Hi everyone and welcome for joining us. We this is our, this is, I don't even know what month it is. This is our March Human Capital Watch and we're going to be talking about the ROI of employer branding. And if you've never heard about the ROI of employer branding, that's, that's not surprising. We do believe that we have got that we we had a, a, an audience that was very interested in this content. So thank you again for joining us. And if you would like to get credit for attending today, you can click the link in the CEU request widget, stay online for the entire webcast, including clicking the little button that says you're here and then you can get credit for participating today. So we are glad you are here. The questions that we'll be answering today are how are organizations measuring the outcomes of investing in employer branding? Then what are the barriers to demonstrate a return on investment for employer branding? And then what are the practical approaches to actually measuring the tangible impact of employer branding? So with that, I'd like to introduce myself and our other speakers today. My name is Robin Erickson and I lead Human Capital Research here at the Conference Board. I've been here for about six years and I am very excited to do this. I previously was a research analyst at Burson by Deloitte and a management consultant there as well. So with that, I'll have Erica go ahead and introduce herself. Hi, everyone. I'm Erica Morsi. I'm a principal researcher in Human Capital here at the Conference Board. I'm very excited to share with you the result of this study and to be here with Robin and Jeremy. And Jeremy will have you introduce yourself. Thanks, Robin and Erica. Hello everybody. I'm Jeremy Eskenazi. I am a Senior Fellow in the Human Capital Center. Along with Erica and Robin. I am a member of the Talent Acquisition Institute Steering Committee and I am have been with the Conference Board for now about three years as a Senior Fellow. I am also now the Program Director for our two talent acquisition councils, the Talent Acquisition Enterprise and the Talent Acquisition Business Council. And I've been with the Conference Board, like I said for about 3 years. However, before that, I spent more than 25 years in talent acquisition consulting in my firm Riviera Advisors and before that as a leader in talent acquisition with several companies. So glad to be here. Well, we're excited that you're here. And yes, I didn't mention that Erica and Jeremy are also the co-authors on this report. And so I'm going to tell you a little bit about these reports and then if you have any questions, please do put them in the question box and we will definitely answer those as we go through today's webcast. So you can see that on the right, there's two thumbprints. That's because we just published these two reports. They are available for you to download in along with the slides from today. How did we do this study? Well, we did a literature review on the impact and the ROI of employer branding. And then we did an online survey of human capital, employer branding and marketing and communication leaders. And we had 192 respondents. That was pretty exciting because, and I, I was talking to Jeremy and Erica one day and I'm like, why do we have such a high response rate here? And Jeremy said, because this is a, this is a thorny issue. A lot of people don't know how to do this. So we were excited about that. And you're going to get to hear more about the data from that survey. We also did individual and group interviews with 15 human capital and marketing communication leaders. And so you can see there then these two reports that we published and the ROI of employer branding, the case for measurement and the ROI of employer branding approaches for demonstrating impact. And we are quite excited to be able to share the insights and the highlights from these reports with you. And that being said, here are the three main insights that we're going to be going over today. The 1st is that few organizations are effectively measuring the impact of their employer branding efforts. And as I said, we're going to have a lot of data to show you that that goes along with that, you know that there's considerable barriers to demonstrating the ROI of employer branding investments. And then we're going to talk about the practical approaches that can help you maximize and highlight the tangible impacts of employer branding. So we're going to actually start with a poll question and say which employer branding outcomes is your organization measuring? We'd like you to select all that apply and I'm going to read them because you're going to probably have to screw up. Scroll down to see all of them. Perception changes. That is the reputation position against competitors. For example, engagement changes, for example, social media engagement, the impressions, recruitment cost savings, the turnover cost savings, the productivity gains, the quality of higher gains. And I don't know. And so you can select all that apply. We'll give you a few minutes to do this because I know it's a lot of responses. And while we're doing that, Jeremy, I would like you to talk a little bit more about why this is so hard. Thanks, Robin. Well, many people on this call probably are on this call because they want to know how to do this. And that's one of the reasons why we did this research and to make sure you all understand this. You are not alone. Very few organizations are really measuring employer branding outcomes effectively. The reason it's hard is because there's so many different systems and various technologies and tools that don't talk to one another. Some of these things are very difficult or costly to measure. And to be honest with you, very few CHROS and other financial leaders are really pushing back now, not saying they won't in the future on why are why am I being asked to, you know, give you X thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to do this? However, they're starting to do that now. And many of you are perhaps feeling the pain. That's why we're doing this research. So that's why I think. Thank you, Jeremy. We're going to give you just a few more minutes to fill out this poll because we're very interested to find out which employer branding outcomes your organization's measuring. And again, you can select all that apply and don't forget to Scroll down while we're waiting just a little bit longer to see if, if we can have some more responses. Erica, just wanted to ask you, I know that we're, we have a lot to go through here today. But if you, if you think back to you know, where we were when we started this research, Was there one thing that sort of stood out to you as intriguing or interesting for why we needed to do this? One thing that stood out was how complex and challenging it can be to measure the ROI of employer branding for the organizations. And where as Jeremy said, we're going to to discuss in detail of about all the challenges and barriers and also more importantly on approaches and recommendations we have. But it's impressive about how complex and challenge a challenging the measurement process can be. OK, terrific. Well, with that, we're going to close out the survey. If you haven't hit submit yet, I'll ask you to do that, but we'll close it out in in about 5 seconds, so 54321. All right, so let's see what we found here. So we've got 37% saying they're measuring perception changes, 37 percent saying that they're measuring engagement changes, 26% saying they're measuring recruitment cost savings, 21% saying that they are measuring turnover cost savings. Very few people are measuring productivity, productivity gains, but more people are looking at the quality of higher gains. And a lot of folks just don't know and that's not surprising. So with that, I am actually going to turn it over to Erica, who is going to explain what we found in our survey. So I'll go ahead and give that to you, Erica. Thank you, Robin. So as you mentioned, Robin, we conducted a survey and also deep interviews with leaders in the field to understand, to firstly understand what's going on with the employer brain branding, how our organizations investing in employer branding, how much do they plan to continue those investments in the next year or not. And then we asked about the goals of the investments, what are the organizations looking for to achieve through investing in employer branding? And then we asked about the measurement, what is the return of the investments in in employer branding? What are the organization's measuring to calculate any ROI? And then we focused on on analyzing challenges and barriers and then recommendations and success stories. And we're going to discuss about all that of those topics in this research presentation. So in this first section, I'm going to share the main data and findings regarding first, regarding the investments, we realized we found that 78% of the organizations that participated in the survey invested in the organization, in the employer branding. And of course, depending on the size of the organization, different levels of investments were were shared. For example, for organizations that were smaller with less than 25,025 thousand employees, they generally spend less than $500,000 in a year, while organizations that have more than 100,000 employees spend exceed the $1 million in a year. And of course there were outliers there, but generally these were the trends. We also asked the leaders in our survey about the plans for next year and 72% of those leaders, each of them representing one single organization, they said that they're going to spend the same amount the coming year, which is now 2025 or more regarding employer branding, which shows about the value that employer branding has for these organizations. And as I said, after understanding the investments that are going on regarding employer branding, we wanted to understand the goals and we asked our leaders about the main reasons they are investing in employer branding. And as you can see in this graph, the main reason with 87% respondents is to attract top talent. But I can say that all the other reasons here are winners because we asked everybody to select the top three reasons why they are investing in employer branding. So they were all selected, but the majority of the organizations selected attracting top talent as the main reason for investment. And as you see also 39% are investing to enhance the company reputation, to increase diversity in the workplace, 27% etcetera. And as there have been, as you said, there have been everybody in this call has access to the slides. You can download and review in more detail all the data in these charts that I'm sharing today. So the next topic and question for us was to understand the return on investment. OK, we know the goals. How is this working? So we asked about the ROI of the employer branding and we asked also about outcomes of the employer branding. If you see this chart, you can see that from everybody that investing in the employer branding, all the organizations 100% that invested in the employer branding. We saw that 68% measured any outcomes of the employer branding. And then 41% of the total of the 100% reported that they measure the ROI of employer branding. And only 8018% of the total were able to share the ROI of employer branding with us. Provided a value say said yes, we measured the ROI of employer branding and this is how much it is. Erica, can I just. Yes. Emphasize that we had 192 people answer the survey, but of that 100 and 92150 invested in employer branding. I know that that note is really tiny on the page. So just so you know, so our, our, our denominator for these the the rest of these surveys, the rest of these charts were 150 those who did invest in employer branding. Yes. And yes, those we asked those remaining 18% who said that they who provided an ROI, we asked about the value of the ROI and the majority had an ROI between 1 and 50%. And also the second ROI was a neutral ROI where revenue equals cost. But we acknowledged analyzing the data that different organizations use different measures to calculate the ROI. So it's it is a lot of variety and a lot of variety measurement, but also in the maturity level of the employer branding initiatives at these organizations. So despite from the measurements and the ROI, we asked about leaders opinion, opinions on employer branding, how satisfied they were with the investments in employer branding. And we saw from the data that the majority of them. So if you calculate 44 and 13, so 58% of the leaders said that they were somewhat satisfied and extremely satisfied with their employer branding initiatives. In addition, we asked about the how how their employer branding initiatives had impacted public perceptions and the majority said that it had a positive impact. We have 56% saying it created awareness and positive perceptions in the external market. For 19 percent, it amplified existing positive perception perceptions and adding here 4% of the ones that said it trust it transformed existing negative perceptions. So it goes up to 75% of leaders who are expressing positive impact of the employer branding for their organizations. In addition, we asked about outcomes that organizations are measuring and here if you see there the select that all apply in the question, all organizations that measured any outcomes and there were 68% of them who said that they measured any outcome of employer branding. We asked those those organizations to respond on the outcomes that they were measuring. And if you see this graph, there is no single outcome that we can say everybody's measuring know every outcome measured here is below 50%. So we know 60%, Sixty, 8% of these organizations are measuring outcomes, but they are measuring different outcomes of employer branding. But again, the majority of the outcomes that are measured are those that are related to engagement metrics like social media engagement impressions, career site visits, application rates, etc. So why is this situation? Because there are a lot of challenges and barriers out there, and we are going to discuss about those shortly. Because I know that the most important part of all these conversations is about approaches and suggestions. And I know Jeremy is going to discuss about those in detail. But before we discuss about barriers and challenges, Robin, I know you have another question. We do. And so we're going to ask this question. You, you only get to select one response here, but again, you might have to Scroll down to see it. So the question is, what is the biggest barrier your organization faces in measuring the ROI of employer branding? I know it's hard to pick one, but we'd like you to pick one. The lack of standard methodologies to measure employer branding ROI. The lack of internal alignment on employer branding KPIs, the wide range of outcomes which are difficult to measure, the difficulty to attribute the outcomes directly to employer branding initiatives, and then the lack of technology integration to access all employer branding data. That's what Jeremy was talking about when he said that it's hard to get all of the data to talk to each other because you're looking for data from multiple systems. So while we look for that, Jeremy. If you had to guess, which one of these do you think would be the biggest barrier? We don't want to influence anyone, but let's let's see how well you do it, predicting the responses from the audience. I'm going to predict that it's going to be the difficulty to attribute the outcomes directly to employer branding because as you will see in our recommendations etcetera, many of the recommendations sort of go over different parts of your organization. They might have to do with retention, they might have to do with talent attraction, they might have to do with brand perception. Somebody might own brand perception and say marketing or communication and you don't have access to that. And we don't know how to attribute those things. So I'm going to guess it's going to be D, but it could be any of these things for. Any exactly. It'll be very interesting to see what our audience thinks. And so while we're doing that, I just wanted to mention that a question came in about whether or not we had seen an impact in companies diversity and inclusion initiatives after the new administration started. And I just wanted to mention that the survey was done last fall. So no, we don't have any data on the these figures with the new administration in place, but the Conference Board is doing an awful lot of responding. And I'm going to mention at the very end, but we have a navigating Washington hub that you can peruse. You can also sign up for our daily emails and we are addressing many, many of the issues that and and challenges and start trying to explain some of the directives that are coming. So just answering that. So I think we're going to go ahead, we'll close the poll and if you haven't hit submit, go ahead and do that. But 54321 and here is the responses. So let's see, D was 33.3 and that does look like it's our highest number, followed by the lack of internal alignment, unemployer branding, KPIs, and then it looks like we have the next, the next highest barrier is the lack of standard methodologies to measure employer branding. So and you know what, thanks for telling us that you don't know because that's exactly what we're trying to help organizations with with this research. And so with that, I'm going to turn it over to Erica to go through the barriers that we found in our study. Thank you, Robin. Yes, they, they are aligned with the barriers. The options in the poll were aligned somehow with the barriers that we identified. And so we we tried to group all the barriers that were mentioned in the interviews and and survey. And we realized that limitation in resources is one of those. We haven't included it here, but it's also important to mention in addition and specific to measure the measurement process, we have applied here 5 main groups of barriers. The first one is measuring difficulties our. The leaders we interviewed and surveyed shared that there is no clear and standard methodology for measuring the ROI of employer branding and in addition, all the data are complex, inconsistent or unavailable. So all of of that increases the measurement difficulties. The second barrier was the alignment issues. Our participants in the study mentioned about a lack of consensus about the branding, employer branding activities and also the overall corporate goals that they were targeting with employer branding. The third one was the complexity of employer branding. As as you know and we know, employer branding impacts a lot of areas in the organization. It can impact employee engagement, culture, attraction of the new candidates, etcetera. So it is very difficult to collect all these data points and of course it's complex. Another barrier was the attribution and causation 1. So on one side, employer branding effects a lot of outcomes, but on the other side, a lot of other factors, internal or external to the organization may affect employer branding outcomes. For example, the labor market, for example, the return to the office policies, the compensation and benefits packages that the organization can offer. So all of that can impact the out the outcomes that also employer branding activities impact. So it's difficult to find the causation relationship between an employer branding activity and the and the outcome. And the final one, which also Jeremy shared a little bit is the technological barriers. There are a lot of data points that are housed in different applications in different platforms, HR, finance, marketing, so and many times these platforms do not speak with each other. So it is difficult to collect those data and analyze those. So I know Jeremy is going to discuss in details about approaches and strategies on how to overcome and mitigate these challenges. But at a very high level, I wanted to mention here that we I'm trying to summarize what can organization do, organizations do to mitigate these approaches. So for example, we mentioned about measurement difficulties and the lack of standard methodologies to measure ROI. In our report, we are sharing comprehensive method to measure ROI of employer branding. But that can be too much for many organizations. It may not be feasible and if that is the case, evaluating and measuring ROI against two specific KP is or talent strategies or business goals can be more feasible for many organizations and a mitigation approach to regarding alignment issues is to reach alignment. So it's is the first important step in any before any measurement of ROI to to reach alignment internally with all the different stakeholders that are involved. But we know employer brand branding teams are located in different parts of the organization. Sometimes they are with talent acquisition, sometimes with marketing or independent teams. But in all cases there are different stakeholders in different teams that need to collaborate and align in making the activities successful and and the measurement as well. So a mitigation approach regarding the complexity of employer branding. So it is important to at least have at least outline all the metrics that you can measure, the standard ones that you are going to use as a baseline and also innovative ones that can help with a better measurement of the ROI. The other regarding issues with causation and attribution, it is a big issue not just with this topic. It can be finding causation can be difficult with with any other activities that and in and I don't want to use intervention Jeremy's but any other initiatives that that are implemented in the organization. So it's it's very difficult to to find the cause and and the outcome relationship. But while that is difficult, improving correlation measurements can help in that regard. And I know Jeremy is going to discuss about that in detail. And also the last one, investing in technology so that all these data and all these platforms can communicate with each other and make actually the measurement possible. So yeah, I know, I'm Robin. You have another poll question question before Jeremy is going to discuss about the approaches and recommendations. I do. And so we are, we are excited that we actually have some practical approaches and I don't want to steal his Thunder, but there's a really cool ROI measurement table that Jeremy would be sharing with you. So before we get to that though, we do have another poll question. This is our last one. The question is how confident are you in your organization's ability to link employer branding efforts to measurable business outcomes? And you can only select one here, but are you very confident, Are you confident, Are you not very confident or are you not at all confident? And if you don't know, you can go ahead and say not at all confident. So while we're looking for you to respond to this survey, I'm going to ask Jeremy if you have any client examples that you could share about the challenges that an organization has had doing this. Sure. So I can tell you that for just to be clear for everybody on our call today, when we talk about employer branding investments, let me be clear on what we mean by that. We should have started this out. We're talking about that. But basically that includes everything that you spend on that is not directly tied to a specific requisition. So when we talk about the spend that you're spending here in, in employer branding, we're talking about sort of the overall employer brand messaging. Any investment that you put in regarding EVP, that value proposition investment, anything that's sort of general about your organization out of the marketplace, as well as investments in internal communication to your own employees about the EVP and why it's great to work there and things like that. So it is important to understand that when we talk about this employer value proposition and the overall investment in employer branding, it does not include the sort of transactional cost that you might spend on all of your say, Indeed advertising for a specific requisition or your LinkedIn postings and things like that. Even though that might go into that bucket of spend. So it is important that we sort of share that. And Robin to your point on, you know, are, are there organizations that are, you know, having these types of challenges when you say to your CHRO or your finance leader, hey, I need $50,000 to invest in developing a new EVP and a new message and they come back to you and say, great, what am I going to get in return for that $50,000? A lot of people, including employer branding professionals have a struggle to deal to deal with that. So what they normally will do is as they'll talk about things like, well, if we do this, we will get more applications or we'll get more quality applications or we'll get more of our employees feeling like they want to stay here. But again, those things, as Erica mentioned, are very difficult to measure. And so I can tell you that that's why we did this whole research in the 1st place is to try to get some tools for our members that will allow them to start to figure out how to really engage with those kinds of questions from other leaders inside of the organization and of course, to go get more money. We, I believe in talent acquisition, believe that there is a value in this investment, but proving that is really the hard part. So that's what we want to really share, and that's what I'll be talking about after we're done looking at these poll responses. Thank you, Jeremy, for explaining all of that. And I agree we should have talked about investment at the very beginning. But that being said, I do know that some of the larger organizations do have a best practice, which is to have a talent acquisition analytics person. And so hopefully they can be working on this. So we're going to go to the poll results in just a few seconds. I'd like to also remind you to send us any questions that you might have. Erica, thank you for going through all of that data. It was a lot. And thank you for also talking about the barriers which to which now Jeremy's going to talk about some different approaches. So I'll go ahead and close the poll. If you haven't hit submit, please do in 54321. So let's see how confident. Well, it looks like over 50% are confident or very confident. That's that's exciting actually. But there's, you know, 35% that say they're not very confident and 12% that say they're not at all confident. So, Erica, do these responses surprise you? A. Little bit. Yeah. But yeah, I am I'm glad we have confident people that are confident on the on the measurement here in this call. And we hope to increase the level of confidence after we talk about all the approaches that Jeremy is going to share. Perfect. All right, Jeremy, we'll turn it over to you to take us away and explain some of these practical approaches that we think organizations can use. Thanks everybody. So we do believe from all of this research that there are some practical approaches that do exist. We did have quite a few people that we talked to in our research that told us about things they are doing that do exist that are not just sort of out there in the magical world that you possibly could try. We actually have talked to several organizations. In fact, many of you on this call today may have participated in our research and for that we thank you. So there's a couple of things that organizations can do, but the practical approaches really involve 5 areas. So they choose between a comprehensive return on investment and a specific KPI targeted ROI. You can do either one of those two things, and I'll show you that in a moment. You can look at Reacher, you know, looking at internal alignment about employer brand KP is and stakeholder collaboration. You could look at reducing the complexity of employer branding metrics, improving the sort of correlation measurements of those brand impacts and investing in technology that allows for data integration. Again, some of these things are not possible for all organizations, but I do want to show you now sort of what are some options that you could use to measure or comprehensively look at KPI specifically. So I'm going to go through this really in a little bit of detail and remember that a lot of this content is available in the research reports that you can download from the Conference Board. Site and Jeremy, this is a perfect example of why everyone should download it because this is quite the eye chart, but we wanted to to provide this to you in one slide so there there you go. There you go. So a couple of components are available to measure and employer branding looks at not only recruitment but retention, productivity and quality as well. So let's take a look at recruitment costs. So the impact of employer branding really can look at the costs, how much you're spending in a particular media compared to others. Employer brand messaging can actually help organizations get their message out about the types of people they want and don't want. This is important. We actually talked to several of our of our members and others that participated in this research that talked about sharing employer brand messages that actually not only compel people to apply, but repel people from not applying the wrong people to not apply. I know that sounds very strange to hear about. Well, why would we want to repel people from applying? Well, some of our participants talked about certain job categories that we're not right for certain people. So if you didn't want to do a lot of hard labor or you didn't want to do the hours or things like that, the employer brand messaging actually tried to communicate more authentically direct content to attract the right people. So maybe in some cases attracting people, attracting more people, but not the right people is a way to to leverage this employer branding. And maybe the recruitment cost can impact can be impacted by that. So how do you measure this impact? You can calculate the average cost per hire without employer brand efforts. You can subtract the average cost with employer branding efforts and you can multiply the difference by the number of hires. There is a formula here. Recruitment cost savings equals average cost per hire without EB investments and average cost per hire with EB minus that times the number of hires. Again, these are some examples that you could potentially use. Again, there is a cost value in implementing all of these metrics, so you have to decide what's going to be worth the investment in actually doing the measures. The next 1 is really about employee retention. Now, a lot of people when we talk about employer branding, they don't think about the impact that this has on employee retention. But a really good employer brand can lead to higher employee retention rates if if you put it in right, it can help to reduce turnover costs. And how we look at that is as you can measure that by looking at your average turnover rate without investment employer branding. You have to do some baselining there obviously, and then determine the average turnover rate with employer branding efforts. Then you calculate the turnover costs, including the hiring, training and productivity losses, and you can then estimate the number of. Employees retained due to these employer branding efforts. Again, employee retention is important, especially when it involves, you know, being more authentic with employees in these messages using the external brand message internally as well. If it is authentic and a quality brand message that can help our organizations with employee retention. And in our research, a lot of the organizations that were measuring employer brand value ROI talked about employee retention as a good place. So for those of you who are in talent acquisition, many of you don't think about employee retention, but this is a good way to get more money if you can measure the impact that it's happening on employee. And the formula. There is basically turnover cost savings without employer branding minus turnover rate with employer brand investments and that times that by employee count and cost of turnover. There are some metrics that involve employee productivity, enhancing productivity. And by way of engagement, again, you can measure before and after that sort of AB approach. And the formula there we provided is sort of productivity gains with or without employer brand investments. As it relates to candidate quality, a positive employer brand, as we all know, attracts higher quality candidates, leading to better job performance and lower training costs. Again, this sounds very pie in the sky, but actually we found many of our research participants were actually measuring this. So as I said before, you could get better candidate quality with lower volume. So one of the things I can tell you is higher volume of applicants does not necessarily mean you're getting better ROI from your investments. It could mean that you're spending money on getting the wrong candidates. So again, a positive employer brand which is authentic really can help you to maybe lower the size of the candidate pool at the top of the funnel, yet improve the types of candidates that are applying. And again, the measurement there is looking at that sort of AB approach, comparing the average performance rating of employees hired with or without the employer branding efforts and estimating the revenue, meaning sales or whatever for low, average and high performance. And the formula is that quality of higher improvement. Now there is a movement for organizations to look at. How do we sort of pull these things all together? And what we are sharing with you here is sort of a total ROI that could include recruitment cost savings plus the turnover cost savings plus productivity gains and minus your employee branding costs divided by your employer branding costs times 100 to give you that total ROI percentage. Now I know this is like for a lot of people here on this call, it was like, wow, this is a lot seems like a lot of work. And to be honest with you, it is that's what we learned. But you could potentially pick and choose some of these things to start. And So what I would just tell you is, is that one of the ways that you could leverage this research is you could start to look at what you have before your employer branding efforts or even if you're doing employer branding efforts now and not measuring starting from now and then measuring in the future. This is one of the ways you can look at it. Another thing that you can do, which I think a lot of people will be excited about, is this example that I'm sharing with you, which I would call the Employer Brand ROI Index. Now you could use something like this to tailor the weightings of various strategic priorities. This is. Very illustrative and it's not an example that's being used today in our research, but it basically combines all of the materials that you just, I just shared with you. And you could put this into a really cool index and show this content to various people who are in your organization that are in charge of giving you additional investment budget. So if you've got an organization that loves indexes and loves RO is and measures and things like that, you can leverage something like this to speak their language, which is something we like to try to share with you in everything we do in the Conference Board is showing some way to tie what we do in human capital to strategic priorities and other kinds of financial and return on investment kind of concepts. So let me take you through this very quickly. Look at if you take all those things, recruitment cost savings, turnover cost, productivity gains and quality improvement and you can wake them to whatever you feel comfortable inside of your organization. So in this example, we said that, look, turnover was really the most important. And in this example, I'm just sharing with you, this is probably from an organization that has a lot of frontline employees, that has a lot of people that they're hiring at high volumes. And if they are having a pretty expensive turnover cost, one of the ways to get money for employer branding is to leverage it to sort of shine that employer brand messaging not only externally for recruitment but also internally for retention and. Jeremy, can I just sorry, sorry to interrupt. I put a note in the chat. Last month we actually published 3 reports on retention, including a calculator to help organizations actually determine their actual turnover cost. So if you're interested, it's the series is called Cracking the Code and I've listed the three reports in the chat again this thing, you might find that very helpful as you're trying to figure this out. For sure. And thanks, Robin. Yeah, that information on turnover and retention is so important. And again, for those of you who are in talent acquisition that are on this call today off often times we are not really focusing on employer brand message investments that might impact retention. But in fact, what we learned from some of the most successful organizations in our research was that they were doing that for retention and that was a way that they could get more, they could get more investment. So if you can help to look at your turnover cost, 'cause that's very important in a lot of organizations, this is one way to do it. Now for your organizations, it may be that you're not able or ready or able to really track the turnover cost savings effectively, or maybe it's not as important as bringing more people in the door for through recruitment. Maybe it changed the waiting to higher in the recruitment cost savings and lesser in turnover cost savings. Same thing with productivity gains and quality of improvement in your, you know, in the candidates. Maybe that's a little bit more not as important. You can change the weighting and then you can create that score, get a weighted score to get you this sort of total ROI, the index. Again, this is a little mind blowing for a lot of people out there. I'm sure you're going, wow, this would be really cool if I could get all of my tools and systems to talk to one another to get this information at a push of a button. That's the challenge that we already heard Erica talk about. But this is one way that some organizations who are investing in employer branding ROI have been able to do this. And this is a suggestion from the Conference Board on a way that potentially you could use an index to really talk about how to, you know, talk about the ROI of employer branding. I want to pause just to make sure that if anybody has any questions about this, you can go ahead and put that in the Q&A and we'll be happy to try to answer those questions. If anybody's doing something like this now, please do put that in the chat or, you know, ask a question. But that's really something that we wanted to hear from our members and participants on. Let me talk to you a little bit more about this concept. A comp, a comprehensive ROI really may not be feasible for many organizations as various talent strategies and pain points differ widely from one organization or another. So for example, you know this is a quote that we got from our research. Somebody said I'm not really even sure that talent acquisition KPI has anything to do with cost per hire per application. One that I'm much more interested in is, is, is crossover win rates or quality of application. So again, that's that concept of we get a lot of people that come at the hot top end of the funnel, but how do I measure the quality people coming into the funnel? That's really a big question that talent acquisition team members told us about. But basically the concept here is, is that organizations can customize the impact and ROI metrics to fit specific talent strategies and business goals to ensure that your employer branding efforts are measurable and impactful. And we are really commending from this research that leaders should create some sort of precise actionable strategies that directly contribute to the overarching mission and objectives of whatever you're putting into place for your employer brand. So instead of saying employer branding is good, we think it's good. What we're saying is, is that you should try to create some kind of measurable metric to start to show the value. Because we started to hear, and one of the things that I didn't talk about at the beginning when we talked about our research is we took our initial research that Erica shared with you and I specifically went out to a couple of CHROS and shared this research with them as a preview to ask them their feedback. And they said, wow, this is really great because I'm starting to question, you know, if if I was asked for more money from my talent acquisition or marketing and communications people for employer brand investments, I'm starting to question like, well, what am I getting for that? Am I getting more quality applicants? Am I getting a better productivity or retention? That's really going to be helpful because budgets are starting to get tighter. And if I'm going to have to give them more money, I'm more than willing to do it if I can show an ROI. And that's really what we're trying to suggest here. These are not a, you know, you must do these things exactly as we shared, but just giving you some food for thought that you can actually try some of these things and try to invest in these metrics to help you demonstrate the value. One of the ways to do that, by the way, is that you can segment these KPIs into categories and that can be a basis to start to narrow down on some of these specific metrics. So we looked at four different categories that you could use in these metrics. The first are perception KPIs. That is your brand position, your reputation against competitors and things like that. Many of our participants, especially those who place the employer brand function in your corporate communications organization, perhaps they are measuring like how well does XYZ organization sort of measure up in sort of the perception of what it's like to work there compared to others. That's really what that means. Then there are the very easy to measure engagement. KP is that's like how many people visited our career site, how many people engaged with us on social media. You know, if you use social media for employer branding internally and externally and people are engaging with your social media posts, people like to report those things. But if I was a CHRO or if I was a CEO and I said, Oh well, we're spending 10s of thousands of dollars on our social media and people are engaging more, What's that get me? Does that get me better candidate quality, higher, higher applicant flow or whatever? That's important, but it has to sort of fit into other metrics too. Then of course, we have the standard overall talent acquisition KPI's, time, cost, quality, things like that. And then we have process KPI's like content delivery, optimization, continuous improvement and things like that. All of these four things can be used to sort of tell the story of employer branding, return on investment. And what we recommend in the conference boards after the research that we've done here, that you start to look at figuring out a way to tell the story because that's going to help you as an employer branding professional, as a talent acquisition or internal communications person to help you get more money and get more credibility to get this ROI. So reaching internal alignment about this is essential, but we also know it's hard. So you need to really establish who's responsible for what and start talking about collaboration. Again, talent acquisition people and retention don't always talk to one another. This is an important opportunity. You want to identify who are the key stakeholders, the nature of the work you're going to have inside of your organization, and how employer branding metrics might work together. Sometimes you have to work across those cross functional, you know, lines and sometimes corporate communications people and talent acquisition or talent management people don't always work together very well. And that's a whole nother webinar. I'm sure we could have for sure, we understand that, but it is important to reduce the complexity of this measurement by really identifying and outlining the metrics and start simple. Establish these clear metrics to define your success. Add some innovative metrics on your own that might help you to tell the story inside of your unique organization and optimize content and delivery strategies with the insights. So really, you know, a lot of organizations, they get this insight so they figure out, Oh well, we're not getting enough return on investment from this media or this type of investment. Let's shift and let's move the money somewhere else. That's really the the goal and really the, the fact is, is that organizations can really champion employer branding through authentic messaging. So again, that committing to measuring ROI in the long term, you want really targeted, authentic and data-driven communications that really will amplify the impact. Your EVP should accurately reflect your organization culture, not tell a story about what you want it to be aspirationally. That's the biggest challenge I think that we've seen in all of this. And really sustained success in employer branding does require commitment to measuring this and refining it for the future to get more money. So while random test might not be applicable for most ROI outcomes, really improving this correlation that Erica was talking about earlier, sort of like what is the baseline we are investing here? What can what, what's changed since we've invested and what can we do differently to change that in the future to account for also things like external factors. So, for example, if if you find that, you know, your return to the office is really causing a big negative impact on, you know, your applicant flow, then maybe you need to invest somewhere else, you know, to sort of overcome that. What happens if you have layoffs or you have some bad, you know, information from your financials that can also impact ROI outcomes as well. And obviously not everybody can do this, but you can invest in technology that would allow data integration a lot easier to measure the impact of employer branding. And a few mostly very large organizations have told us that doing this is really helpful for them to measure integrating all of their technologies to talk to one another as Robin talked about, using advanced analytics, AI and talent acquisition and analytics people and leveraging dashboards is really helpful. So our the final word is, is, is that our recommendations are really about establishing these, you know these KPI's and foster stakeholder alignment, focus on specific KPI related ROI when you're measuring isn't feasible overall implementing the baseline. So starting from before and after and conducting periodic evaluations incorporating these innovative metrics that might be specific to your organization. And obviously, the the hardest one, probably not feasible for everybody is investing in technology to integrate the relevant employer branding data. So with that, I want to pass it back over to Robin. I know that was a lot of information, but there's even more in our reports. So please download the reports and feel free to let us know what you think. Jeremy, thank you so much. I know that that was a lot to run through, especially when we have a deadline, right, which is trying to make sure that we don't go too long. But I'm going to make a case if you thought that this was interesting, especially the, the, the measurement aspects of this, Please, please, please take our short Reimagine Workplace survey. You've got the QR code there. You can, if you download the slides, you can actually click on the link to the survey. It's 5 minutes. And we, every year, I, I, I, I think I'm never going to be able to get people to take the survey. That's one of our biggest challenges here in human capital. And so, but we're excited this year because we've included in this survey AI recruiting, retention, hybrid well-being DEI. We've also got some questions around change management. And so we really would love to have you participate. And there is AQR code for those of you who are very savvy, you can just click it with your your phone and take a picture. I'm going to quickly, quickly go through the next closing slides, which is we hope you'll join us next month when we talk about exploring the critical role of CHROS in the boardroom. This is actually a global study that we're doing and we haven't seen very much written on this topic in the past. So we're excited that we've been able to interview many, many CHROS and provide this study for you. Then you can see the other human capital watches that are coming up, and you can see that in June, we will come back and talk about how to navigate the reimagined workplace in 2025. We've got some upcoming events you can see there. We've got 3 conferences coming up that are human capital related. There's one coming up in May, People First Strategic Transformation. It's going to be held in New York, and we would love to have you join us. Then last but not least, just wanted to reiterate the fact that the Conference Board has this Navigating Washington hub and it's available to everyone. It's outside our firewall. Ever since COVID, when we first established our first hub, we decided that we needed to make these real, these very important hubs available to the public. And so Navigating Washington is just the latest. We did one around the recession, around geopolitical tensions. We did one around diversity and racial equity, and those are just a few of the other ones that we've done since then. So thank you all for joining us today. I know that we tried to cover an awful lot, but we're thrilled that you were here and we hope to see you again in April. Thank you. _1741825134111