Glassdoor: Employees rank LinkedIn's Jeff Weiner as CEO of the year; Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg loses top spot
Career website Glassdoor today released its latest report highlighting 2014′s top 50 Chief Executive Officers (CEOs), and once again the tech world played a big role in the list.
Context & Ripple Effects
The arc here runs through Glassdoor's own year-end tables: Facebook ranked among the top places to work heading into 2012, and a year later employees still put it at the very top of the workplace list while Steve Ballmer's approval numbers got their own attention in the same December 2012 ranking. Zuckerberg's personal standing has been riding that wave.
Today's 2014 report breaks the streak at the individual level — Jeff Weiner of LinkedIn takes the CEO-of-the-year slot and Zuckerberg drops off the top. The story travelled unusually widely for an HR-data item, picked up by eight outlets including Business Insider, Computerworld, Mashable and GeekWire within a day, which says more about how closely Silicon Valley watches these scores than about any single event at either company.
First-order effects
- LinkedIn walks away with a recruiting asset: Weiner's top billing gives its talent team an externally validated claim that its leadership outperforms every other large tech CEO in the eyes of employees.
- Zuckerberg's slip converts a two-year run of first-place employer branding (the 2012 list) into a vulnerability that rival recruiters can cite when courting Facebook engineers.
Second-order effects
- Competing employers gain ammunition in the talent war without spending anything — Glassdoor's rankings become quotable collateral in offer conversations, raising the cost for companies that slide down the table.
Third-order effects
- If the annual cadence holds, employee-review platforms like Glassdoor function as a public scoreboard CEOs have to actively manage, turning workforce sentiment into a recurring reputation metric alongside product launches and earnings.
The trend: Employee-generated review data is hardening into an annual public leaderboard that tech CEOs compete on and recruit against, with Glassdoor setting the scoring.