How Thermo Fisher Scientific Measures the Impact of Employer Branding

Many of the employer branding professionals we speak to on the Employer Branding Podcast are chasing the same thing: how do you measure the impact of employer branding?

That’s why I was so excited to sit down with Kenty Brumant, Senior Manager of Talent Attraction and Employer Brand at Thermo Fisher Scientific. This global organization operates in the pharma, life sciences, chemical research, and biotech sectors, with over a million products ranging from electron microscopes to cancer treatments.

As you can imagine, the talent challenge at Thermo Fisher is a big one, with many specialized roles to fill across the globe. And because they’re a science company, the metrics matter.

But which metrics? And how do Brumant and his team use that data to drive strategy? We talked about all this and more at the Employer Branding Strategies Conference.

The Three Areas of Employer Brand Impact

Full disclosure, Thermo Fisher has been a Link Humans client since 2019, using the Employer Brand Index to get insights into what past, present, and future employees are saying about their brand across 16 key attributes.

Beyond the EBI, Brumant and his team look closely at three areas of employer brand impact:

1. Engagement and conversion on their careers site
2. Social media engagement
3. Internal survey and HR data

“We use data to measure our strengths, opportunities, weaknesses, and to govern our strategy so that we’re not looking at things in a vacuum,” Brumant says.

Website Metrics That Matter for Your Careers Site

Beyond visits, page views, and applications, Brumant recommends looking at some alternative traffic metrics to get a deeper understanding of how your careers site is performing.

For starters, he recommends splitting your audience between new visitors and returning visitors. This gives you a better idea of how effectively you bring new people in and, separately, whether or not your careers site generates engagement.

Brumant pays special attention to visits to pages that are not related to a job application. He points to time spent on site as a crucial metric to track. “The longer candidates spend on your site, the more chances they have to sign up for a job recommendation, apply for a job, learn more about your culture, and learn more from your information,” he says.

Optimize Your Social Media Channel Strategy

For social media, Thermo Fisher uses the EBI to get the lay of the land. Beyond that, Brumant tries to keep a close eye not just on what conversations are happening on social media, but where they are taking place.

For example, they recently had a business unit looking to fill several data scientist roles. This is a niche, passive audience that is very much in demand. They quickly realized that the conversations they wanted to take part in weren’t happening on job boards or social media but on Stack Overflow.

Brumant and his team optimized their channel strategy and invested in that platform, creating a Stack Overflow company page that has paid big dividends.

Make Internal Surveys Actionable

Finally, the employer branding team at Thermo Fisher pays close attention to internal metrics. “A lot of times, organizations just look at what is happening externally,” Brumant says, “but your biggest advocates are your own employees.”

They use internal surveys to generate action plans across the business, from the senior level on down. Brumant finds it especially helpful to identify quick wins for each business group, whether that’s supporting engagement, submitting more employee stories, or soliciting more reviews.

They also partner with HR for quantitative data around critical areas like internal mobility, DNI, and CSR. These numbers give context to internal survey results and help drive strategy. HR is also helpful in terms of identifying touchpoints with employees where employer branding can have a significant impact on perceptions.

External Metrics

One final metric they look at at Thermo Fisher is external awards, where they are currently listed at #7 on the Fortune 500 Candidate Experience Report. That’s data worth paying attention to.

To follow Kenty Brumant’s work in employer brand, connect with him on LinkedIn. For help gathering data and insights you can act on to improve your own company, get in touch.