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Listicle of the Day: Big 4 Bliss?

Posted on by Jason Bramwell

Each Big 4 firm has unhappy employees. But if you work at Deloitte, EY, and PwC, you must not be as miserable as those lost souls who work at KPMG, according to CareerBliss’s 2020 ranking of the 50 happiest companies in the U.S.

The career and recruiting website used 10 factors—including culture, leadership, work atmosphere, one’s relationship with co-workers, and CEO ranking, as well as employee reviews—to determine whose cube farm occupants are the most nauseatingly happy. The companies are then given a score of 1-5, with 5 being the hap, hap, happiest.

The “BlissScores” (oof) for the top 50 happiest companies ranged from 4.251 (No. 1, Google) to 3.117 (No. 50, Katerra).

KPMG employees apparently are the unhappiest of the Big 4, as the House of Klynveld couldn’t get a score higher than a 3.117.

Here’s where the other three placed:

10. Deloitte (3.949)
22. EY (3.818)
38. PwC (3.698)

So if you’re happy and you know it, let us know … or clap your hands or something.

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Former KPMG Employee Now a Bean Slinger; May Have the Best Burrito in London

It’s my understanding that burritos are hard to come by in London. Apparently they just opened the first Chipotle there. For many of you, a life without burritos slapped together in 90 seconds (not including the wait on line) isn’t a life worth living. The Brits have managed to survive for a number of centuries without tortillas overstuffed with sour cream and free-range pork. And while Chipotle can certainly churn out a fine burrito, if you happen to find yourself in Spitalfields, East London you might check out Poncho No. 8. It was started by Nick Troen and Frank Yeung, Troen being the ex-Klynvedlian and Yeung a former equities trader at Goldman Sachs.

The friends spent the next three years living together, talking about going into business one day. After a brief separation — Troen worked for KPMG, the accountancy firm, and Innocent, the smoothie maker, before doing a masters, while Yeung worked for Goldman Sachs, the investment bank — they quit their jobs, moved back in together and four months ago launched a Mexican restaurant.

Although it is early days, Poncho No. 8 (Poncho Ocho), their pocket-sized restaurant in Spitalfields, East London, employs a staff of nine, sees 300 customers a day queue down the street for “gourmet” burritos and took £100,000 in its first quarter.

Troen and Yeung are unashamedly influenced by Innocent, the wildly successful fruit drink company also started by graduate friends. “It was always a company we admired. The branding and style had a big impact on us,” Troen says.

Poncho was a typical back of the envelope idea — “we looked at the numbers and thought ‘why has no one done this?’, ” Yeung says — brought to life via the same mix of ingenious, vaguely hippy branding and healthy ingredients. The restaurant features a green-painted “Guac Shack” while the website offers a “countdown to lunch” for bored office workers.

Starting a new Mexican wave [Times via BI]

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The Big 4 Continue to Impress College Students, Dominate Latest Universum List

It’s been far too long since we had a Big 4 dominated list to share with you. The last that we can dig up was PwC’s three-peat for Training 125. We were starting to get the shakes…

Thankfully the drought has ended with the latest list from Universum, who we last hear from in the fall with their 50 Most Attractive Employers.

This time around, it’s the Top 100 IDEAL Employers, that is described as “annual employer image survey…based on more than 163,246 employer evaluations, reflecting the opinions of approximately 56,900 Undergraduate students.” In the “Business” field of study, the Big 4 have, once again, landed high on the list:


Ernst & Young – #2
PricewaterhouseCoopers – #3
Deloitte – #4
KPMG – #6

Big 4 domination on a college student list is nothing new. Their recruiting strategy is aggressive and any company getting bested by Google in anything is exactly a surprise. Some other notables:

FBI – #11
IRS – #23 (IRS 2, Sarah Palin 0)
Grant Thornton – #30
Accenture – #66

Frankly, the number beside the firm name is irrelevant. The firms will boast the latest ranking in press releases and on campus visits per standard operating procedure. This continues to demonstrate that the firms are impressing college recruits effectively. They are presenting the image they want to present and they are doing so with an ever increasing online presence. We will continue to see them high on these lists.

The Universum American Student Survey [Universum]
Universum USA Presents the 2010 Top IDEAL Employers [Press Release]