Glassdoor: Employees rank Google's Larry Page as CEO of the year; LinkedIn's Jeff Weiner loses top spot
Career website Glassdoor today released its latest report highlighting 2015's top 50 chief executive officers, and once again the tech world played a big role in the list.
Context & Ripple Effects
Glassdoor's annual employee survey has become the tech industry's most-watched reputation scoreboard, and the list Zuckerberg would eventually drop off of entirely was still ascendant in 2015: Larry Page takes CEO of the year on the strength of Google's workforce approval, while LinkedIn's Jeff Weiner cedes the No. 1 position he had held.
The result matters because these rankings feed directly back into recruiting — Google had just lost the overall best-place-to-work crown that same year, when Airbnb dethroned it in the 2016 places-to-work list.
First-order effects
- Google gets a recruiting asset it can market directly against every rival competing for engineering talent, while LinkedIn's employer brand absorbs a visible demotion at the exact moment both firms fight over the same candidates.
Second-order effects
- Weiner's displacement forces LinkedIn to defend its culture credentials publicly, and other CEOs — Facebook's among them — now treat Glassdoor placement as a metric worth managing, since Facebook topped the best-places-to-work list in 2017 partly on that halo.
Third-order effects
- The 2015 snapshot marks the high-water point of big-tech CEO approval: by 2019 Google and Facebook had slid out of the top ten altogether (both falling down the rankings), suggesting employee sentiment scores function as a leading indicator of employer-brand erosion across the sector.
The trend: Glassdoor's employee-voted CEO and workplace rankings evolved from a feel-good annual list into a tracked reputational index whose multi-year slide now charts big tech's declining grip on talent.