4 Tools to Monitor & Measure Your Employment Branding Efforts

By Jessica Miller-Merrell 

Employment branding is one of the most powerful tools recruiters have available to them today. It’s not only the newest and hottest thing in recruiting but is also one of the most worthwhile things you can do in the race to bring in the best and brightest. Today, recruiting teams are building an overarching strategy for their recruiting and hiring efforts that combines marketing, branding and recruiting. However, there’s a common misconception that many are playing out through their strategy, and that it the belief that employment branding only exists in social networks.

It’s true that social networks like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram give you the perfect platforms to flex your employment brand, but it goes far beyond those spaces. Employment branding should be centered around campaigns, not just social networks. It’s for this reason that we should be measuring them not only through social analytics but a number of other tools as well if we want to grasp their full impact.

For new marketers and recruiters in this space, employment branding all about a balance of efforts between creating and executing campaigns, educating team members and executives as well as measuring and monitoring current campaigns. With tools beyond the standard social measurements, we’re able to see the whole picture of how our efforts online, through social and in the real world, measure up.

To help with doing this, here are four of my favorite tools:

Google Analytics

In my opinion, Google Analytics is the starting point for measuring your efforts. It’s simple to adopt, easy to understand and extremely enlightening. This tool can show you how people are finding your website or careers page, what they’re interested in on your site, how long they’re spending there and so much more. As a free tool, there’s really no reason not to make this part of your measurement.

Social Recruitment Monitor

This website is a unique tool that shows you which companies are doing the best job of recruiting through social media. You can add your company to the list to see where you rank each week, but you can also use it to compare your organization to other companies. Take a look at the top contenders and see what they’re doing compared to your efforts. Sometimes measurement is about more than just numbers, so take the time to evaluate others’ tactics. 

URL builders and cookies

URL builders and cookies allow you to track potential candidates’ moves with the goal of gaining a better understanding of what’s working in your campaign and what’s not. URL builders allow you to create a unique URLs for each social post, link in a blog or job posting, giving you insight into which links are clicked the most and therefore showing you which ads, posts or even phrases work best. Cookies are used when a candidate visits your website or careers page and shows you how many pages they visit, where they visit and much more.

RivalIQ

RivalIQ is a tool that not only helps you measure and monitor your own efforts but gives you a peek into what others are doing as well. You can use it to monitor your social, SEO and content marketing efforts. RivalIQ also shows you what other employers, your competitors, are doing as well. It’s one of the most complete tools I’ve found for monitoring not only social efforts but also nearly anywhere else your employment brand reaches.

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media. She's the Chief Blogger and Founder of Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter at @jmillermerell.