Social media companies are the best technology employers to work for. According to employees, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook are the best three technology employers for 2014. Google is ranked fifth, with Interactive Intelligence the only ‘traditional’ tech company in the top five best technology employers to work for.
Not only did social media providers dominate the technology sector, they also seized the majority of positions in the overall top five rankings.
Social media is transforming lives in more ways than we could have expected. From record initial public offerings to the birth of the Arab Spring, these companies are now setting the standard as the employers of choice.
When Glassdoor, a free online jobs and career community, revealed its 2014 Employees’ Choice Awards this month, it also provided a snapshot of the ever-growing influence of social media beyond a screen.
In 2010 Southwest Airlines led the rankings, joined by a mixture of manufacturing and business services firms. A year later, things began to change in when social media companies began wowing their employees:
- 2011: Facebook entered the top five with a bang, as the number one employer in Employees’ Choice Awards. Facebook had bumped the much acclaimed Southwest Airlines to number two, followed by business services and manufacturing leaders Bain & Company, General Mills and Edelman;
- 2012: Unseated by consulting behemoths Bain & Company and McKinsey & Company, Facebook ranked third and was joined by Google just scraping into the top five. With MITRE taking the fourth place, business services and consulting firms clearly ruled the day in 2012, but Google and Facebook were giving rival employers a taste of things to come;
2013: Facebook, the only social media company in the top five, reclaimed the number one ranking, amongst a diverse range of employers from business services, technology and health sectors;
- 2014: While Bain & Company has stolen the 2014 crown, social media companies dominate the top five, filling sixty percent of the top five positions: Twitter, LinkedIn, then industrial Eastman Chemical, followed by Facebook in fifth position.
Glassdoor has aggregated millions of salaries and anonymous company reviews, surveys and other “employee generated content”. The US rankings of the 50 best places to work in 2014 is now in its sixth year and provides a unique confirmation of social media pushing the boundaries in more than just the technology industry.
The top five of the last six years is like a storybook of our change in our society: 2009 did not include a single social media company. Traditional industries dominated, with General Mills, one of the world’s leading food companies, with 100 consumer brands, topping the employee rankings.
Business services firm Bain & Company was ranked number two and is noteworthy in that it is the only employer to be consistently listed in the top five for the last six years. Bain & Company went on to claim the leader’s jersey in 2012 and again in 2014.
The lessons for 2014? Watch this space: social media companies are innovators in more than just technology and IPOs, they are disrupting many different aspects of business and society. And their employees love it.
A few years ago, one of my first business coaching sessions was with an entrepreneur who had spent a year and a half in development. He’d given up a well-paid job and spent about $25,000 on developing an App. He had no real business plan. When I pointed out that he had notionally invested about a quarter of million dollars on the App, he drew a deep breath of entrepreneurial fatigue, and said disheartenly, “Well, I suppose so.”
An outdoor portrait of the 9th Training Battalion at Perham Downs, Wiltshire. Victorian optician Gordon Heathcote from Kew is seated on the far left, sporting his new Corporal stripes he earned in England. 
Optimize Business 