Does the Great Resignation has you thinking about job-hopping? Glassdoor may be able to help you find your next gig, via its annual 100 Best Places to Work study .
Glassdoor bases its rankings on feedback from current and former employees who've posted anonymous reviews to its site over the past year. The rating numbers Glassdoor actually publishes are pretty limited, so you'll see a lot of the same overall numerical scores. When pressed for how Glassdoor then ranks companies with the same scores, it says it uses a "proprietary ranking algorithm."
OK, that's a little vague, but the algorithm calculates a ranking not only based on employees' overall numbers but also across several sub-ranks, including satisfaction, CEO leadership, career opportunities, and compensation and benefits, among others. The 100 companies with the best ratings make the list.
Among the top 100 large companies, Nvidia nabbed the winning spot from Bain & Company, which held it last year. Glassdoor also reported 36 newcomers to the top 100—several new tech companies among them, including electric vehicle maker Rivian and help desk software developer ServiceNow. Overall, the list included 40 technology companies with well-known names such as Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Zoom. If you're worried about hitching your wagon to a new arrival, top-ranked Nvidia has made the list for the last eight years, while Apple and Google have been there for the last 14.
Among the companies with lowered rankings this year from 2021 were some notable names, including Meta, which nose-dived from number 11 down to number 47 this year—presumably due to all the public scrutiny and negative press it suffered in 2021. Zoom was the blue-ribbon loser, scoring number 22 in 2021 but face-planting in 2022, coming in dead last at 100. Then again, it did make the list, so don't count it out for your job search.
What About Small Businesses and Geography?
All the names thus far have been large companies. But along with the top-100 behemoth employers, Glassdoor also came out with a top 50 list for small and midsize businesses (SMBs), which it defines as companies with fewer than 1,000 employees.
At the tippy-top of that index rests KlientBoost, a digital marketing consultancy. Other technology names you might know that made the SMB list are Lucid Software (14th), Grammarly (27th), Domo (42nd), and Sprout Social (44th).
Even though the hybrid work craze makes geography much less important, Glassdoor also cross-referenced the data to come up with the best four metro areas in which to work. At the top of that list was, surprise, San Francisco; 30 of the top 100 companies are headquartered there. After SF came Boston with nine companies, Los Angeles with eight companies (those employees must not care about traffic), and New York City with seven companies.
If you're looking to slice and dice this data even further, Glassdoor has filters on its site that parse its results across best CEOs, jobs overall, and highest-paying jobs. Coming up are similar studies for other countries, including Canada, the UK, and a number of EU nations.