Google Ranks as World’s Most Attractive Employer

Universum, a global leader in employer branding, has recently released their global talent attraction index, “The World’s Most Attractive Employers 2011.” Based on the survey results of over 160,000 job seekers with a business or engineering background, the index reveals the most sought after and highly regarded organizations to work for – shedding light on an employer’s potential to acquire the best and brightest minds.

Split into two major categories, the index caters to the preferences of both business and engineering job candidates:

On the business side, Google was revealed to be the world’s most attractive employer for the third consecutive year. With KPMG maintaining its foothold in second place, PwC moved up as the third most popular employer, knocking Ernst & Young down a peg to fourth place this year.

“The talent market for business career seekers is being dominated by the professional services firms, known for being great places to launch a career, and by companies that offer a new working culture in a dynamic environment. For the last 3 years we have been seeing Google leading the pack and it will take a strong player with a clear talent strategy to steal this number one spot”, said Lovisa Öhnell, head of Research and Consulting at Universum.

On the Engineering side, Google once again dominated the competition (three years running), with two other American companies closing out the top three spots. IBM ranked as the second most popular employer, while Microsoft slid down to third place.  BMW came up into fourth place this year.

“The software industry is highly dependent on its human capital, hence the efforts to attract and retain the brightest minds in the world,” said Carlo Duraturo, Global Account Director at Universum. “There’s a new working-culture paradigm today – the relaxed & creative office – and part of it we owe to this industry. Generation Y feels very comfortable working in this new environment and it’s clearly reflected in the attractiveness of the software industry.”

Universum surveyed over 160,000  career seekers from the world´s 12 largest economies to produce the only global index of employer attractiveness.