Data-driven employer branding – Relax, measure, analyze, plan, repeat!

If a company wants to build a thorough and effective employer branding strategy, it is essential to continuously measure its employer brand. Today, the use of social data and insights to find, attract and retain quality employees is a fundamental starting point for planning.

A woman with glasses is looking at charts on a laptop.

De mit és hogyan mérjünk? Honnan tudjuk, milyennek látják cégünket az internetezők? Ebben segít a social listening, azaz a netes véleménykutatás.

  • But what and how to measure? How do we know how our company is perceived by internet users? Social listening, or online opinion research, can help.
  • The first question is: are they even talking about us? If an employer is barely mentioned, we need to focus on raising awareness of our employer brand and reaching out to a wider range of professionals.
  • By examining the most regularly appearing key themes and attributes related to our company, we can highlight our strengths and weaknesses. Emphasize our core values and use them as foundation when developing our HR and employer branding strategy. And don’t be scared of the negatives: with persistent work – organisational development, effective internal and external communication and continuous monitoring and response – you can change the image and negative perception of your company.
  • These changes can be easily tracked on a so-called opinion-rate graph, which shows us how the general perception of a company evolves over a given period. So we will see if our work is bearing fruit and if our desired image is coming closer to the image the people of the internet have of us.
  • It’s not just what they say about us, but where and when they say it. Let’s look at the channels and platforms, where work-related communication is most active, and see if there is a trend in when these topics are most vocal. This will immediately give us an idea of where, when and with what regularity we should appear with our posts and job advertisements.
  • So we’ve looked at how internet users see us, but let’s not stop there! We should put the data into context and compare it with the indicators of our main competitors. Competitor analysis shows us how our employer brand stands in the market and also helps us to observe and learn from other companies. However, it is not a good tactic to simply copy the strategy of an envied company, as the best we can do is to communicate about ourselves in a self-reflective way, based on our real values.
A woman with glasses is looking at charts on a laptop.
With data-driven employer branding, you can assess the needs of your employees and design your employer brand based on authentic data.

If we rely on online opinions and actual measurements to build or redesign our brand image, we make our own job easier by building on solid foundations and up-to-date information. We see where we started and where we are going and what we need to do. The next step is to use the best of our professional knowledge to find solutions to the problems we have identified and to highlight the assets that give us an advantage as an employer.

For example, in our article on the SSC sector, we showcased strategic steps that can be taken to respond effectively to web opinions and data.