Employer Brand ROI: What Consumer Marketing Figured Out Years Ago

Employer brand has an ROI problem — not because the value isn't there, but because the discipline hasn't yet made the case in the language that boards respond to. Consumer marketing cracked this decades ago. Employer branding, still relatively new as a function, is working through the same growing pains that brand marketing faced before it earned a permanent seat at the table.

Dylan Lees-Jones brings eight years in employer branding and recruitment marketing to this conversation, shaped by a background in direct marketing, hospitality, and financial services — industries that were data-obsessed before most EB teams were tracking anything.

Why employer brand still struggles for budget that consumer marketing takes for granted

• Consumer marketing has a 100-year head start. Brands like Coca-Cola have been investing consistently for generations; the ROI of brand investment is assumed, not argued. Employer branding is still having to make the case.
• The past five years have added pressure: Covid, the Great Resignation, geopolitical instability, and now AI investment demands. Leadership empathy for "invest more in employer brand" is low when competing priorities are pressing.
• The more effective approach is not to argue for large budgets upfront. It is to demonstrate what good looks like in one defined period, build trust through results, then expand the mandate over time.
• "These aren't short-term problems — they're three to five year problems." A narrow, measurable early success is more likely to build lasting buy-in than a full strategy deck.

Most EB teams skip the most important step: defining what to measure before they launch

• The instinct is to launch, then report on whatever data is available. The more durable approach is to set success criteria before a campaign or initiative goes live.
• The halo effect is real and often invisible until a channel is removed. Switching off radio in one case caused a 28% drop in sales; removing a second channel produced a 47% drop in e-commerce traffic. Channels that appear unmeasurable are often doing significant work.
• "We don't do that initial work at the start to say what are we going to measure and how are we going to measure it." Without this, reporting becomes a post-hoc rationalisation rather than evidence.
• Gatorade's Mission Control model — a dedicated team monitoring every brand data point in real time — is an extreme version of this principle, but it shows where rigorous brand measurement can go.

Quality of hire is the metric most worth defending

• Volume metrics — applications, click-throughs, impressions — are easy to report and frequently irrelevant to business outcomes. Quality of hire is harder to measure but closer to what matters.
• When quality of hire is compromised, attrition follows. When attrition follows, every metric in the funnel has to be repeated, at cost.
• Attracting candidates who don't match the culture or values tends to produce early exits, back-fill costs, and institutional knowledge loss — regardless of how strong the top-of-funnel numbers looked.
• Quality of hire reflects both hard skills and values alignment. A technically strong candidate who doesn't buy into how the organisation operates is still a mismatch.

Lifetime value is the missing framework in employer brand reporting

• Consumer marketing has used customer lifetime value for decades to determine acquisition cost thresholds, channel prioritisation, and loyalty investment. Employer brand hasn't made this translation yet.
• The principle maps directly: if acquiring a strong hire costs £7,000 and that person is still contributing to key accounts five years later, the acquisition cost is not a cost — it is an investment with a calculable return.
• Conversely, making someone redundant without knowing their lifetime value means organisations routinely destroy returns they have already built. "It costs seven times the value to replace somebody."
• Connecting onboarding data, performance data, and attrition data into a coherent LTV model is feasible with current tools. The missing piece is not the technology — it is the organisational appetite to track it end to end.

A lot of what Dylan describes — the gap between attraction, awareness, and the experience that follows — plays out before a candidate ever reaches an application form. The careers site is where initial perception is either confirmed or undermined, and most of the data that would help employer brand teams understand what's working sits across systems that were never designed to talk to each other.

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