The Best Places to Launch a Career

The surprise in BusinessWeek's second annual ranking: Accounting firms have raced to the head of the pack

By Lindsey Gerdes

SPECIAL REPORT

Best Places to Launch a Career

• Internships: The Best Places to Start
• Interning Your Way to a Job
• 50 Best Internships
• The 95 Best Places to Launch a Career
• The Best Places to Launch a Career
• Behind the Best Places
• The College Administrator: What's Different About the Ys
• The New Hire: Why I'm Delighted with Deloitte
• Video: Inside Scoop From Big Four Recruiters
• Personalized Ranking Table
• Slide Show: Wacky Ways to Land a Job
• Teach for America Taps Titans
• Video: Upward Bound at JP Morgan—One Analyst's Personal Account
• Reporter's Journal: Microsoft's Happiness Czar
• The Bottom Line on Next Gen Workers
• September 24, 2007 Issue of BusinessWeek

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Members of Deloitte & Touche's Class of 2007. Chris Buck

Accountants used to be spoofed as bean counters—dutiful, middle-aged, gray-suited men with considerable analytical expertise but little charisma. That was during the good times. After their uninspiring performances in the corporate scandals of recent years, accounting seemed like a profession without much of a future, and the firms certainly no place to launch a career. Scratch that. This year accountants became sexy. Accounting firms dominated BusinessWeek's second annual ranking of the best companies for new college graduates: Deloitte & Touche is No. 1, followed by PricewaterhouseCoopers and Ernst & Young. The last of the Big Four, KPMG, moved up four spots, to No. 11.

Why did the accounting firms do so well? Enormous demand. Across industries, there is a mad scramble to recruit the best and brightest of a new generation, the much-maligned, heavily scrutinized Geny Y. Nowhere is the pressure more intense than in the Big Four. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act has so greatly increased the need for their services that the firms are facing an epic talent shortage.

That has put them in an unusual position: They are among the first to rethink how to recruit college grads, keep them happy on the job, or just keep them at all. Ernst & Young uses Facebook to let prospective employees talk freely with real ones. Deloitte will show a rap video about office life—made by interns—to give students a realistic view of the company. And PwC requires some bosses to get a second opinion on their evaluations of new hires to make sure the feedback is clear enough, the goals ambitious enough for kids who are uncomfortable with ambiguity. Welcome to the post-millennial world.

THE GOOGLE EFFECT

Our ranking is based on three extensive surveys: of career services directors at U.S. colleges, the employers they identify as the best for new graduates, and college students themselves. This year we were able to examine the records of many more companies, which allowed us to expand our list of employers from 55 to 95 and broaden our view of the corporate landscape. Several newcomers, including PwC, IBM (IBM), and Microsoft, (MSFT) eclipsed last year's favorites. Walt Disney (DIS) had been No. 1; this year it fell to No. 7. Last year's No. 2, Lockheed Martin (LMT), slipped to No. 9.

There were a number of surprises beyond the rise of the accounting firms. Only nine companies in the top 50 last year offered starting salaries of at least $55,000. This year twice that many pay big money; among them are the brand-name tech companies, where, thanks to the Google effect, first-year salaries now average $60,000 to $65,000 (and that's before bonuses). We also saw the three pharmaceutical companies surveyed last year fall in the rankings. Merck & Co. (MRK) (No. 49), which was in the news because of its problems with Vioxx, did poorly in the student poll.

Our survey shows how some of the smartest employers are starting to deal with a new generation that expects a very different workplace from the one of their parents.