One of the surest ways to track how your employer brand is going is by benchmarking. Your competitors face the same market conditions, and many of the same shifts and challenges. So you can know that if you’ve beaten your closest talent competitor that you’ve done something right. You get data to back up what you’ve done.

Wisdom allows you to benchmark multiple competitors in multiple geographies.

There’s different ways to choose who they are. If you’re looking for a small selective pool of talent - highly qualified software engineers, or people with a certain amount of experience - you may want to focus on other competitors in your industry. But for early talent, you may be competing geographically - who else are the biggest employers in the region - or you could be competing against people who are offering similar compensation.

In Wisdom's Benchmarking, you can see how your employer brand awareness, consideration and appeal stack up against your competitors.

You can track how these change over time - spotting if your campaign has worked, or if you want to adapt your competitors tactics.

You can see how every company on Wisdom ranks. Spot the market leaders, ones to watch and ones doing a similar job to you.

You can see what's going in in the market, and what problems are specific to your company. If everyone's appeal has dropped by four points, that dodgy LinkedIn carousel you panic-posted may not be to blame.

1. Bespoke Research: Commission bespoke research - but it's expensive, time-consuming and slow, and can become outdated pretty quickly. Good for foundational EVP work, but it's not agile enough for real-time competitive tracking. Plus, it can be skewed by respondent bias.
2. Monitor Job Platforms Constantly monitor LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Indeed - but it doesn't allow you to see targeted ads, and tends to skew heavily negative (Glassdoor) or positive (LinkedIn). It also can't tell you about passive candidates (the silent majority) or give you an idea of how content resonates across the market. It tells you what they're saying, not how it lands.
3. Follow Awards Keep an eye on awards - but this is a very, very small slice of the market, and are ultimately only as good as the judges. They're often driven by self-submission or pay-to-play entires - which might not be the most accurate benchmark.
4. Talk to your employees Interview internally. You can see what other people have heard about competitors, or in interviews with other firms. But you can't be massively confident that you're getting a representative, unbiased sample. You're more likely to find yourself in an echo chamber.
5. Benchmarking indexes Follow some employer brand research groups and their benchmarking reports - but they're static and don't allow you to customise what you're looking for to your particular brand.
6. Google Search Trends You can have a look at Google Search Trends - but they only reflect the very top of the funnel - not perception, engagement, conversion or how people respond to your actual content.