Tag: The Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For

KPMG Doesn’t Need You, FORTUNE; It Has Plenty of Other Employer Rankings That Say It’s Still a Great Place To Work

Oh Christ, the FORTUNE1 100 Best Companies to Work For came out today, which means marketing and PR teams all across Corporate America are on high alert. Who went up? Who went down? Who’s new on the list? Who’s off the list? Who gives a shit? That’s my take. If you’re not Google, then you suck. I want an employer who has a cafeteria that serves the most obscure cuisine on the planet (e.g. BBQ Tasmanian devil short ribs with poached platypus eggs) and I want it for FREE. If you can’t make that happen, then I might as well be working for the Taliban as the Womens Initiative coordinator.

Best Place to Work Bupkis

Last week we went through the painful ritual of listing out the accounting firms blessed with a spot on Fortune’s 100 Best Places to Work. All the usual suspects made an appearance but ultimately a regional firm, Plante & Moran, took the highest spot among accounting firms (but they didn’t get to ring the closing bell, did they?).

None of this is of interest to you and frankly we’ve had about all we can stand when it comes to these lists but Adrienne pointed us to this post by Laura Vanderkam that takes the debunking to an intricate level, starting with something that we all know, that most of these lists are opted into by the companies HR or Marketing Departments (emphasis ours):

To be eligible for a list, you have to fill out whatever paperwork the tabulators require […] This means that not only do you have to be a great place to work, you have to be a company where management cares about being listed in magazines as a great place to work. Only 311 organizations bothered this year, out of thousands of employers in the US. So if you went through the whole process, your odds were pretty good. But that doesn’t means that the 311 employers that did try are better than the thousands that didn’t.

Our resident math genius is on vacay but if you do some rough calcs, your chances are, what, 1 in 3? Decent odds. Then, comes the strange phenomenon of where these companies fall and why:

[I]t’s strange that a magazine with such great reporters as Fortune relies on such a flimsy methodology for creating their rankings. If you believe this list, then Americans prefer to work at Nugget Market (a 9-store supermarket chain) than at McKinsey, at Google vs. Facebook even though some headline-making defections would point otherwise, and we should want to work at Aeropostale because, as one young employee put it “Where else can you talk to the boss over pizza?” (Um, where can’t you?)

The Trouble With “Best Places To Work” Lists [BNet]

Someone Would Like to Qualify Plante & Moran’s Fortune Ranking

From the mailbag:

The firm would be a great place for a new hire and/or intern. They offer competitive starting salaries along with a great support system and culture. I don’t know exactly how Fortune determines their ranking. If they surveyed newer staff and partners, they are going to look great every time, which seems to be the case.

There are some serious compensation issues for managers. How does a base of [70k-ish] sound (with potential bonus up to a staggering 8%)? How about a [marginal raise] over a 2.5 year period while [being promoted] that same time frame? The partner:staff ratio is so upside down that it is no wonder why they try and keep managers’ salaries so low. Some of the senior partners are a joke to try and rationalize with. I did my best, but couldn’t convince them what market salary was for a manager. I told them good luck.

Earlier:
The Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For: Plante & Moran #26 (2011)