As Simon Barrow and Richard Mosley argue in The Employer Brand, people judge an employer by the experience it gives employees and the promises it makes to candidates.
As anyone in HR can tell you, this is an important distinction.
It matters whether a Lead Data Scientist accepts your offer, but three employees in Operations team are planning to resign.
And what do you tell the COO when they ask why you haven't filled the Senior Operations Manager role?
The reality is that as an HR leader, you need to know what your current and potential employees think about your organization.
One way to do this is through an employer branding survey.
In this article, we share 9 questions you should ask on your survey to measure your company's reputation as an employer and identify potential issues impacting your employee retention or hiring.
But keep in mind: you want to make sure you act on these feedbacks, or your employees will be less likely to share their feedback the next time.
You want to check in regularly to see whether your employees are happy or whether their expectations have changed, especially if your organization is going through change.
In fact, 70% of Sparkbay clients opt for monthly surveys to collect regular feedback on employee job satisfaction.
Here's how Sparkbay can help you get regular employee feedback:
With the help of this feedback, Sparkbay generates clear reports with a score out of 10 that allows you to track your employee satisfaction over time and identify your top improvement areas.
You can also break down your results by manager, department or tenure, and compare your results with companies in the same industry as yours using Sparkbay's proprietary dataset.
Here are the top questions for evaluating your employer brand.
Employer branding survey questions
Are you inspired by the purpose and mission of the organization?
Asking your employees this question during an employer branding survey will help you determine whether the purpose of your company means something to the people who work there. If your employees find the mission statement inspiring, they will plug that energy into their work, leading to higher productivity levels and more creativity.
Do you believe the organization lives up to its stated values?
Values are supposed to be the principles that shape your culture, influence how you behave, and determine your reputation. If your employees believe there's a disconnect between your written values and the values you actually demonstrate, this could lead to employee cynicism and disengagement.
By asking this question, you'll be able to gauge whether the values you profess align with the actions you take.
If your staff answer "yes" to this question, you can be confident that your employer brand is in good shape.
If the answers suggest that the actions and values don't align, you'll know that you need to work on making your actions align with your values.
Do the organization's stated values align with values you personally consider important in life?
The purpose of this question is to gauge the level of alignment between your people's personal values and the company's stated values. When there's strong alignment, it's a sign that your current employees are drawn to your employer brand, which creates a sense of unity and engagement. A low alignment is a sign that there may be a disconnect that causes tension and dissatisfaction, which over time could impact employee performance and retention and your overall employer brand.
Are you proud of how the organization contributes to society?
People want their jobs to be about more than just making money for the business. They want to contribute to the greater good of society.
Asking your employees this question allows you to gauge whether they're proud of what the organization gives back to society.
If employees are proud, you can feel confident that your company's social responsibility efforts are making an impact and that you're communicating them effectively, which also boosts your employer brand.
If people aren't proud, you'll need to either rework your strategy or rework how you communicate it.
Would you recommend the organization to a friend or family member looking for a job?
This is a straightforward but powerful survey question that measures your employee's Net Promoter Score (eNPS). If your current staff would recommend the company to others, they are strong champions of your employer brand. If they wouldn't, they may have issues they'd like to address.
Do you understand how your work contributes to the goals of the organization?
This is an important question because it gauges whether your employees feel like what they do matters. If people feel like they are a small but meaningful part of the company's success, they'll feel more valued, and therefore, more engaged and productive. On the other hand, if your employees don't see how what they do ties into the company's goals, you may need to rework your internal communications and how jobs are designed.
Given your experience with the company, would you be excited to apply for a job at our organization?
The answers you get from this question will help you understand what your current employees' experience is like and whether they feel like the company is a good place to work. If the majority of employees would reapply, you'll know that your employer brand is viewed favorably. If they wouldn't, you may have issues with the work environment, opportunities for growth, or the culture that need to be addressed.
What three words would you use to describe the organization to someone unfamiliar with us?
Since this is an open-ended question, your employees have the chance to describe how they see your employer brand. Look for patterns and recurring themes in the answers to identify areas where your brand is strong and where it needs work.
What are the top three things you are looking for in an ideal job?
The purpose of this question is to understand what is most important to your employees when it comes to a role. You can then ensure that your employer brand aligns with these expectations to increase job satisfaction, employee engagement, and employee loyalty.
What is an employer branding survey? why is it important?
At a high level, an employer branding survey helps you identify gaps between what you promise as an employer and what people experience either internally (your employees) or externally (the talent you want to reach).
This is important because you want to collect meaningful data points that either confirm or deny your existing employer branding statements. If your marketing messages say one thing (e.g. on your careers page) and your employees don't say the same thing, you have a problem.
Your employer branding survey should include questions for your internal audience (employees) and your external audience (prospective candidates). Your internal questions should focus on whether people feel your leaders are trustworthy, whether there are opportunities for growth, if people feel valued and included, and whether people would actually recommend this organization to others.
For your external audience, you want to understand whether they are aware of your organization, whether they would consider working for your organization, and what they like and don't like about your organization from an offer and overall employer brand perspective.
Once you have these two views, you can position your organization accordingly. For instance, if you have a high level of internal advocacy but low external awareness, you know you need to invest more in marketing.
If you have a lot of external awareness (people are excited about your organization) but your internal morale isn't that great, you may be over-promising. This could lead to a high regretted attrition rate, especially in the first year, which is an expensive way to lose employees since you invested a lot to acquire them.
How to run an employer branding survey
What questions should we ask in an employer branding survey? How can we design an employer branding survey? How do you conduct an employer branding survey?
These are all helpful questions.
Your employer branding team's top concern should be: How can we use this survey to actually drive change?
Decide what the survey is actually measuring
Perception and drivers are two different concepts that often get mixed up when employers conduct employer brand surveys.
This leads to confusing data that's hard to take action on.
When you're conducting an employer brand survey, be mindful to separate perception and drivers.
- Perception: how attractive employees think the company is as a place to work or whether they would recommend working for the company. This tends to move slowly and once it's damaged, it sticks around.
- Drivers: The underlying experiences (e.g., career growth, pay fairness, leadership, or workload) that can impact employees' perception of an organization, often changing well in advance of perception and brand shifts.
A helpful strategy is to use a few anchor, outcome-based questions that are always worded the same way. For example, the willingness to recommend the company as an employer is an extremely useful outcome anchor question since it can be tied back to referral rates and external Glassdoor reputation.
Choose a cadence that matches the decisions you need to make
To get a broad sense of where employees stand at with the company organization-wide, distribute a comprehensive employer branding survey once or twice a year.
In between these employer brand perception surveys, you can use shorter pulse surveys to collect data on priority themes and topics, such as confidence in leadership, career opportunities, or willingness to recommend the company.
A rotating-sample pulse survey reduces survey fatigue while giving you fresh data every month.
It's important that the sampling frame remains consistent to ensure that changes aren't driven by a mix shift of employees in various functions or shifts.
Protect anonymity
Employees will limit how open and honest they are on surveys based on how anonymous they think the survey actually is.
Make it clear what steps you're taking to protect employees from being re-identified, whether it's protecting data from teams that are too small, gating demographic filters, or controlling the use of open text questions.
For example, you may choose to keep results hidden or anonymized for teams under a certain size. Sparkbay offers the option for employers to do this with a minimum number of responses set to 5 (default) and customizable by the employer.
Pay attention to how people might be re-identified by cumulative filtering:
Strategies to protect against re-identification through filtering can get complex. For example, a department might surpass the minimum number of responses, but applying filters (e.g., location, tenure band, level) might allow a user to see data for one person.
An even trickier concern is re-identification with open-text survey comments.
This is because people can be re-identified through specific references to things like projects, promotions, or headcount decisions, regardless of how large the team is.
Open-text comments provide an added re-identification risk.
So, will you share raw, lightly redacted, or themed verbatims? Make that decision up front and communicate it to employees so they know how their comments will be handled when they're considering how to respond.
Plus, avoid routing a survey completion tracking through managers or asking employees to prove they participated in the survey.
Instead, offer participation rates in aggregate only and make it clear that leaders will only see whether their teams did or didn't participate, not their specific answers.
Plan distribution across the organization
Once you have an updated employee list, assign people to the correct business unit, location, function, and manager.
This allows people outside of HR to take advantage of the survey data by providing that hierarchy or letting them see their relevant teams while ensuring that HR teams can analyze data at the enterprise level.
For example, Sparkbay automatically assigns report access based on the organization's hierarchy. A regional manager sees their region but can't see another leader's region.
Consider the best way to distribute surveys to frontline and desk-based employees:
- Email invitations and reminders for employees with regular access to their inbox
- Links distributed through the intranet or employee app for distributed teams
- QR codes or shared devices for employees working in factories, stores, warehouses, and on the field
- Translated surveys for employees who work in other languages, with translated dashboards to empower local managers to act on their results in their language
Make sure you're tracking participation rates by different segments or groups as well as overall participation rates.
This avoids biased data collection where the overall participation rate is healthy but the participation rate of frontline or night-shift employees is half the participation rate of the head office employees.
Otherwise, you run the risk of basing your "employer brand" on the data that comes primarily from a head office perspective.
Turn results into external employer brand action
Your internal employer brand survey is one of the most honest and appropriate sources of data for your external employer brand. You can use the themes that your employees rate highly to back up claims in your job ad, and use the themes they rate low to determine what you can't promote just yet.
Compare what you're telling candidates throughout the funnel and what your employees at the 90-day mark report.
Any dissonances here can drive early churn and negative reviews.
How to analyze results and act on them
Suppose you receive a company-wide average as one of your deliverables. This is not the most helpful number. It can limit your ability to identify specific areas for improvement.
Your company's headline average number is only the starting point.
Segment the results
First, compare responses based on department, manager, and tenure. You can also consider segmenting by location, role, or business unit. It's important to identify trends across different questions before jumping to conclusions based on isolated survey questions.
Intersectional segments like "new hires in one region" or "engineers reporting to one manager" can reveal critical issues hidden by overall departmental averages. Make an effort to create intersection segments in your analysis.
Track whether low scores are consistently low scores or if they are suddenly low scores. A team that has always averaged medium scores is a known entity.
Track scores over time
Keep your wording and segmentation consistent across cycles. If you change how survey questions are written or how employees are mapped to managers, it compromises your ability to compare year-over-year results.
Look at trends among your key groups, not just your overall trend. It's possible to have a flat company-wide average while experiencing a decline in scores for new hires or a particular function.
Pay attention to external factors when you see changes. Does a dip in score coincide with a major reorganization? A change in remote work policy?
An uptick in hiring?
Prioritize a small number of improvements
Evaluate and prioritize based on a combination of factors: how high/low the score is, the trend, how many individuals are impacted by the improvement, and how much that specific topic relates to engagement overall. Pick two to three priorities and responsibilities changes are assigned to specific teams with deadlines and milestones.
- High impact, easy to change: prioritize these first
- High impact, hard to change: set interim goals and assign an appropriate executive as lead
- Low impact: monitor rather than implementing an entirely new program
Close the loop, or expect the next survey to suffer
Use your survey to inform employees of the data you've collected, how you will be making changes, and when they can expect another check-in. Closing the loop is essential to avoiding survey fatigue.
It's also helpful to address items you will not be changing and why. This helps maintain trust instead of silently ignoring employee input.
With Sparkbay, you can easily view your results with a clear engagement score out of 10. Using our segmentation and benchmarking tools, you can easily determine which teams produce the best results, and find the top opportunities for improvement. You can also customize your dashboard's content and wording to suit your organization's segmentation and use language your teams and organization would use.
The benefits of a robust employee survey platform
A robust employee survey platform such as Sparkbay can help leaders understand obstacles and opportunities and focus their efforts where it matters. It can also track engagement and satisfaction over time to identify which actions are working and which aren't.
That starts with being able to explore employee data any way you want. It is important to be able to segment data based on demographics such as tenure and role, and Sparkbay allows leaders to interrogate their data in any way they want to uncover deeper insights about their people.
Using the right survey platform, you can compare your survey data with others in your industry, similar-sized companies, and top employers.
With Sparkbay's automated coaching, managers can act on easy-to-implement strategies, and these tools drive action to ensure you meet your employee-centric objectives.
Managers need somewhere to see all of this at once, and manager dashboards help them visualize their survey results in one place.
Sparkbay offers science-backed questions on key workplace topics such as diversity and inclusion, change management, employee benefits, and more.
Measuring and improving employer branding through employee pulse surveys is straightforward and effective when you adopt an approach that works.
If you're interested in learning how Sparkbay can help you build a more engaged workforce, you can click here for a demo.
