Does Employer Brand Affect Diversity?

Does employer brand affect diversity

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Do you know if employer does in fact brand affect diversity levels in your talent pool and, therefore, your employee population? Do you really? 

Of course, most organizations who focus on such things spend a fair amount of time trying to amplify ways in which their commitment to diversity can strengthen their employer brand. And as we know, in many job families and types of organizations, meeting diversity goals can be quite a challenge.

But could your employer brand affect diversity? It might be good to know.

You Can’t Manage What You Don’t Measure

Does employer brand affect diversityQuite honestly, I could wear that headline out given the company I work for, but it’s always true. Are you measuring how your employer brand is perceived by various candidates that could be classified as “diverse?”

You’re spending a fair amount of time creating content and materials that showcase your diversity to candidates. You’re optimizing your candidate experience and monitoring candidate satisfaction levels. Everything seems to be working out well, but are you quite sure that underrepresented candidate satisfaction rates are the same as the satisfaction rates of the candidate pool overall. Does your employer brand affect diversity?

You see where I’m going with this. You should be monitoring employer brand affinity for your diverse candidate segments right next to your general population brand affinity. You should be watching your diverse population satisfaction rates alongside your general population satisfaction rates.

A Bit of Context

If this sounds like a herculean task, let’s look at how technology is changing the game in the recruiting world in general and work our way back to diversity brand management.

More and more organizations are using talent feedback technology to monitor and measure their employer brand affinity, their candidate experience and their candidate satisfaction. With Survale, each time a job seeker or candidate interacts with your recruiters, hiring managers – even your website – they receive a short pulse feedback request anchored to the specific interaction.

The real time data that is collected can be analyzed and used to optimize the recruiting process, candidate satisfaction, and employer brand affinity. Because these pulse surveys are triggered by actions in the applicant tracking system, each bit of feedback can be segmented by any data that is tracked in the ATS. No need to ask what job they applied for or what region they are in or which hiring manager they worked with. If it’s in the ATS, then Survale knows it too and makes it easy to filter data by these segments.

Given that kind of capability, more and more organizations have real time dashboards to monitor things like:

  • Candidate satisfaction by recruiting stage. Does it go up or down as career site visitors become applicants who become interviewees who become offer accepters/decliners who become employees.
  • Brand affinity by recruiting stage. Does it go up or down as career site visitors become applicants who become interviewees who become offer accepters/decliners who become employees.

These metrics are beacons identifying possible problems. If satisfaction drops at the interview stage, simply drill into the numbers by location, department, and hiring managers to find where the problem lies. Then fix it.

If satisfaction is high and brand affinity is “meh,” drill into comments to find out what might be driving the disparity. Or simply add questions about the process that could help identify issues affecting this. Then alter your branding strategies to address the issues.

The Opportunity to Make Employer Brand Affect Diversity

If you track diversity classifications in your ATS, then you have a tremendous opportunity to get never before seen data about how your employer brand affects diversity and how diverse populations experience your hiring process in total.

Now you can monitor:

  • Brand affinity by diversity class
  • Candidate satisfaction by diversity class
  • Career site effectiveness by diversity class
  • Interview experience by diversity class
  • Offer declines by diversity class
  • Year one quality of hire by diversity class
  • Candidate source by diversity class.

These diversity experiences may be the same as the general experiences but, as Survale CEO Jason Moreau likes to say, you don’t have to GUESS, you can KNOW. This kind of automated feedback allows you to go from “I think” to “I know.”

And by the way, you need to KNOW. Depending on the size of the diverse populations you target, bad candidate experiences and lack of brand affinity can affect smaller populations much more severely than larger populations. When it comes to small territories, cultures and communities, bad experiences travel fast and they can weaken brands and kill referrals within that population. This can be extremely difficult to recover from, especially if you aren’t tracking and optimizing your hiring process based on diverse candidate experience.

Your processes, people and strategies might have built-in biases that are not immediately obvious. Monitoring brand and process feedback for diverse segments can be invaluable in identifying bias that might be hindering your ability to appeal to and hire certain underrepresented populations.

If you have more questions than answers about how to cater to diverse candidates in a way that moves the needle, and want to answer the question does my employer brand affect diversity, you need this experiential data from diversity segments. 

For more information about Survale, click here.

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