Facebook, Google, Apple And Rackspace Rated Best Places To Work in 2012
Glassdoor, a jobs and career community where employees can anonymously rate companies and CEOs, has just released its fourth annual Employees' Choice Awards, listing the top 50 “Best Places to Work,” based on surveys collected from U.S. employees in 2011.
Context & Ripple Effects
Glassdoor's fourth annual Employees' Choice Awards turn its database of anonymous U.S. employee surveys into a public ranking, with Facebook, Google, Apple and Rackspace among the top 50 best places to work for 2012. The list lands alongside GeekWire's companion read of the same survey data, which finds CEO approval ratings dropping for Steve Ballmer, Jeff Bezos and other tech chiefs — company scores up, leader scores down.
First-order effects
- Facebook, Google, Apple and Rackspace head into 2012 hiring with third-party, employee-sourced validation of their workplaces, a credential recruiters at each can cite directly against rivals competing for the same engineering talent.
- Glassdoor converts a year of survey collection into its biggest annual publicity moment, reinforcing the jobs community as the venue where tech employers get judged.
Second-order effects
- Companies absent from the top 50 face pressure to answer on perks, culture and management style, since candidates can now comparison-shop employers through anonymous peer reviews before interviews.
- GeekWire's finding that approval ratings fell for CEOs like Ballmer and Bezos separates company brand from leadership brand — boards and comms teams at big tech firms now have a public, recurring scorecard on their executives too.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, anonymous employee-review platforms become a structural input to tech's talent market, with annual best-places-to-work rankings functioning as a de facto league table that shapes where scarce engineers choose to work.
The trend: Tech companies increasingly compete on publicly rated employer brand, with Glassdoor's employee-survey rankings emerging as an annual scoreboard in the industry's talent war.