The Employer Brand Audit Process

The importance of the employer brand to organisational success is a subject high on the corporate agenda. We have shown in our articles on this topic how employers position themselves to attract and retain the best talent through the development of a robust employer brand.

Once you’ve delineated and launched your employer brand statement you can’t rest on your laurels, you need to review and monitor performance on a regular basis. As well as employee engagement or attitudes surveys, think about conducting an employer brand audit. This will involve evaluating your communication channels and employer brand touchpoints from brand website and applicant tracking to employee referrals testimonials and the whole hiring process.

Things change so maintain a focus on what employees and prospective employees are saying about your organisation. Monitor the organisational reputation to assess what is being said about the venture and how people engage with your brand. Use a multi-platform strategy and include sites like Twitter, Glassdoor, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.

Interest and feedback

Keep an eye on how your brand awareness is playing out by tracking clicks, comments, likes, and shares – engagement signals that the organisation is gaining trust and credibility as an employer of choice. You will need to assess what components of the brand are gaining traction and interest, don’t forget to take note of both positive and negative feedback, as this will guide your employer branding strategy for the future. Remember to keep an eye on competitors, too.

Measuring, monitoring and managing your organisational reputation is a vital component of wider talent strategy. Monitoring the right data facilitates the production of regular reporting to assess the effectiveness of the brand in a reliable, consistent and coherent fashion. The starting point for measuring employer brand lies in tracking key metrics:

• Cost per hire – companies with a strong employer brand show a 43 percent decrease in cost-per-hire, so this is a good indicator of employer brand health
• Employee satisfaction – regular surveys, compared against each other, can be revealing
• Retention – as those with a strong employer brand have lower turnover rates than competitors
• Time to hire – understand the cost of open vacancies over time.

Affinity and alignment

Regular auditing of your employer brand facilitates understanding of those attributes that have the most influence on current and prospective employees so that communication plans can be devised to appeal to the talent you seek to attract, engage and retain. As the organisation evolves it’s important to ensure that you address issues around culture, engagement, and productivity to ensure employees continue to interact effectively with customers, delivering your product/service and living your brand values.

Managing employer brand can be a complex task, at Link Humans we believe it’s important to understand the role of the employer brand in influencing employees’ perceived differentiation, affinity, satisfaction, and loyalty. You want to see a return on your investment in employer branding but remember that employer branding is a subjective exercise and some benefits may be hard to quantify. Employer brand initiatives are most likely to fail when HR policies are not aligned with the employer brand promise.

Ongoing monitoring is important as without systematic measurement you may never see the results you seek. It’s not a one size fits all exercise but tracking the progress of the employer brand initiative and monitoring efforts with appropriate metrics will show you how employer brand has the potential to impact the entirety of your business objectives.