Measure your employer brand the way your CEO would.

Early in my career, a mentor told me something I've never forgotten.

Change has a budget.

Look at what your organisation is changing right now. Maybe it's growth into a new market, an expansion, an acquisition, or a big push on customer experience. Wherever the business is heading, the money is heading there too.

So if you want your EVP funded, the trick isn't to argue for a bigger slice of the HR budget. It's to connect your employer brand to the things the business is already spending on.

The best people pitch isn't enough on its own.

I'll admit it. I'm an idealist.

I genuinely believe that if you get the best people, you build the best business. And then everything's sunflowers, unicorns and puppy dogs.

Your CEO doesn't usually see it quite that way. They've heard that pitch before, probably more than once. It's true, but it's not a business case.

Tie it to what the business is already trying to do.

Start with the big priorities. Then work backwards to what the employer brand can do for each one.

If the business is making an acquisition, the question is how you keep the key people through the integration. If it's expanding into a new region, it's how fast you can fill the critical roles there. If the priority is customer experience, it's how you stop the frontline churn that your customers notice long before anyone else does.

Now you're not asking for money for an employer brand project. You're helping deliver something the CEO has already committed to.

You can see what that looks like in our work with Townsville Hospital and Health Service, where the EVP was approved by the executive and the board before it went live in job ads, careers content and recruiter training.

Frame it as the cost of doing nothing.

The other shift is to talk about what inaction costs.

There are hard costs everywhere once you look. Every vacant role has a price. So does every replacement, and every resignation. ELMO's 2024 HR Industry Benchmark Report puts the average cost of a hire in Australia at around $20,000, before you count lost productivity.

And they compound. AHRI's research has found a link between skills gaps and turnover. When people leave, the ones left behind carry more, and heavy workloads are one of the biggest reasons people leave in the first place.

One client we worked with looked at the impact of lifting engagement over four years. The improvement in retention was worth around $4 million a year.

Then there are the soft costs. Customers dealing with a new face every few months. Knowledge walking out the door. Teams that never quite settle. They're harder to put a number on, but a CEO will recognise every one of them.

Here's a quick way to size it. Take your three highest-turnover roles. Multiply last year's leavers in each by your average cost to hire. Then add the number of days each role sat empty, multiplied by what that role is worth to the business each day. That's your cost of doing nothing, in language the finance team already uses.

Talent acquisition metrics are useful, but downstream.

Cost per hire, source of hire and quality of hire all matter, and you should track them. But they mostly tell a story about efficiency.

Efficiency is valuable. It's just not what gets an EVP funded at the top table. Senior buy-in comes when the work is clearly tied to the strategic objectives the CEO is already being measured on.

How to measure an EVP with lead and lag indicators.

The other thing that protects your employer brand work is setting expectations early. Some results show up in weeks. The ones that matter most take longer.

• Lead indicators come first. Views, engagement, impressions, clicks and referrals tell you the work is reaching people, and they're useful early on. Just don't stop there. The amplification post covers how to get those numbers moving.
• Medium-term indicators show it's working. Job ad conversion rates, quality of hire, six-month retention and regrettable churn. When a national NDIS provider we worked with saw six times more applications, that was a medium-term signal the promise was landing.
• Lag indicators are the ones that really count. Employee engagement, belonging and employee net promoter score. These take time to move, but they're the proof your CEO will care about most.

The lead indicators buy you time. The lag indicators earn you the next budget.

Start with the priority, not the metric.

Before your next employer brand update to the leadership team, find your CEO's top three priorities for the year. They'll be in the strategy deck, the annual report or the last town hall.

Write one line under each on how your employer brand helps deliver it. Then pick the one number that would prove it.

That's a very different conversation from reporting how many likes the careers video got.

If you'd like help building an EVP with the business case and the measures built in from the start, that's how we approach EVP consulting. And if you're still making the case for why an EVP matters at all, start here.