4 Pitfalls to Avoid When Measuring Your Talent Brand

"Your talent brand strategy isn't working."

These are the last words you want to hear from your boss. But if you aren't adequately measuring the impact of your talent brand strategy, how can you prove her wrong? Without data, you're out of luck.

Knowing the ROI of your talent brand campaigns is table stakes for getting buy-in from your leadership team, proving the impact of your energy, and understanding what areas you should focus on going forward.

But, like anything worth doing in life, there are risks involved. When it comes to measuring talent brand impact, here are 4 pitfalls you need to watch out for:

1. Forgetting that branding is both art and science

In business (especially in board rooms) we like to think we can control our audiences—shape their preferences, change their opinions and influence their behaviors. However, we have to remember that there is an art to branding - we can't control how everyone will react.

Candidates form opinions months, sometimes years, before they may engage with your company, respond to your InMail, or apply to a job. Their actions may be correlated with branding campaigns, but not causally tied.

2. Expecting results tomorrow

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither is your talent brand. No matter how eager your boss is to see the ROI of your latest recruitment video, politely remind her patience is a virtue.

First impressions may form in a moment, but strong reputations are what drive great talent acquisition. And reputations are built slowly, over time, and influenced by a variety of factors.

Talent branding is about continually growing brand relevance and nurturing ongoing relationships with target talent pools.

3.  Analysis paralysis

Sometimes, collecting data isn’t the hard part—it’s knowing what to do with it. As you become more savvy at measuring your talent brand impact, you’re going to see patterns emerge. Avoid running forever on the hamster wheel of data collection, and take action.

Here’s the good news—you should always be iterating, testing, and improving your talent brand strategy. But if you don’t do something, you won’t know whether it’ll move the needle.

4.  Losing sight of your destination

Always remember why you decided to invest time, energy, and money into your talent brand strategy in the first place.

Was it to grow your millennial talent pool? To change an outdated stereotype of your company? To show your boss that social media isn’t irrelevant to your industry?

Every metric you track, qualitative or quantitative, should help you better understand your progress towards your ultimate goal.

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*Image by Wendy