In order to focus on improving your employer brand, it’s important to go beyond pure recruiting metrics and look at marketing metrics in the areas of employment branding that you should be thinking about. Branding is one area we’ve touched on before in posts on the similarities recruiting marketing has to traditional marketing, and it’s also one in which it’s beneficial to take a page from the marketer’s playbook.

Employment branding metrics give you a solid platform on which to present goals and KPIs to your company leadership to maintain current processes that directly impact your brand, as well as implement new programs to improve these metrics. We must think specifically about the candidate experience and how we can cultivate those relationships and focus on building candidate funnels that drive results.

Employment Branding Metrics Recruiters Need to Know

As you examine your metrics, consider the overall goals of your employer branding program. For example, if your goal includes improving culture by offering development opportunities, pay close attention to retention rates and employee engagement. Also consider adding a metric specific to that goal, such as time-to-promotion.

1) Candidate conversions

Jobvite analyzed its database of 69 million job seekers and 15 million applications from 2016 to aggregate the most common metrics recruiters use to assess their organization’s recruitment funnel.

The conversion rate of careers site visitors to applicants was 8.6 percent in 2016, down from 11 percent in 2015. Check your own attraction conversion rate—if it’s greater than 8.6 percent, your employment brand and recruitment marketing efforts are strong. If it’s lower than 7 percent, you have room for improvement, and if it’s even lower, it’s time to pivot and focus on making some adjustments to your application process and career site.

2) Source of hire

Measuring your source of hire allows you to direct more resources to the most valuable channels. For example, if referrals represent a significant percentage of your new hires and you don’t already have a formal referral program, it’s time to create one. If you already have a program, you could justify purchasing a dedicated tool to make the process more efficient and help drive more referrals.

3) Engagement per source

Candidate engagement is one of the most powerful metrics for analyzing your employment brand. Focusing on engagement per source of hire gives you and your recruiting team the information you need to make modifications to your brand’s public perception on various channels whether it’s social media, career site, or something else.

Find different ways to engage your candidate audience using custom social content like videos and employee testimonials to help increase engagement levels with candidates by source.

4) Career site traffic

Traffic over time is a solid tool to measure the success of campaigns driving traffic to your career site. Additionally, if you can’t pinpoint your source of hire with your ATS or CRM, you can use Google Analytics to track the principal sources of traffic to your careers site. Your site traffic provides insight into your employment brand based on the channels driving traffic to your company site. You’ll want to look at source of traffic and analyze how your brand is presented on those sources.

5) Conversions per page

Based on industry benchmarks, if your conversion rate per page is more than 11%, you’re on target. Your career site is likely doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. However, if your conversion rate is less than 11%, you’re below the industry benchmark, so you should prioritize improving your employer brand and optimizing your career website. This is one of the easiest areas to modify based on data; if you’re seeing conversions drop after you added or removed a section on your career site pages, it’s an excellent way to A/B test your content and what it says about your company brand.

6) Application abandonment

What percentage of site visitors leave your career site without taking action and how can you measure this? Google Analytics is your best bet. Ask your marketing team to set up applications as a goal in Google Analytics to give you the exact conversion rate of your careers page. You’ll get data that shows you the exact number of candidates that actually apply for a job (and you’ll see how many leave immediately). This can help you determine what to tweak based on the bounce rate for specific pages, or a high rate of abandonment might mean that you should consider an overhaul of your application process altogether.

7) Employee review site ratings

You already have metrics available on your Glassdoor account that reflect your company’s reputation. These include:

• Overall company rating
• CEO approval rating (% that approve)
• Business outlook (% positive)
• Recommend to a friend (% yes)
• Profile views over time
• Demographics

However, numerical measures and quantitative data are not the only way to measure your employer brand. You’ll also want to track anecdotal feedback from employees and candidates via Glassdoor reviews, employee surveys and/or focus groups. Document key issues on a regular basis so you can monitor trends over time.

Your employer branding metrics can work in conjunction with your Glassdoor ratings and review sentiment; ideally, as you work on improving your culture, you’ll notice an upward trend of employee satisfaction.

Finally, you’ll want to set a reporting schedule for these metrics. Without a benchmark or goal-based plan, the task of monitoring your employer brand could fall back in priority and you may miss out on key opportunities for improvement.

With a clear picture of the metrics to track based on your goals, and a schedule for monitoring, you’ll learn what efforts worked, and how well. Most importantly, you’ll have real-world data to inform and build the case for the coming year’s employer branding programs (and budget).