Nobody in talent leadership needs to be told that employer brand matters. You've seen it work. You've seen what happens when it isn't invested in. But convincing the people who control the budget is harder. We hear it all the time.
Employer branding ROI conversations don’t stall because the evidence isn't there, but because most teams are making the case with the wrong evidence. Cost-per-hire figures land well in recruiting reviews, but they fall flat in CFO conversations.
What is employer branding ROI?
It's what you get back from how people perceive you as an employer: lower hiring costs, better retention, stronger candidate quality and, less obviously, more customer trust.
The return on employer brand doesn't live primarily in your recruitment funnel. It also shows up in how your current employees perform, how long they stay and whether your company's reputation as an employer builds trust with the people who buy from you. The Charter and Welcome to the Jungle research playbook links employer brand with talent attraction, employee engagement, customer experience and broader business performance, while noting that its findings show correlation rather than proof of causation. Read the playbook.
Ahead of the New Employer Brand Summit, Welcome to the Jungle co-hosted research with Charter and partnered with Panoplai to examine the connection between employer brand and business performance. The article below draws on that research playbook, the Summit recordings and the external studies cited in those sources. The aim isn't to show that investing in employer brand works, but to clarify what you should measure if you want to prove its value.
The numbers behind employer brand
Most employer brand business cases lead with reducing cost-per-hire. The playbook cites LinkedIn research suggesting that companies with strong employer brands can achieve 50% lower cost-per-hire. A poor reputation costs more, too. Harvard Business Review reported that a bad employer reputation can cost a company at least 10% more per hire. Ouch.
While these figures are well-known, they aren't always robust enough on their own. The numbers that connect employer brand with financial performance are more useful for a CFO conversation, provided you describe the relationship accurately.
In “The new employer brand as a key to business performance”, Charter and Welcome to the Jungle surveyed more than 800 U.S. workers about 20 technology and finance companies from the Russell 1000. The researchers compared worker sentiment with Glassdoor ratings, revenue growth and 10 years of stock-market performance. Companies with more positive worker sentiment, including Salesforce, HP and Alphabet, showed stronger revenue growth and stock-market returns in the sample.
Additional research from the University of Oxford's Wellbeing Research Centre analysed more than 15 million employee wellbeing responses from Indeed and data from more than 1,600 U.S.-listed companies. It found that higher workplace wellbeing was associated with greater firm value, higher return on assets and higher profits. The researchers also reported that the top 100 companies ranked by wellbeing outperformed the S&P 500 and Dow Jones by 20% over the period studied.
Daniel Zhao, lead economist at Glassdoor, makes a related point in the Charter playbook interview: employee engagement and satisfaction are linked to business outcomes, including customer satisfaction, financial outperformance and negative outcomes such as misconduct or fraud. That turns employer brand from a recruitment nice-to-have into a question of employee experience, risk and due diligence. Zhao's interview identifies culture, senior leadership and career opportunities as the three most important workplace factors for employee satisfaction.
You're probably measuring the wrong thing
Most employer brand programmes track what's easiest to quantify: applications received, cost-per-hire and time-to-fill. But the research suggests that employer brand also creates value through the people already in your organisation.
A 2024 service-sector study summarised in the playbook found that employer branding investments delivered stronger performance gains through current employees than through new hires. The finding challenges the idea that employer brand is mainly a recruitment tool. In that study, employee satisfaction was linked to customer experience and organisational reputation.
Zhao states the underlying mechanism clearly:
“You can't really have a strong employer brand without a strong employee experience. Then, ultimately, how employees feel and how they are able to perform on a daily basis is the underlying reason why your business works or doesn't.”
— Daniel Zhao, lead economist, Glassdoor.
That means rethinking what we actually track. Joel Willcher, head of lifecycle engagement at McKinsey, described how his team connects employer brand activity to business outcomes by tracking the funnel from social-media campaign to website visit, application and successful application, then measuring the total cost of that funnel.
“I very rarely suggest people initiatives for the sake of people. It always starts with what is the problem we as an institution are trying to solve and, 100% of the time, people are the solution.”
— Joel Willcher, head of lifecycle engagement, McKinsey.
Starting with the business problem rather than the people pitch changes who you're speaking to and what evidence you need to bring. It's a small shift in how you open the conversation.
Three things that make an impact
1. Stay consistent through uncertainty
Sarah Walker, chief people officer at the Long-Term Stock Exchange, discussed the difference between responding to short-term pressure and abandoning a long-term employer brand strategy:
“Companies who have stayed true to their company culture, their commitments — how that brand looks and feels sort of when no one's looking — do end up outperforming the ones who whiplash with whatever's happening in the economy.”
— Sarah Walker, chief people officer, the Long-Term Stock Exchange. Summit ROI session
If short-term budget pressure changes what you promise candidates and employees, it can create a credibility gap that can become expensive to fix.
2. Make career growth central, not an afterthought
Glassdoor data identifies culture, senior leadership and career opportunities as the three most important workplace factors for employee satisfaction. The research also says those factors have remained broadly stable since before the pandemic. Teuila Hanson, chief people officer at LinkedIn, was frank about the standard employers need to meet:
“Every single person you recruit into your organisation should be the best. You should expect that they're getting InMails on LinkedIn every day even after you recruited them, because they are the best. And you need to take care of them.”
— Teuila Hanson, chief people officer, LinkedIn.
3. Put money into content, not just ads
Glassdoor reports that employers whose overall rating improved by 0.5 points saw 20% more job clicks and 16% more application starts on average.
LinkedIn's widely cited estimate is that 75% of the global workforce is passive talent that is not actively job searching. The practical implication is that employer brand content has a role before a job post even goes live. It helps candidates understand what your organisation is like, whether the work fits their ambitions and whether your promises match the experience you can offer.
What we see on our own platform
When we look at company profiles on our platform, the patterns we see are consistent with the Summit research: what an employer says externally needs to reflect how it authentically approaches things. In fact, the employers who consistently attract attention on Welcome Employer Brand aren't always the biggest or best-known. They tend to give candidates a clearer picture of the work they’re doing, their people and the employee experience.
We’ve seen that company profiles featuring 10 to 12 videos see engagement rates nearly 5% higher than profiles with fewer than three. What are candidates interested in? Welcome to the Jungle's analysis of more than 368,000 UK-based candidates found that they’re looking to understand ways of working, who they’ll be working with, and what growth looks like.
We’ve also seen from surveying our candidates that 87% of young professionals are more likely to apply to companies actively working on diversity, while 89% view concrete environmental action positively.
Alice Hagger, chief brand and creative officer at Welcome to the Jungle, described the role of employer brand storytelling at the Summit:
“We don't just choose a job, we choose a story we want to be a part of. What makes people stay isn't always what made them join. They might have joined for the role or the salary, but they decided to stay because of the story and because of the people. Most employer brands don't write for those moments.”
— Alice Hagger, chief brand and creative officer, Welcome to the Jungle.
Employer brand is a performance tool, not just a communications one. Communication is how you make the performance visible. Companies that build employer brand from the inside out are more likely to create a credible story because the message starts with the employee experience.
Employer branding ROI: the questions your CFO will ask
A few things are worth knowing before you walk into your next budget meeting.
Lead with the governance angle. “Our Glassdoor score is a signal of employee sentiment and business health” lands differently from “employer brand lowers cost-per-hire.” Then bring in performance data. Then explain what you're going to measure differently going forward.
Hear it directly from the people who said it
The research in this article draws on the Charter and Welcome to the Jungle New Employer Brand Playbook, produced for the New Employer Brand Summit 2025, with contributions from Glassdoor, Oxford University, LinkedIn, McKinsey and other practitioners.
Want to hear these conversations in full? The complete Summit recordings are available on demand.
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