Measuring the ROI of your Employer Brand

If you are going to put a lot of time and resources into your Talent Attraction program, you need to measure the effectiveness of these efforts...right?

While most organizations use LinkedIn and other social channels to promote their Employer Brand (see p. 16, LinkedIn Global Recruiting Trends 2016), few measure the effectiveness of these efforts.

The question is: how can organisations use the rich data available from LinkedIn and other social channels to assess the impact their branding efforts are having on their recruitment objectives, including cost of hire, time to hire and quality of hire?

The way most recruitment functions were setup traditionally, they had pretty robust measurement of their hiring engine. However, recruitment teams have come to realise that social recruiting has new norms. Not only do they need to change their mindset and way of operating in order to survive and thrive, but they must also come up with new measurement approaches to ensure they are investing resources well.

My intention in this post is to provide some guidance on how you can measure your branding activities on LinkedIn.

The inherent challenge of measuring brand effectiveness

What most companies are discovering, is that brand is one of the most difficult areas to measure. Ultimately brand is about emotional resonance. It is about how people think and feel about your company and services…and what they are saying about your company when you are not there.

Many years ago, I was working on an ecommerce company. We invested considerable resources in building our brand and so we wanted to measure success. We hired an external agency to conduct surveys to measure our brand resonance and cut through. Then we overlaid this data with final indicators like sales growth. It was an expensive and time consuming process and so we could only do it once per year.

These days, in the digital age - in the era of social recruiting - we have much more data available than at any time before. There are many lead indicators of brand success that simply did not exist before.

However, in order to make sense of the available data - to be able to hone in on the key measurements - it is essential that we frame this in the context of the candidate experience.

Candidate Experience explained...

Meet James Tan.

In the diagram below is mapped out the sequence of events that led James to be employed by Singtel.  It is an asynchronous journey: no two individuals will pass through the stages in the same sequence or over the same time period.

Despite the asynchronous nature of the journey, ultimately, every potential candidate, including James, will go through the same general stages.

Recruitment is partly a numbers game.  In order to get the required outcomes at the bottom of the funnel - hires - there must be a larger number coming for interview, a larger number being considered for interview and an even larger number applying. Thus, it stands to reason, that in order to attract large numbers of high quality applicants, you must have a brand relationship with huge numbers of relevant people.  Or put more simply, in order to get the desired outcomes at the bottom of the funnel - new hires - you must keep the top of the funnel full.

In the case of James, Singtel is firmly on James' radar because of their brand building efforts. Would James have applied for the role without top of the funnel activities?

Perhaps it's best to think of this in terms of building digital relationships. James is being pushed down the funnel by the employer brand activities of Singtel. Ultimately trust is required to make a major transaction like signing up for a new job. Singtel's branding efforts will have gone a long way to building that trust with James.

Apply measures to the Candidate Journey

When we look at the recruitment funnel, the key measures on LinkedIn are:

So there are a lot of measures available.

The funnel framework helps us to identify appropriate measurements for each stage of the candidate journey.

Return on Objectives

It is essential to be clear on what your objectives are before setting up a tracking program.

Sometimes it is better to think of Return on Objectives rather than Return on Investment. In other words, how can you track performance against your specific objectives. For example, a company moving into a new market will be focused on brand building from the bottom up and therefore brand awareness would be a key objective. Similarly if the company is undergoing a transformation requiring new or diversified talent needs or re-branding after a merger.

So the message here is: before you decide on your measurements and start tracking them, make sure you are measuring against your objectives.

Four measures to focus on

Although you must determine the measurements that best meet your objectives, I will highlight four measurements that will provide a strong indication of your employer brand building success.

Metric 1: Brand Reach

Brand reach looks at the top of the funnel and how broadly your brand is reaching. Essentially this is anyone who eye balls your brand.

In this example we see the total brand impressions on LinkedIn for a 200 person Recruitment Agency over 12 months. This data includes company data only and does not include the Brand Reach of their employees, which is often greater than that of the company.

Where does the data come from?

• The Content Impressions are available from your LinkedIn Analytics tab.
• The Job Impressions are available in your Jobs dashboard.
• The ad impressions must be provided by your LinkedIn account manager

Metric 2: Brand Engagement

Highlights all actions to engage with your brand. This is also a measure of the quality of your branding activities.

For the same 200 person agency highlighted above, as we move down the funnel, we can see that meaningful actions from members to engage with the brand, has amounted to 327k over the same 12 month period.

Again, this data includes company data only and does not include the brand engagement of your employees, which is often greater than that of the company.

Metric 3: Followers

At the heart of any Employer Branding strategy is building and nurturing relevant talent communities. On LinkedIn, your Followers equals your Talent Communities.

Followers are people who have elected to further their relationship with your brand.

It takes time and consistent effort to build a large Follower base on LinkedIn.

It is essential to look not just at your Follower numbers, but also at the relevance and quality of your Followers. Not all Followers are created equal, and you want to build a targeted following of people that fit the criteria you’re looking for. Instead of just knowing how many Followers you have, what you really want to know is exactly who your Followers are. On the LinkedIn analytics tab, you’re able to see your Follower demographics by function, seniority, industry, and company size.

Once you know your follower audience breakdown, you can adjust your messaging for those varying audience segments.

Attracting and engaging Followers on LinkedIn will help fuel your recruiting success. When we look at Followers across all of LinkedIn, we see that:

• 66% of members are interested in job opportunities from companies they are following.
• Members are 61% more likely to share information as a result of following your company. In other words they become your brand advocates.

Metric 4: Talent response rate

If your employer branding efforts have been effective at building digital relationships, you should expect a higher response rate from your priority talent pools when you reach out via an InMail from Recruiter or when the member sees a Job Post.

On average, across LinkedIn, Followers are 81% more likely to respond to an InMail than non-Followers of that company.

Your Employer Brand attracts Followers and thus heavily influences outcomes and the quality of that outcome.

Here is a typical example of the InMail response rate from members engaged with your brand versus those who are not engaged with your brand. 

For Executives: use a performance scorecard

Whether you decide to use these measurements or others - and this should depend on your objectives - I recommend creating a summary performance scorecard highlighting your key metrics.  For example:

As mentioned at the outset, brand influences what people feel about your company and as such, not all can be measured. Employing the framework of the candidate journey through the recruitment funnel enables you to identify the leading indicators of brand success. It just requires you to:

1. Determine clear objectives.
2. Identify relevant metrics.
3. Track results.

However, there are many aspects of employer branding activities that you will never be able to measure. Darren Ryemill, Founder and CEO of Opus Professional Services Group in the UK, told a story about the unexpected benefits of brand building activities.  A  very successful Recruitment Consultant was working in Dubai. When he decided he wanted to move back to the UK, he called Darren and said “I constantly see Opus’s brand presence: you come across as a leader in your field. I would like to work with you and set up your Accountancy desk.” He was brought on board and established a very successful accountancy recruitment practice.  How do you measure the ROI of that?

Final Measures

As well as the measures through the funnel, it is also important to track final indicators, including cost of hire, time to hire and quality of hire. The key is to identify whether these measures have shown a positive upwards trend since commencing a concerted employer brand program.

What about ROI?

Ultimately you also want to calculate your Return on Investment (ROI). This is a measure of the value created minus the investment.

The most common way to measure Employer Brand ROI on LinkedIn, is to identify the number of hires made and multiply this by the cost per hire through other channels. Let's say your investment in LinkedIn is $40k. You make six hires in year one through LinkedIn. These hires would normally have cost you $15k each. In this case, your ROI = (6 x 15)/40 = 1.5. Thus the ROI uplift in this case is 50%.

Measuring the hires sourced directly through LinkedIn is a bit manual and requires some discipline. There are two main methods:

Source tracking in your Applicant Tracking System (ATS)

When you add a candidate sourced on LinkedIn to your ATS, record the source. This will allow you to report on hires sourced through LinkedIn. Simple as that.

Import into LinkedIn Recruiter

It is also possible to important a file of hires into LinkedIn Recruiter. The email address of the new hires will be used to match whether those individuals applied for a job or responded to an InMail from your recruitment team before being hired.

Summary

1. Brand influences what people feel about your company and as such, not all aspects can be measured.
2. Social channels provide a wealth of indicators of brand success.
3. Determine clear objectives.
4. Identify relevant metrics.
5. Track activity.
6. Calculate ROI = Value created MINUS Investment.

I would love to hear your thoughts and perspectives on this important topic. Please join the conversation by commenting below.

Some of the ideas in this post were adapted from an excellent ebook that you can download for free - The Quest to Quantify: Measuring the Impact of Your Talent Brand.

I'm a "Talent Brand Consultant" with LinkedIn, based in Sydney, Australia.  I post articles about LinkedIn Strategies, Employer Branding, Content Marketing and Social Media. Follow me by clicking on the 'Follow' button at the top of this post if you would like to receive my articles right in your news feed as they are published.