EBSI > NPS

Introducing a new measure of an employer’s brand strength that is more inclusive than Net Promoter Score.

On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this company to a friend or colleague?

If this question looks familiar, then you’re probably already familiar with Net Promoter Score® (NPS)¹. For 20 years, it has been a bellwether metric for quantifying customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. With one easy-to-answer question, organizations of all sizes have been able to calculate the health of their customer engagement with a remarkably simple formula:

(Brand Promoters (scores of 9-10) − Brand Detractors (scores of 0-6)) ÷ Sample Size × 100

While the NPS formula is highly valuable in distilling customer sentiment down to a single number, the strategy team at Aloysius Butler and Clark (AB&C) felt we could develop a more robust measure of brand loyalty, especially in terms of recruiting and retaining talent. We put our 50-plus years of experience with qualitative branding research to use to develop a more complete measure of an employer’s brand strength, one that includes audience satisfaction, perception of employer reputation and NPS. It’s a calculation we call Employer Brand Strength Index™ (EBSI).

While it has the ease of use and simplicity of the traditional NPS, our proprietary EBSI measurement tool brings in more metrics that are tailored to individual organizations and their specific industries. Our measurement includes perceptions of current employees as well as external audiences, allowing us to benchmark external assessments of employer brands against internal reflections of employment experiences. Organizations are able to include their NPS and employment reputation into a measure that allows them to monitor the success of what is being promoted in the market.

And with the introduction of factor weights measured with a five-point Likert scale (see table below), we can refine the EBSI to help calculate overall employer brand health.

The EBSI can be used as a reliable predictor of employer brand strength and employee engagement. The inclusion of the EBSI in a recruiter’s toolbox provides talent acquisition and talent engagement teams a comprehensive additional key performance metric. The EBSI is a benchmark measure that should be reviewed over time to adjust operational practices and recruitment marketing messages to continually improve an organization’s employment brand to attract prospective employees and enhance employee loyalty.

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1. In 2003, Fred Reichheld, a partner at Bain & Company, Inc. created the NPS metric.