Just recently, I’ve been asked by quite a few Chief Exec’s, mainly directly, sometimes via a Head of TA, or Head of Comm’s, about the return on investment that they’ll get from investing in, and then following, an EVP or Employer brand deployment programme. And then what the KPIs will be. So much so, that I thought I’d jot down the answer, just in case it was useful to you too.

“It’s really simple”, I generally answer. “There are three main business benefits you should be looking for from an EVP or employer brand programme”. They are:

1. A significant increase in the number of best-in-class candidates considering you as their preferred employer
2. A reduction in unwanted attrition
3. Growth in awareness of your core values, with increased clarity about how they benefit your employees, your clients and wider society

That’s it. Simple. Now all you need to do is to decide on which, if not all, are your priorities and whether the impact needs to be rapid and immediate, or incremental and longer-burn. And there you have the starting point for your strategy. 

ROI is then easy to work out in line with the strategy you’ve identified. If - for example - you’re thinking long-term, and you're focused on employee engagement and thereby reducing unwanted attrition, then simply work out what the cost saving of not having to recruit a replacement for an average employee. If you can hang on to them for an extra 12 months how much will that save you? Or, figure out the upside to a 10% increase in productivity from a single, more engaged, employee. How much extra will that earn?

Or, if you need to positively impact on recruitment effectiveness right now, what’s the business value of reducing the time to hire or increasing the number of great candidates?

Then multiply.  Simple formulas that drive real, tangible, business value.

Your KPIs, the things you'll be measuring daily/weekly/monthly (you can delete as appropriate), should directly follow on. 

Often we help out with the process of figuring this detail out, running workshops to map out objectives, and working to identify the ROI and the KPIs of EVP programmes with our clients. You’d be amazed how frequently the outcomes are consistently both simple and long-lastingly business-critical. You probably won't be quite so amazed at how horrendous the average ATS or CRM is at delivering the data points that you actually need when you’ve identified what’s important….

Anyway, to get the ROI and KPI question right, you just need to know what’s important to your business, and how quickly you need to get there. Then you’ll know what you’re working towards achieving, and how to measure it. 

PS. At this point, the EB film-flam merchants are getting even redder in the forehead and it's likely that gaskets are being blown in apoplexy. They’ll tell you it’s complex, and difficult, that you need their dashboard solution no doubt to interface with the ATS. They’ll say the way they do it is proprietary and complex and requires fully integrated systems. I wonder how much they want to sell their solution to you for, and whether that’s going to give you the information you need.