The companies were evaluated extensively on Career Pages, Job Boards, Employee Reviews & Candidate Engagement, Accolades, Recruitment Marketing, and Social Responsibility.
WilsonHCG recently released its fourth annual “Top 100 Employment Brands Report,” which can be downloaded here. The report evaluates the Fortune 500 companies using 16,000 data points and more than 550 different sources to rank and understand an organization’s overall employment brand.
The report ranks the top 100 of the Fortune 500 based on the companies’ Career Pages, Job Boards, Employee Reviews & Candidate Engagement, Accolades, Recruitment Marketing, and Social Responsibility.
John Wilson, WilsonHCG’s chief executive officer, spoke with BioSpace about the report.
Biopharma and Some Overlap
As in previous years, the analysis is broken into six industries: Industrial Machinery; Pharmaceuticals; Hotels, Casino, Resorts; Computer Software; Insurance and Managed Care (Health Care); and Information Technology (IT) Services.
“We use the same segments as the Fortune 500 breaks it down,” Wilson said.
From the point of view of BioSpace readers, it can be pointed out that some companies, such as Dow, may not necessarily fall under the Pharmaceuticals category, and GE, which is under Industrial Machinery, has significant biopharma aspects to it.
The #1 company on this year’s list overall was Johnson & Johnson. Last year Johnson & Johnson tied for first place with General Electric.
This year GE plunged eleventh. When asked if GE did something to drop or the intervening companies just improved, Wilson said, “A lot of it was other companies are doing better. For companies one through 50, really only 14 points separated them. When I’d look at GE versus J&J, the piece of J&J talking about their accolades and how that makes you proud to be an employee, they were more significant than what GE did. J&J has a career page that is, in our rankings, slightly superior, but they finished one point away from being in the top six, and two points away from being in the top three. This report shows how good companies are getting at employment branding.”
The top 10 companies overall, and their points, are:
#1. Johnson & Johnson ……… 82
#2. Intel ……………… 81
#3. IBM ………………79
#4. Lockheed Martin ….79
#5. Procter & Gamble ……. 79
#6. General Motors ……….. 78
#7. JPMorganChase ………… 78
#8. Dow ………………………78
#9. ADP ….. 78
#10. Cummins ……….. 78
All of the different segments ran quite close to each other, although some sectors fared better in some categories than others. For example, Wilson said, “Pharmaceuticals outrank all other industries in corporate social responsibility, and in recruitment initiatives, which is a heavy weighting. They are also top three in people who like working there, based on what current employees are saying and talking about being part of those organizations. We’ve seen it be more important generationally, millennials and others, in what the company is doing for the community—the pharmaceutical industry outranked all other industries in that.”
The companies were evaluated extensively on Career Pages, Job Boards, Employee Reviews & Candidate Engagement, Accolades, Recruitment Marketing, and Social Responsibility, and awarded points for each category. Each category has multiple areas that were analyzed and ranked.
“We broke it down into two pieces,” Wilson said, “One is the attraction side—what’s going to get a candidate to come work at X company. And second is, what is it like working at the company, to make people stay there. The advantage of a good employment brand versus bad – there’s a host of different reasons. But if you’re an employee of J&J and you get a call from some company that has a poor employment brand, regardless of compensation, you start thinking, ‘Maybe I’m in a really good spot, look at all the things my company does versus this one that is calling me.’”
Breaking out companies that are either pharmaceutical companies, or have some level of relationship to biopharma, medical devices and healthcare, here’s the list, compared to the rankings from the 2017 report:
2018
#1. Johnson & Johnson (82)
#5. Procter & Gamble (79)
#8. Dow (78)
#11. GE (77)
#14. Alphabet Google (76)
#24. UnitedHealthcare (72)
#26. Humana (72)
#33. Boston Scientific (71)
#35. Cardinal Health (70)
#56. Bristol-Myers Squibb (68)
#57. Monsanto (68)
#64. AbbVie (67)
#65. Stryker (67)
#81. Celgene (66)
#94. St. Jude Medical (65)
2017
#1. Johnson & Johnson (81)
#13. Dow (74)
#14. Monsanto (74)
#16. Stryker (74)
#20. Humana (73)
#29. Bristol-Myers Squib (71)
#38. ThermoFisher Scientific (71)
#44. UnitedHealthcare (70)
#45. AbbVie (69)
#56. Eli Lilly & Co. (68)
#60. McKesson (68)
#61. Merck (68)
#65. Abbott Laboratories (67)
#67. Amgen (67)
#86. CardinalHealth (66)
Takeaways
The report presents a fairly good analysis of what the analysts were looking at and why. For example, in analyzing company job boards, the report notes, “Approximately 52 percent of candidates still come from job boards (Jobvite), indicating that, while other modes of attracting talent are making an impact, candidates still heavily rely on job boards for insight into open roles, growth opportunities and your mission/vision.”
And noting that 87 percent of organizations indicate that culture and engagement are one of their top challenges, and 80 percent of executives claim employee experience is “important” or “very important,” according to Deloitte, only 22 percent say their companies are “excellent” at creating a differentiated employee experience.
“We hear feedback very frequently that this is a benchmark for how internal employee branding, people who are running sites, and ultimately how account leaders are judged. In the first few days the report is available we have thousands of downloads across the globe. Many of them are reaching out, wanting to understand how they fare, what they did wrong, what they did well,” Wilson noted.
The report points out that of more than 4,000 corporate talent leaders in 35 countries, the number one priority for 2018 is: Talent.
For example, in biopharma, recruitment of top talent is extremely fierce, often cited by company executives and developers of biopharma real estate space, notably in the Boston and San Francisco areas. Companies work hard to develop an attractive and competitive environment to draw in the brightest and best.
Wilson added, “One facet that always stands out to me is how the top 10 employee brands and top 10 employment brands in this report have 176 percent more in revenue than the bottom 10. It’s interesting to me how the brand, as well as revenue and brand, ties in.”
