Employer branding can be easier said than done. At the end of the day, it is about real-life reflections of your company and overall attractiveness of the organization rather than what you write down on a paper. Nevertheless, it doesn’t mean that the impact and effectiveness of your employer brand cannot be measured. On a bigger picture, employer branding may be functionally associated with HR recruitment but it must be a collective work of the HR, marketing, business development and also the C suites.  Both the HR and Marketing departments work tirelessly to put out your employer brand, and all their time and resources shouldn’t go wasted. We suggest the following five ways where you may quantify the results of your employer branding tactics and continually improve in the future.

1.         Start with concrete deliverables

The bottom line here is that you need to know what you are measuring before you can measure it. Different organizations will have varying needs and there is not a one size fits all approach in dealing with the deliverables. For example, is your company currently suffering from high turnover rate and it has been exposed to the talent pool that the top talents are reluctant to join your company? Or, are you trying to implement a silicon-valley work culture within your company to attract the millennials? Or, is your competitor doing a better job with publicity in the market?

Whichever case it may be, it is important to set up concreate deliverables and achievable KPIs before you start implementing any strategy. The more defined and clearer your objectives and metrics are, the easier it is to measure the results and definitely more effective the campaign will be.

2.         Employer Rankings

Employer rankings are issued by third parties that are reputed to be independent and can reach out to wide areas of the public. International ranking websites such as Glassdoor provide a platform for past and current employers to describe about their work place and overall experiences which can greatly influence prospective candidates. There are also pay-scale websites that roughly list the salary range depending on respective titles.

Myanmar Employer Awards is a prime example of these rankings both for local and international companies in Myanmar. There are several categories among various HR practices, out of which you can be recognized for your biggest strengths. Since the awards run annually, you can also showcase consistency and continuous improvement of your operations.

3.         Retention Rate

Retention rate is the most common tool for indicating the effectiveness of your employer brand, based on a global survey by Exaqueo where 38% of the companies used this as their number one metric. The higher the retention rate, the happier the employees, and it can naturally resonate with potential employees in the future.

Even if you are now experiencing a high turnover rate, the root causes can be key indicators of areas for improvement. For example, if the employees tend of leave after two years at work, this could be due to the lack of growth opportunities, or that your competitor is luring the properly trained staff of your company. On the other hand, if you are already enjoying a high retention rate, then have a quality assessment of your people and make sure to expose that to the public.

4.         Employee Engagement

Needless to mention, employees themselves are the best vehicles to communicate with the outside. The employer brand that you advertised through marketing and interview processes must be able to meet the expectations of your hires both on the short run and the long term. You can use either traditional surveys or non-formal approaches, such as a casual chat over coffee or peer review, to assess the level of employee engagement in your company.

It is highly possible that unsatisfied employees will disclose their problems on social media platforms, which you must keep track. This is not a surveillance of your staff but an overall review of your workplace that is portrayed on Facebook, in the case of Myanmar. With the available machine learning algorithms, this can be done in an automated process.

5.         Cost Per Hire

Cost per hire is a crucial metric, especially for smaller businesses and startups. This includes the overall cost of hiring new stuff such as job posting, interviewing, and onboarding, and should be kept at a minimum. With optimized branding, this cost should be decreased since you can take advantage of organic channels such as word of mouth, social media and employee referral. This could also be correlated with ‘average profit contribution per employee’ where you can compare the productivity of the existing employees with the new hires, and see if the latter are up to the performance expectations.

Meanwhile, the total number of applicants does not always translate as an optimized employer brand. For instance, out of a total of 1000 applicants, if only 3 are suitable for interview, there must be a problem with either the brand or job posting. This is known as ‘applicant to interview ratio’ and there is another similar index known as ‘interview to offer conversion’ which depicts how many of the interviewees are eventually offered the job. Of course, these indices may vary for different industries and job levels, and can be associated with the overall cost of hire and the employer brand itself.