9 Metrics to Monitor for Your Employer Brand

To justify investment in your employer brand, you’ll have to measure its effects. You need a sense of easy, quantitative measures, like applicant quality, but also qualitative experiences, like employees’ sense of belonging. Where do you start? These are the nine metrics you need to start tracking to gauge the effectiveness of your employer brand.

1. Time to hire

This one is obvious: One reason to strengthen your employer brand is to hire new talent more efficiently. An appealing brand will attract potential candidates and encourage them to move through the hiring process more quickly. 

It’s a bit circular, to be honest. Your hiring process influences your employer brand, and a smooth one will boost your reputation, which can speed the process.

2. Cost per hire

Because efficiency is the goal, this one goes hand-in-hand with time to hire. When you have high-quality candidates well-matched to the role and to your company, you’ll have to do less wading through unqualified candidates.

3. Employee referrals

Happy employees are natural employer brand evangelists. People who are engaged where they work are 23x more likely to recommend that workplace, says Gallup. 

Employee referrals pay down the road too. According to Zippia, 45% of referral hires stay longer than four years, while only 25% of job board hires stay that long.

The number of referrals you receive is important, yes, but if your referral program has incentives, you may be getting volume over quality, so rate those referrals as they come through.

4. Applicant quality

Forget application volume. Getting a mass of applicants doesn’t matter if they’re not qualified. Recruiters and hiring managers should rate the quality of applicants they receive. 

Consider: 

• Do applicants understand the position they’re applying for? 

• Do they understand what your company does and the role they will play?

5. Candidate drop-off rate

Monitor at what rate you lose candidates in the hiring process. Don’t forget to flag at what point these applicants are dropping out, and why, which will show you the leak in your bucket.

6. Offer acceptance rate

By the time you extend an offer, you’re confident the candidate will accept, but . . . things still sometimes fall through. 

When a potential hire turns down your offer, ask why. It may not be something you can address, like pay or benefits, but you may find your employer brand hasn’t been as effective as you hoped at communicating your employer value proposition or your company culture. 

You may also find cracks in your candidate experience: More than half of candidates (58%) turn down a job offer because they’ve had a bad experience during the hiring process, says CareerPlug.

7. Workforce demographics

Are you meeting your diversity goals? If you’ve branded yourself as an employer with the goal of making your workplace more diverse and inclusive, you have to know your demographics. Track demographics over time to identify attrition problems by gender, race, ability, seniority, team/department, etc. That will tell you if you’re meeting your inclusion goals.

You can’t tout a diverse and inclusive workforce as part of your employer brand if your numbers don’t back it up.

8. Retention rate

The ability to bring new hires in the door matters, of course, and so does keeping the ones you have. Don’t focus on new talent at the neglect of your tenured employees. Retention rate is a very important indicator of the success of an employer brand, which begins by taking care of the employees already inside your organization.

P.S. Always conduct an exit interview or exit survey to understand why employees are leaving.

9. Consider a net promoter score

You might also choose to track your net promoter score, or NPS, to get a sense of how your employer brand is perceived both inside and outside your organization. Your NPS is the result of a single question: How likely is it that you would recommend [brand] to a friend or colleague?

Asking this question of current employees is easier (we’ll talk about pulse surveys below), but asking it of people outside your company requires an investment. While this is a good number to have as it relates current and prospective employees, it doesn’t provide detail. If you’re going to track your NPS, do so regularly, but not frequently.

Qualitative measures 

Qualitative factors influence the success of your employer brand too. Employee experience is harder to measure than, say, time to hire, but it’s even more important. For example, a poor sense of belonging could be the cause of a low retention rate.

• Belonging: Measuring employees’ sense of belonging can be as easy as asking “Do you feel like you belong here?” Here’s an Emtrain guide on measuring belonging.

• Inclusion: Like belonging, there’s no need to overthink how you measure inclusion. To begin, ask employees, “Do you feel included here?” Accenture created this guide on measuring DEI.

• Employee engagement with training programs, ERGs, and even benefits packages.  Lack of engagement could mean that you’re not offering what they need, or it could mean that they don’t know what they have.

• Employee reviews: How do your employees rate you on third-party review sites like Glassdoor and Indeed? Consider star ratings alongside reviews.  

Considerations when measuring employee experience

In small organizations, where there many be many “onlys”—the only Black woman, the only queer person, the only person with a visible disability—some will not feel comfortable raising concerns and giving candid feedback. 

If your workforce is small, ask for feedback but not demographic information so employees feel more comfortable being honest, and give workers more than one avenue for raising concerns, so they can choose which feels best to them.

How to measure the employee experience

Short, regular pulse surveys of two or three questions can help you track small changes in employer brand perception over time, but be aware of survey fatigue. Asking employees to share their sentiment and experience too often can just frustrate and annoy them

Here’s a short guide from McKinsey on how to avoid survey fatigue. (My god, they should know.) Here’s one bit of advice: Prevent survey fatigue by “[giving] yourself enough time to act on results.” In other words, really listen to employee sentiment rather than compulsively asking for it again and again. 

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza writes about workplace culture, DEI, and hiring. Her work has appeared in Fast Company, From Day One, and InHerSight, among others.

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