Brand-Building Metrics
Part of The PIRATE Way — Stories about scaling up engineering teams
Metrics for Brand Building in Talent Acquisition
Measuring the effectiveness of your channels is essential to ensure you are using your resources, time, and money wisely. You should consider two types of metrics: transactional metrics that are easy to measure and other metrics that may not be 100% accurate but provide an essential reference for keeping or discarding a channel.
Background
In some cases, you can consume API for grabbing automatically not just the campaigns you are running but also the cost and conversion (e.g. LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Google). However, it may take work to collect information automatically. In such cases, gather as much information as possible for future investigation and learning.
Segmentation
Segmenting the data will help you evaluate the performance of each segment and fine-tune your strategy. Consider collecting the following information:
- Date: When the action was executed
- Channel: sem, social_media_ads, content_marketing, referral_program
- Source: google, linkedin, stackoverflow
- Medium: ads, email, message, blog_post
- Campaign: python_bcn_event_21, series_a_funding_round_pr, …
- Cost: Economics of the action (human cost included)
Impact
Measuring the impact of your brand-building activities can be challenging, especially for offline activities. However, there are creative ways to measure the following:
- Volume of viewers
- Volume of interactions (likes, shares, comments)
- Volume of candidates who applied for a role and started the hiring process
- Volume of candidates hired through that action
Separating potential hires and hires is essential in some cases, as a potential hire may reject the offer for various reasons. That doesn’t mean the channel is not providing excellent candidates who are successfully reaching the end of the process.
Automation
Implement a good attribution strategy for online and offline activities to measure your brand-building activities. Tools like branch.io can help ensure every action and campaign has a unique link with metadata for future measurement. You can use a QR code with that unique link for offline events. Your hiring process system must process that link and add metadata, such as channel, campaign, and terms (Google’s campaign URL builder can be a good inspiration), to the candidate in the hiring and, eventually, the HR system.
Metrics
Here are some essential metrics to consider:
- Cost of Awareness: The volume of viewers/Sum of Costs for that segmentation
- Cost of Engagement: The volume of interactions/Sum of Costs for that segmentation
- Cost of Acquisition: The volume of applicants/Sum of Costs for that segmentation
- Cost of Hire: The volume of hires/Sum of Costs for that segmentation
- Conversion (CTR): The volume of applicants/The volume of hires
- Retention (LTV): The volume of hires/The volume of members after 6/12 months
- Channel Distribution (%): % of potential hires per segment
Conclusion
While some metrics can be perceived as vanity metrics, having a complete picture will help you make better decisions. The cost of awareness and engagement will help you identify the most effective channels to build your brand. The cost of acquisition and cost of hire will help you identify the most effective channels to acquire talent. The conversion and distribution will help you be more tactical about what to keep and drop. Finally, LTV is nice to understand the segments that need to be providing members who stay.
Remember: This is a blog post from the series “The PIRATE Way”.
