All Big Four Firms Make The World’s Top 50 Most Attractive Employers List

We have blogged earlier about Universum, the employer branding company, particularly on their MBA and undergraduate surveys of top employers. The Big Four firms, Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Accenture typically make the top ranks in their surveys.

Now they have come up with the world’s Top 50 most attractive employers, their first global index of employer attractiveness which highlights the world’s most powerful employer brands, those companies that excel in talent attraction and retention.

To come up with these results, nearly 120,000 students at top academic institutions in US, Japan, China, Germany, France, UK, Italy, Russia, Spain, Canada and India chose their ideal companies to work for.

And the Big Four firms are again on the very top of this list. Against some very tough competition and some very tough critics (students!) all the firms made the Top 10 Global top 50 business list, in august company of Google, Goldman Sachs, McKinsey and Microsoft. Accenture was just a tad behind at rank 23.

Global Top 50 Business

Company Ranking 2009

Google 1
PricewaterhouseCoopers 2
Microsoft 3
Goldman Sachs 4
Ernst & Young 5
Procter & Gamble 6
J.P. Morgan 7
KPMG 8
McKinsey & Company 9
Deloitte 10

Accenture 23

Interestingly, Universum also put together a global top 50 engineering company list, and the Big Four firms also make good rankings on that list as well, again aside top companies such as IBM, Intel, BMW and General Electric. In this list, Accenture was the first of the Big Four at rank 20, with KPMG making the last of the lot at rank 47. Big Four firms are not typically known for engineering, so we are certainly surprised at this. Perhaps the definition is broader than just hardcore engineering, in which case, the Big Four firms do offer services in hardware, software, outsourcing, system design, ERP, social media and disciplines related to business information technology.

Global Top 50 Engineering

Company Ranking 2009
Google 1
Microsoft 2
IBM 3
BMW 4
Intel 5

Accenture 20
Deloitte 29
Ernst & Young 33
PricewaterhouseCoopers 37
KPMG 47

In any case, Big Four professionals can feel quite proud of this ranking, and alumni can use this in their cocktail conversations!