Description
It is a relative measure of the attractiveness of the organisation’s employment value proposition.
Formula
Survey results.
Interpretation
Employment Brand Strength represents an index of survey questions and/or quantitative metrics designed to represent the employment value proposition of the organisation.
The employment brand can help an organisation attract and retain the talent it needs to achieve its strategic goals. Components of the employment brand include remuneration and benefits, work environment, work-life balance, organisational culture and environment, and brand strength.
An index of Employment Brand Strength is likely to incorporate assessments of three perspectives of these components.
First, organisations can assess internal perception of the employment offer and, where appropriate, can measure the closeness of those perceptions to reality.
Second, organisations can assess external perception of the employment offer. Such perceptions are often solicited from applicants, potentially including applicants who are hired, those who are passed over and those who reject employment offers.
Third, employers may also assess media coverage or other external distribution of information about the organisation and its employees.
In general, new employees tend to be less aware of organisational characteristics than of the specific requirements and characteristics of the job for which they are hired. Applicants’ awareness of the organisation during the recruitment process may impact performance once hired, especially awareness of the organisation’s level of risk-taking and development opportunities.
Data Sourcing
Typically, data for this measure is sourced from the responses to one or more questions from employee and applicant surveys, as well as from externally produced documents.
Analysis
Employment Brand Strength may be analysed by function, business unit and location to identify areas of high and low results for targeted interventions and best practice benchmarking. The measure can be analysed by characteristics of employees and applicants completing surveys to determine how satisfaction levels vary.
Such dimensions for analysis could include employment level, pay grade, gender, ethnic background, age, tenure and job title.
Limitations
The value provided by this measure depends heavily on the effectiveness of indexing methods and
survey design and delivery in accurately reporting employees’ opinions. It does not reveal anything about the productivity of the workforce or any link between employment brand and organisational performance.
Additionally, all survey measures represent employee perceptions at a point in time and can reflect recent events.
Targets
Targets for this measure will depend on the scale used for the index or survey question responses. Targets based on benchmark groups will only apply if other organisations use sufficiently comparable metrics, survey questions and survey methodology.
Organisations would aim for as high a level of employment brand strength as reasonably achievable, given the organisational context.