2024 Priorities, Challenges, & Budgets for Employer Branding Practitioners

Each year, Cliquify conducts a deep-dive study on employer brand priorities & budgets. To help shape the plans for 2024, 66 enterprises worldwide participated in the study in September 2023. 42% of the survey participants have over 10,000 employees. 71% of the participants are in employer branding roles, 21% in talent acquisition, and the rest in HR.

The survey respondents represent brands including IBM, Sanofi, Kohler, Woolworths, Danfoss, HCLTech, Booking. com, Cognizant, Mastercard, CVS, AECOM, Diageo, and many more.

Here is a summary of the key findings.  Download the full report here.

What are the key priorities for employer branding practitioners in 2024?

• Creating a truly unique employee/er value proposition that doesn’t sound like everyone else. Finding those differentiators is the key.
• Easily capturing the essence of the value proposition through employees using video format.
• Enabling employees to share branded/controlled content on their social media channels.
• Launch technology such as revamping career sites, candidate relationship and applicant tracking systems.
• Increase internal branding efforts to focus on employee retention.

What are the key challenges in 2024?

• Headcount and budget constraints continue to be a challenge.
• Proving the ROI of employer branding with metrics that impact the attraction and retention of talent is very difficult.
• Keeping content fresh and “evergreen” by sourcing local employee stories regularly is not scalable.

How are the employer branding budgets shaping up in 2024 compared to 2023?

• 58% of the survey respondents plan to keep the budget at the same level as 2023.
• 27% plan to increase their budgets as compared with 2023.
• 15% plan to decrease their budgets in 2024.
• Of the respondents with 10k+ employees, nearly half of them have annual budgets between $300,000 – $350,000 USD.

How are employer brand practitioners measuring success?

• Focus on the employee experience as measured by referral rates and internal mobility.
• Positive movement in reviews and rankings on external sites like Glassdoor and Comparably.
• Content and applicant quality.

How satisfied are employer brand practitioners with their current tools/technologies being leveraged?

• 51% of the respondents are evaluating their tools to help them do more with less given tight budgets.
• There is fragmentation in the number of tools being leveraged.  A quarter of the respondents are using more than 4 different tools today.
• The disjointed tools are causing adoption and experience challenges with users.

Download the full report here.