For the second year running, internet giant Google has topped a poll of most-liked business employers.
The World’s Most Attractive Employers 2010, published by employer branding company Universum, is a global talent attraction index, based on responses from nearly 130,000 job hunters with a business or engineering background in the world’s 12 largest economies: the US, Japan, China, Germany, France, the UK, Italy, Brazil, Spain, Canada, Russia and India.
In the business category, Google managed to stave off continuing pressure from the “big four” professional services firms – KPMG, Ernst & Young, PwC and Deloitte – which ranked second to fifth respectively. But while KPMG climbed to number two from eight last year, PwC dropped a couple of places from last year’s second position.
Two banking giants saw their rankings drop this year, with JP Morgan falling from number seven to nine and Goldman Sachs dropping from four to 10.
Proctor & Gamble at six, Microsoft at seven and Coca Cola at eight completed the business top 10.
In the engineering category, however, IT-sector companies continue to dominate with the top three employers – Google, Microsoft, and IBM – maintaining their positions from last year.
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“We’re witnessing the auditing firms and FMCG companies reconquering their talent group after a brief love-affair with the IT industry”, said Michal Kalinowski, Universum’s CEO.
Lovisa Öhnell, Universum’s research and consulting director, said: “Firms in the professional services sector need to attract top talent to be successful; the auditing firms are aware of the challenges and spend a lot of resources in talent attraction and employer branding.”