Metrics Matter: Measuring Employer Brand with @ShannonSmedstad and @Social_Em

Employer brand is more than just a story and a heartfelt video on your website.

It’s tears on the faces of employees, telling you the story of their manager’s compassion when their dad passed away. It’s how they met their best friend at work. It is the stories of so many people, summarized, and how those stories translate into brand content. These stories, measuring employer brand, and so much more were the topic of our conversation with Emily Fritz and Shannon Smedstad from team exaqueo.

Our conversation with these employer brand experts ranged from breaking down the distinctions between recruitment marketing and employer brand to defining culture and ultimately discovered that employer brand isn’t “just fluff” anymore. Emily and Shannon have backgrounds in both university recruiting and agency recruiting. Because of this, our guests were able to offer an entry-level course into culture for every audience, from high volume to hyper-targeted diversity candidates. Despite the variety of candidate backgrounds, they’ve found that there’s always one truth:

“People care about culture when you define it as the workplace environment and the company’s behaviors and norms.”

Of course, people often push back on employer brand, claiming it’s not measurable. However, our guests offered a guide for delivering better data to justify the ROI on your employer brand expenses. Unlike many agencies, the exaqueo team does measure success.

“We do recommend measurements – with our research we are able to get a really good sense of the company, the field, so we have a good sense of what they should/should not measure and the right metrics – why this is better than this and this is why.” 

But what to measure isn’t always so obvious.

Here are three things our guests recommend you review when trying to align data to your employer brand efforts:

1. Know your goals, what you want to achieve, and who you want to reach before starting any program.
2. Measure retention and why people turn down offers. Consider this when you’re building attraction programs. “We do declination surveys and ask them why – short survey – what influenced your decisions and where did you go?” added Shannon.  
3. Measure brand over time and measure campaigns more short term.

Our conversation with Emily Fritz and Shannon Smedstad shows just how necessary measuring employer brand is. When culture is so important to candidates, our guests’ backgrounds and knowledge are incredibly valuable. This is true especially when it comes to their tips on measuring employer brand and what to review when trying to align data to your employer brand efforts.

If that wasn’t enough, below you’ll hear Emily and Shannon share more:-