First things first, what does employer branding really mean?

Employer brand is the term commonly used to describe an a company’s reputation as an employer, and its value proposition to its employees, as opposed to its more general corporate brand reputation and value proposition to customers.

According to the LinkedIn Global Talent Trends 2017 report, if employers had unlimited budgets employer branding is the number one recruitment aspect they would invest in. 53% of employers agreed that this would be the case, with 80% agreeing that employer brand has a significant impact on their ability to hire great talent.

Employer branding is what makes one company stand out, but what do candidates want to see? The Linked in ‘Global Talent Trends’ reported that candidates most valued:

1) Culture & values
2) Perks & benefits
3) Mission & vision

Take a look at your own employer branding. Is it reflective of your culture and values? Does it convey the ethos and feel of your business? Is it an accurate representation of life at your company?

How can you measure these things?

Employer branding is difficult to measure. Showing a direct correlation between a stronger candidate pipeline and branding efforts can be tricky.

The top three ways to measure your employee branding (according to the LinkedIn Global Talent Trends 2017) are:

• Traffic to your website’s careers page
• A survey on current employees
• Social media engagement

One way we measure employer branding at ISL is through a hire survey. We survey all employees three months into their careers with us, in order to understand initial perceptions of our brand and business, based on touch points throughout the interview process.

The survey then explores whether their initial perceptions are aligned to the reality of working for us. How do the two stack up?

We recommend a recent hire survey as a great way to understand whether your employer branding is an accurate representation of life as an employee in your company.

Below is a template of our recent hire survey, which provides insight into the effectiveness of your employer branding and ideas on how to improve it.

First Steps

What motivated the employee to consider a role and how did they transfer those motivators into actions? What process did they go through and how did they start their research into new options?

• Why were you looking for a new role?
• What were the first steps you took?
• What were you looking for in your new role? What were your key priorities?
• How did you decide which companies to speak with?
• Which other companies did you compare explore?

Discovering

Delve deeper into how your employee first came into contact with your brand and how they developed knowledge and created a perception of your company. Which tools did they use to research your company? Which gave them the best insight?

• How did you first come to hear about us?
• What was your initial perception? What formed that perception?
• How did we demonstrate we matched your priorities list?
• What information stood out to you throughout your research?
• How did you research us/ reference us? Which channels did you use?
• What differentiated us from other companies you researched?
• What did other companies do that stood out to you in your research?

Social Media

Understand the effectiveness of your social media channels. How many employees looked at your social media to build a perception of your company culture? How useful was it to them? What part did it play in creating their initial perception of your culture?

• Did you look at our social media throughout the research/ interview process? If yes, which three words would you use to describe our company based on our social media accounts?
• In your search for the right company, were there companies that had particularly engaging social media accounts? What was it that they did that you liked?
• What do you think we could do more or less of from an internal recruitment marketing perspective?

Interview Process

Track your employee’s journey from an interested candidate through to commitment to join. Once your employee was interested in your company, how did you transfer that interest through to buy-in and commitment? What particularly helped candidates gain insight into your company? What did they really value? What triggered their decision to join?

• What did you like about our interview process?
• When throughout our process do you realise that we were the right company for you? What triggered it?
• What did we do throughout the interview process that really helped you, and made the decision easier for you?
• How did we demonstrate our values and bring our culture to life?
• How did our interview differ from other interview processes? Was there anything that other companies did throughout their interview process that appealed to you or was particularly insightful?

The Present

Now that your candidate has been successfully converted to a current employee, how does the reality of their role and their view of your business compare to their initial perception created throughout the research and interview phases? Was your employer branding from your adverts, social media, website and interview process an accurate representation?

• What do you think our KSPs are from an employee perspective?
• Are we different from your previous company? If so, how?
• Now you are here, what surprised or surprises you, based on how we described ourselves and the image we portrayed?
• On a scale of 1-10 (1 being not at all, 10 being definitely) how closely do we align with our employer branding and the way we described our company through our marketing and the interview process?
• Can you give an example to support your answer?
• What could we do to further differentiate ourselves from our competitors? How would you then bring that to life to attract other people to us?

Conducting a recent hire survey with each of your employees, either face-to-face or via an online survey provides a wealth of valuable insight into how your brand and company is being perceived by your target audience. We all have moments when we believe we know what people think, but do we really? Probably not. Ask them! Your employees are a reflection of your target audience, don’t second guess something as important as employer branding. Take the time to learn from your recent hires to understand whether your positioning of your company and culture is as effective as it could be!

If you found this blog helpful, you may be interested in reading our 2018 Essential Recruitment Planning Guide which covers routes to market, market research, on boarding tips, an ‘am i ready to recruit?’ survey and any more useful chapters! 

This post originally appeared on the ISL Recruitment blog.