I worked with Sanofi, one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies, helping them raise their employer branding maturity.

Stay curious, the lesson from a six-year-old

A short anecdote. The photo on the right is my youngest son. He's six, endlessly curious, always asking why and how and what's next. Working with him has reminded me of something that applies directly to measuring your employer brand: stay curious, keep looking over the horizon. I've made huge progress in this field over twenty years, and I still discover new things every day. Curiosity is the engine.

The labour market has flipped from employer-led to employee-led

Almost every company is facing the same problem. They need the right people to make their strategy succeed, and those people are hard to find because most of them already have a job. At the same time, the jobs themselves are changing. The skills are changing. The labour market today is very different from twenty years ago, and it will keep changing over the next two decades.

One thing will stay stable: a structural shortage of labour. That puts the responsibility back on employers to be clear about what they stand for, so they can attract and retain the right people. Hybrid work is now normal. People are shifting from focusing on hard outputs to softer ones, like meaning, balance, and identity. They know they will work more than ninety thousand hours in their lifetime, and they want to do something else with their life too.

The old days are over. It used to be easy to say "I'm a great employer, you should work for me", and discard candidates who didn't fit the mould. Today, it's an employee's market. They choose whether they want to work for you. They choose whether to stay. And they talk about you publicly, not just at birthday parties but on social media. If you can't take care of your current and future employees, they will damage your reputation.

The way through this is to present yourself as a human organisation. Every human has flaws. Every human shows up authentically. The more open and honest you are with your employees, the stronger the connection becomes, and the more authentic your image as an employer becomes.

Capturing your essence, the Employer Value Proposition

The starting point is what I call capturing your essence. In employer branding we call this the Employer Value Proposition, or EVP. It's the process of saying what you really are about, not just talking about how great you are. You define what you stand for, and then you make sure your actions match.

I built an employer branding methodology around this. I call it the blueprint methodology, and it comes down to three steps:

1. Define who you are as an employer.
2. Communicate that internally and externally with the right creative concept and the right leadership behaviour.
3. Measure progress continuously, so you can analyse, advise, and adapt.

Step one starts with target group personas, then a clear EVP based on what you stand for, what your employees believe, how you are perceived, and how you differentiate from competitors. That EVP feeds your employer branding strategy and the KPIs you'll commit to over the next two or three years.

Step two is where most employers used to start, with communication. Today communication still matters, but the creative concept is only as strong as the leadership behaviour behind it. If you say you're ambitious and open but your leaders aren't, the message will never land. Sometimes employer branding needs a cultural change to be credible.

Why data alone isn't enough, the spreadsheet manager trap

Step three, measurement, is gaining traction and will keep gaining traction over the next ten to fifteen years. Data gives you a solid foundation. It moves the conversation away from "my opinion versus your opinion" and toward something representative.

But there's a trap I call the spreadsheet manager trap. Don't fall into it. People and feelings can't be fully captured in a spreadsheet. The right approach is to collect the right data, analyse it, interpret what it means, and give a recommendation based on what you found. Then remember that decisions about people still need judgement, and that leaders need to set an example.

How to present employer brand data to leadership

In the past, when I reported back to a client on how their employer brand was evolving, I would arrive with dashboards full of clicks, impressions, average CTRs, and tables of data. That isn't the right approach. CEOs and senior leaders aren't data scientists. They glaze over.

The approach that works: collect the right data, distil the essence, explain what it means in plain language, and recommend the decision you think they should take. Don't dump the spreadsheet. Hand them the conclusion.

Internal versus external employer brand KPIs

When we talk about measuring employer brand, the first thing to know is that there are two dimensions: internal employer brand and external employer brand. You can put them on two axes, with a 0-10 scale each.

External KPIs include things like followers on social media or candidate experience scores. Internal KPIs include willingness to stay or willingness to recommend. All of these are relevant. The point is to know where you are today on both axes, set a target two years out, and use your strategy to move both numbers in the right direction.

Recruitment KPIs and employer branding KPIs are not the same thing

People often confuse these two. To me, recruitment is about attraction. Employer branding is about attraction, engagement, and retention. Recruitment is a slice of employer branding, not a synonym for it.

The KPIs follow the same logic. Recruitment is about cost per hire. Employer branding is about quality of hire. Cost per hire measures how efficiently you spend recruitment marketing money. Quality of hire measures the return on the people you brought in, including whether they fit the culture, engage, and stay.

So is cost per hire important? In my opinion, not that much on its own. You can attract the best possible talent and still fail to engage and retain them. Recruitment marketing shows you the funnel from labour market communications through ATS conversion to new hires. That gives you a cost figure. But it tells you nothing about whether those new hires stick and contribute.

The holy grail, employer brand ROI

The ultimate question is: what is the ROI of your employer brand? To answer it you need to focus on the right KPIs, not the wrong ones.

The wrong KPIs to focus on in isolation are cost per click, online conversions, and cost per hire. They measure marketing or recruitment efficiency, not employer brand strength.

The right KPIs combine two layers:

• Non-financial metrics. Engagement levels, retention, the share of employees willing to recommend you, the strength of advocacy from people who used to work for you and still speak well of you.
• Financial metrics. The euros you invest in your employer brand versus the value of the talent you attract, engage, and retain.

And the third element, which is just as important, is leadership behaviour. If leadership treats employer branding as something HR or Communications should handle, it won't work. Leaders set the strategic decisions and the budget. If they don't embrace employer branding, you're stuck. So part of the work is convincing them that employer brand connects directly to the quality of the workforce, and that quality drives financial performance.

Building consistency across every link of the employer brand

The strongest employer brands are consistent at every stage of the journey:

1. Labour market communications. The right content, on the right channels, reaching the right target groups.
2. Candidate experience. Career site, recruiter behaviour, hiring manager behaviour, all reinforcing the message in your labour market communications. If you say you are ambitious, the experience of applying should feel ambitious.
3. Selection and hiring. Pick the people who genuinely fit your EVP.
4. Onboarding. Make new hires feel they made the right choice, in the first weeks and beyond.
5. Employment experience and engagement. The real moment of truth lands after about a hundred days. Are they still as enthusiastic as they were on day one? Often this is where leadership behaviour either confirms or destroys the message.

Leading organisations are building a specific set of employer branding metrics around this, tracked through surveys at each stage:

• New hire surveys every six to twelve months, to test whether the experience matches the labour market communications.
• Employee satisfaction surveys every one to two years.
• Hiring manager surveys every quarter or half year, to check the link between employment experience and the satisfaction of the people doing the hiring.

Connect those non-financial metrics to financial metrics, and you can start to define ROI: the cost of your employer brand against the revenue your employer brand generates (quality of hire and retention expressed in euros). With that you can calculate employer brand net present value over four or five years.

Closing thoughts

Three things to take with you.

First, follow the roadmap. Define who you are. Communicate it well. Measure the progress. Repeat continuously.

Second, recruitment marketing metrics and employer branding metrics are not the same thing. Cost per hire is recruitment. Quality of hire, engagement, retention, and ROI are employer branding.

Third, think long term. We always want to solve things tomorrow, but employer brand is a multi-year game. Track it through the surveys above, focus on the metrics that matter, and stay curious. Look over the horizon, like my six-year-old does. If you ever want to talk it through, connect with me on LinkedIn.

Thank you for your attention.