Best Employer Branding Software - March 2021

A complete buying guide to getting employer branding software

Phil Strazzulla,HR Tech Expert, Harvard MBA, Finance and Software Nerd - Oct 19, 2021

A strong employer brand allows companies to explain their employee value propositions to potential hires. The right tools can help you do everything from content creation to amplification.

If you’re looking to attract and convert more applicants into your hiring funnel, then you've come to the right place. In this guide we’ll help you understand the benefits of employer branding software, along with what your options are.

In this guide you’ll find: Best EB solutions, common pitfalls, ROI calculator, key metrics to track, and more!

We spend hundreds of hours researching the best HR and recruiting software so you don’t have to. We never take money from vendors during our research phase and rely heavily on practitioners and experts to help us recommend the right software. However we may earn a fee if you click on vendor links on this page.

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A Quick Breakdown: Best Employer Branding Technologies

TheMuse

Essentially a job search portal, TheMuse helps connect employers and employees who are aligned in terms of values. But that's not all. Employers can also discover key employee insights in order to improve their work culture.

Visit Website Visit Website

or read our full review

NextWave Hire

Good design can make or break a brand. Nextwave Hire understands this and solves the branding problem for recruiting teams so that you can attract top-notch candidates. Use their service for building, designing, writing, and getting leads for your career site.

Visit Website Visit Website

or read our full review

Glassdoor

True to its name, Glassdoor is a platform that fosters transparency. Employees can leave anonymous reviews for their workplaces, disclose the salary, and discuss the interview process. Companies can also list jobs.

Visit Website Visit Website

or read our full review

BuiltIn

Built In is a platform for tech companies to showcase their values and attract suitable candidates. Employers can make a profile for their company to list jobs and their benefits. What's interesting is that employees can filter jobs based on culture and value.

Visit Website Visit Website

or read our full review

61 Hours Researched

11 Experts Consulted

15 Vendors Reviewed

Top Employer Branding Technologies

We track thousands of HRTech solutions, these are the best employer branding tools per our research and expert council as of March 2021.

NextWave Hire

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Why we love it

NextWave Hire

Review

NextWave allows even the smallest HR teams to get a new career site, talent communities and employee testimonials up and running fast - with a strong focus on driving trackable ROI. It’s simply the best tool to take your employer brand from zero to sixty and leverage all the best practices your marketing team uses to drive new revenues.

Make sure your marketing team isn’t going to get in the way of HR controlling the career site, or else it will take months instead of days to get this solution live. Also be aware that the functionality is limited vs a more robust (and expensive) offering such as Avature if you’re looking for a CRM. **Please note, NextWave’s Ownership overlaps with SelectSoftware Reviews.

NextWave Hire

Customers

Indigo, Guild, Toast, EverQuote, CarGurus, MeUndies

NextWave Hire

Stats

NextWave Hire

Pricing

NextWave Hire’s pricing is based on each customer’s needs and starts at $9,500 annually.

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Best For

Companies of all sizes looking for a career site building tool/service.

Worth Checking Out:

Visit

NextWave Hire

to learn more

BuiltIn

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Why we love it

BuiltIn

Review

Built In is a hub for information on the tech industry, from news to HR resources to jobs. Its numerous branch sites dedicated to specific localities, such as Built In Boston or Built In Los Angeles, make it stand out as a unique solution for tech recruiting and employer branding.

Built In provides employers the opportunity to reach a network of diverse, qualified candidates, with the end goal of attracting the best candidates to your open roles. Built In offers branded content, employer profiles, and high visibility job placement as part of their recruitment tools.

BuiltIn

Customers

Cisco, ADP, PayPal, TikTok, Chewy.com

BuiltIn

Stats

2,500,000+ monthly users
65% of users are mid- to senior level
360,000 average monthly views of remote jobs

BuiltIn

Pricing

The pricing of Built In’s plans and services isn’t disclosed on their site. Contact their sales team for a price quote according to the size and needs of your business.

Get a quote

Best For

Companies looking to recruit as well as build their employer brand in the tech space.

Worth Checking Out:

Visit

BuiltIn

to learn more

TheMuse

Visit Website

Why we love it

TheMuse

Review

TheMuse was one of the first companies to pioneer the employer branding space with their in depth company profiles and content first talent attraction strategy. They’ll help you create interesting information about your company, and then distribute this content onto their site.

The skeptic in us want to call TheMuse nothing more than a job board that was founded in 2014, and therefore is a lot more consumer friendly and content heavy than old school job boards. It’s also worth noting that their distribution is very strong with millennials in New York, SF and other “Tier 1” markets, but drops off when you get beyond the top 10 cities, let alone outside the US.

TheMuse

Customers

84.51°, Facebook, BounceX, Knot Standard.

TheMuse

Stats

7,000,000 monthly users
130,000+ jobs posted

TheMuse

Pricing

The pricing of The Muse’s plans and services isn’t disclosed on their site. Contact their sales team for a price quote according to the size and needs of your business.

Get a quote

Best For

Companies of all sizes looking to strengthen their employer brand.

Worth Checking Out:

Visit

TheMuse

to learn more

Glassdoor

Visit Website

Why we love it

Glassdoor

Review

Glassdoor has tens of millions of active job seekers on their site which you can market to via pay per click advertising. This is one of the best places to get more applicant flow. It’s also a place where you can greatly enhance your employer brand for free by encouraging employees to write reviews.

We all know the bad about Glassdoor - you can’t fully control it and it’s full of ex-employees with an axe to grind. Beyond that, their pricing has risen a lot in the past few years, although perhaps that trend is over due to increased competition and the fact they the business has now exited to Japanese company RecruitHoldings, the owner of Indeed.

Glassdoor

Customers

Amazon, Dell, Icertis, Sprout Social, Capgemini, Ring Central.

Glassdoor

Stats

Over 50M monthly job seekers
3 out of 4 users are more likely to apply to an open job if the employer is active on Glassdoor

Glassdoor

Pricing

Glassdoor has 3 plans, Free, Standard, and Select. Customers can sign up for the Free plan at any time. The pricing of the Standard and Select plans isn't listed on Glassdoor’s website and is only accessed by contacting the sales team.

Get a quote

Best For

Businesses of all sizes looking to grow their employer brand.

Worth Checking Out:

Visit

Glassdoor

to learn more

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Employer Branding Pitfalls

Here’s where we see people struggle when it comes to employer branding:

Marketing is a great ally for your HR team, but they are not going to do the work. When you’re looking to build out your brand, realize that marketing gets paid based on new revenues. That said, they have the skill set to help out. So, ask them for advice on any initiative you’re considering, and make sure you’re not stepping on their toes when doing something outward facing. Just don’t expect them to do any real work or you’ll be stalled for months (or years).
Don’t feel like you have to have a full blown employer branding strategy all at once. Companies spend literally years putting together strategies that are outdated before execution begins. Take a “lean startup” approach and focus on one initiative that will make a difference for your business.
Make sure you stay focused on ROI. The teams who do, get more budget. The teams who don’t, get frustrated when the CFO won’t shell out more cash. Unfortunately, HR is held to a higher standard when it comes to proving ROI because they’re a cost center. Take that as a challenge, and keep track of all the value your initiative is bringing to the table vs what it cost.
Get executive buy in early. Make a short deck around why employer branding is important. Something like “we’re growing/hiring a ton, the war for talent is brutal, we need to market ourselves as a place to work just like we market our own product.” Employer branding is super intuitive to the c-suite, they just need to hear it conveyed correctly with a business case in mind. Once you have this, getting budget for the first project or two shouldn’t be too difficult.

ROI From Employer Branding

The Return On Investment (ROI) driven from employer branding is a bit hard to track but that just means it’s even more important to focus on. There are two main buckets we can broadly put initiatives into, one is increasing awareness, and one is increasing conversion.

Awareness: If we make more people aware of our company’s talent brand, and they apply and are hired, then we have something to show for our efforts. For example, we spend $10k on ads on Glassdoor, get 1,000 applicants and hire 10. Our typical cost/hire is $5k, and so we have a profit of (10 hires *$5k cost/hire) - $10k spend on Glassdoor = $40k.

Conversion: Let’s say we get 1,000 career site visitors/month, and 5% of those apply for a job. Let’s say we update our site, and now 11% apply, 6% more. So, we’ll get 1,000 visitors * 6% = 60 more applicants/month. We know that for every 60 applicants, we’ll get 1.2 hires. Our cost/hire is $5k. So, we’ve made 1.2 * $5k = $6k.

Take a look at the calculator on the right for a template you can change for your specific project.

Download Employer Branding ROI Calculator

Click Here

Stay Organized

When buying new HRTech, we always find it’s hard to stay organized, especially when looking at many different solutions. Realistically, it’s really hard to keep all of this data straight in your head! It’s a best practice to use a spreadsheet to keep track of your key criteria, your nice to have tie breakers, and other key tidbits like pricing. So, we’ve put together the below spreadsheet for you to use in order to stay organized. It has some example questions, but of course feel free to modify it to meet your own criteria!

Employer Branding FAQs

What is employer branding?

Employer branding is the management of company image in the eyes of job seekers, employees, and stakeholders.

What is the goal of employer branding?

The goal of employer branding is to build a reputation as a positive place to work. By building a good brand, companies see higher retention rates, heightened candidate awareness, and better cost-per-hire.

What is employer branding software?

Employer branding software are solutions designed to help your employer brand through useful tools, content creation, career site management, and more.

What are the features of employer branding software?

Employer branding software includes such features as:

Career sites
Employee testimonials
Talent communities
Company profiles
Content creation

What are the benefits of using employer branding software?

Employer branding software can provide many benefits, including:

Increased retention
Increased career site conversion rate
Better brand awareness
More employee advocacy

2 Key Metrics for Employer Branding

Yes, we are data nerds here at Select Software Reviews. Here are the metrics we think you should be tracking for your employer branding efforts, and why:

Career Site Visitors: This metric can be broadly defined as “awareness” - but that can be tough to track across all your social impressions, job ads, etc. So, the easiest thing to track is the number of people going to your career site each month, which is a strong proxy for the number of people your brand is getting in front of.
Conversion rate: What percent of career site visitors are converting into your ATS and talent communities - “We were getting 5% of traffic into the ATS prior to implementing microsites, and are now getting 7% which means 250 more applicants/week, 3 of which we hire on average.”
Other Metrics: Here are a few more if you want to go all in - percent of offers accepted (better branding means people are “sold” from their first point of contact with your talent brand and therefore more likely to accept), retention (stronger employer brands see higher retention as employees know what they’re getting into), employee advocacy (more referrals, social shares, testimonials are all part of having a great employer brand).

Our Advice

Pick one area that your talent acquisition efforts are really struggling with, and focus on that. Maybe it’s engineering hiring, being more proactive with talent communities, or getting more awareness about your tiny company that no one’s ever heard of. Pick one area of pain, design an experiment, and track the results religiously. If it works, double down. If not, go back to the drawing board.

The good news is that most HR teams have been slow enough to adopt employer branding tactics to the point where there is still so much low hanging fruit when it comes to differentiating yourself versus your talent competition. Good luck!

Are we missing something on this page? Let us know and we’ll research it for you!

Best Employer Branding Technologies

TheMuse
:
Employer branding platform for mostly urban millennial hiring

Glassdoor
:
Still the number one place job seekers research companies

NextWave Hire
:
Employer Branding Software for Small and Mid Sized companies

BuiltIn
:
Content-based employer branding

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Best Employer Branding Software - March 2021

A complete buying guide to getting employer branding software