Summary
T. Rowe Price engaged Edelman to better position the organization as an employer of choice for diverse talent, specifically Black and Latinx professionals from the financial services and technology sectors. Edelman executed a full-funnel employer marketing program to attract under-represented minority candidates to T. Rowe Price. Edelman Data & Intelligence (DXI) was engaged to measure whether the program was successful at driving target candidates to apply for open roles. Using econometric analysis, we demonstrated that the marketing program succeeded in driving 22% of applications received from under-represented minority candidates.

Objective/Brief
Representation remains an ongoing challenge in the financial investment services industry, with 2022 data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicating that only 14% of the workforce identifies as Black or Latinx. T. Rowe Price, a leading asset management firm, has a long-standing history of supporting communities of color. T. Rowe began work on its diversity talent acquisition program with Edelman to better position the organization as an employer of choice for diverse talent, specifically Black and Latinx professionals from the financial services and technology sectors.

The program used a variety of owned and paid media outreach to reach and introduce potential candidates to T. Rowe Price as an employer. Media placements ranged from mainstream platforms such as LinkedIn, Glassdoor and Instagram to sites tailored to the target audience such as Blavity and We All Grow Latina. To justify T. Rowe’s investment in the program and advocate for continued allocations, a measurement workstream needed to quantify the impact of the program by demonstrating that the program was driving potential under-represented minority candidates to apply for roles.

Strategy
To demonstrate the impact of the employer marketing program in attracting under-represented minority candidates to apply for positions at T. Rowe Price, data about the media activations in the program needed to be clearly linked to job application data. Data on job applications at T. Rowe Price was available through the client’s talent acquisition platform (Workday); however, the technology infrastructure was not in place across all media channels to track whether applicants had been exposed to the program’s media activations/activities prior to applying. An alternative approach to traditional click attribution was required.

Edelman DXI devised an innovative solution leveraging our core Communications Mixed Media Modeling (CM3) offering, grounded in the field of econometrics, harnessing the available data to quantify the impact of employer marketing on job applications. This solution leveraged the available aggregate media and application data over time, avoiding the need to set up directly trackable media (e.g., inconsistent pixels and cookies). The approach called for media data at the platform level, and in some cases more granular than the platform level to distinguish between different types of activities/tactics on the same platform. This granularity enabled us to not only prove the overall impact of the program but also to deliver insights about specific activations that could be used to inform the design of future programming.

Execution/Implementation
Edelman and Edelman DXI worked closely with a cross-functional client team to collect the data on the owned and paid media that was a core part of the campaign, including news articles, social media posts, and sponsored content. We also collected data on job applications for all candidates and for under-represented minority candidates.

We crafted a regression-based CM3 model to measure trends and quantify the volume of under-represented minority applications that were driven by the campaign. In addition to requiring only available data, this solution accounted for the non-linear nature of the candidate journey and controlled for factors that are not trackable, avoiding the draw-back of attribution methods that assume a linear, unbroken digital candidate journey.

The model predicted weekly URM application trends with 94% accuracy and quantified the number of applications and the growth in applications that were driven by each channel of the marketing program, both among under-represented minority candidates and for the candidate pool as a whole.

Effectiveness of Assignment
The employer marketing program was shown to drive 28% more job applications from under-represented candidates than would have been received without the program. This impact justified the client’s investment in the program and provided stakeholders with assurance that the program has been successful. The T. Rowe Price team presented the results to several key stakeholders, using the results to demonstrate impact and rally support for budget/support to continue and expand the program.

The impact reports also gave specific insights about the channels that were most effective in attracting applications from URM candidates, empowering the client to advance the program by focusing on more efficacious channels and evolving (or de-prioritizing) less effective channels. For example, Instagram was initially a relatively small part of the program, but our results indicated that Instagram was a powerful channel for communicating with under-represented minority candidates. These results provided our client the information needed to advocate internally for additional budget and expanded use of the platform.

This work proved that T. Rowe Price’s targeted employer of choice marketing to attract under-represented minority candidates has been successful in creating a significantly larger and more diverse talent pipeline.

The T. Rowe Price team reflected on the effectiveness of the program in an Edelman & Edelman DXI client satisfaction survey by saying: “We are so proud of the work we’ve done together. Collectively, we have made remarkable strides. The impact of your strategic and tactical counsel on our employer brand has been a gamechanger. We couldn’t have accomplished what we have without your team.”