Measure Your Success with These 13 Employer Branding Metrics!

In times of scarce resources, efficient and cost-effective recruiting and employer branding are essential. Employer Branding serves to make a company attractive as an employer and thus increase the number of applications. Recruiting focuses on the process of locating, assessing, and hiring new staff. Both HR disciplines employ different methods to achieve their goals. However, they should always go hand in hand if possible. But that's easier said than done. The following 13 employer branding metrics are good tools to measure the success of your employer branding strategy and recruiting. After all, the size of the budgets in personnel marketing is always based on past successes.

Employer branding metrics: What are they, which should you choose?

It's obvious that not every company uses the same metrics. The goals and measures are too different. Nonetheless, some metrics keep popping up. We present these here. However, they may not be equally useful for every employer. One of the most important tasks related to the topic of employer branding KPIs is therefore the careful decision about which metrics and why they are collected and analyzed.

Commonly used employer branding metrics

1. Number of applications

The number of applications is an easy metric to measure, indicating how many people have applied for a particular position or within a defined timeframe.

2. Offer Acceptance Rate

The Offer Acceptance Rate is the ratio of actual employment offers to total job contracts offered. This KPI can give you an indication of how popular a job offer is compared to other offers. In conjunction with additional factors such as pay, career opportunities, company culture, working conditions etc., the Acceptance Rate can also provide some indication of the attractiveness of the employer.

3. Cost-per-Hire

This metric refers to the total costs an organization has to bear per job filled, including costs for its own staff and advertising.

4. Cost-of-Vacancy

The Cost-of-Vacancy indicates how much money employers spend on average per month for a position that is not filled. The metric is important for employers as it helps them understand how much money they spend on unfilled positions on average each month – money that is not available for other investments.

5. Time-to-Hire

Time-to-Hire measures the time period between initial contact with potential candidates and their hiring. This metric is an important indication of how quickly a company hires new employees and helps to optimize the recruiting process.

6. Time-to-Fill

Time-to-Fill is the average number of days it takes employers to fill a position. Time-to-Fill is an important indicator for employers to measure the efficiency of the recruiting process. A high Time-to-Fill (which can be measured in days, weeks or months) usually indicates a currently hard-to-recruit target group or a need for optimization of the recruiting processes.

7. Source-of-Hire and Sourcing-Channel-Efficiency

This KPI indicates the path by which an employee was hired. It is important for employers as it provides insights about the efficiency of the different sourcing channels they use to find and hire their staff. Collection is typically done by surveying newly hired employees. Insights gained help evaluate the efficiency of the various sourcing channels and optimize them if needed.

8. Retention Rate

The retention rate is a measure of the number of employees an organization retains over a particular period of time. It is therefore an indicator of how well a company can keep its employees. A high retention rate can indicate that the company is an attractive employer and that employees are satisfied and committed.

9. Conversion Rate

This figure indicates how many visitors to an employer's site (website, Employer Branding Social Media Measures or otherwise) actually become applicants. It is calculated by dividing the number of actual applicants by the number of website visitors. A conversion rate of 1% means, for example, that one out of 100 visitors to a website becomes an applicant. A low conversion rate indicates a need for optimization in the offering or the candidate experience in general.

Pro Tip: If you're looking for support in analyzing your employer branding social media campaigns, you should check out Buffer. It is a reporting tool that analyzes the performance of your Employer Branding campaign and creates corresponding reports.

Additional Employer Branding KPIs

• Session DurationLength of a user's visit to a website
• Bounce RatePercentage of users who leave a particular page before they complete their goal, such as submitting an application
• Cost-per-Click: Amount the employer pays per click, a popular advertising method because you only pay for actual clicks generated, e.g., for LinkedIn Employer Branding Measures
• CPM – Cost Per Thousand Impressions:This measure allows the effectiveness of marketing activities to be measured. It is frequently used in direct marketing and print media. Both measures have been used less frequently in HR recently.

Conclusion

It's a challenge to identify and measure the right employer branding KPIs. There is a range of essential KPIs that every employer should know and collect. Others are only useful if appropriate measures are in place. Opting not to use metrics would be unwise. Only with long-term data collection and analysis can necessary optimizations be detected and implemented. Employer branding measures, recruiting processes, candidate journey and experience as well as employee retention and satisfaction, and ultimately the success of the company, depend on it.