How We Found the Best Places to Launch a Career

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In many cases this was the result of employers doing better or worse on the student or career-services surveys. Marriott, for example, shot from No. 45 to No. 7 in part because it fared far better with students than it did last year. Since new competitors in an industry sometimes fare better on one or more surveys than existing employers, their presence is often enough to shake up the ranking. The retailing segment, for example, doubled in size with the addition of Sears, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Target, which almost single-handedly knocked Walgreens, Macy's, and Kohl's down 17, 31, and 47 spots, respectively.

This year, BusinessWeek made several minor modifications to its methodology. First, we added several new questions to the employer survey and eliminated others. We added a new industry category—media and entertainment—to accommodate new companies that participated for the first time this year, and shifted one company, Walt Disney, into the new category from hospitality. We also changed how we scored the employer surveys in the nonprofit/government category. Instead of eliminating many questions because they did not apply to both nonprofits like the Peace Corps and government agencies such as the IRS, we counted every question. This is why the Peace Corps fared far worse this year than it did last year.

Less Chance for Errors

Finally, we made a slight change in the way we scored the employer surveys from each industry. In the first two years of the ranking, we used a complex set of rules to determine how many points to award to each company for each question based on their responses. Last year, we awarded 10 points for the best answer—the highest pay, for example—and no points for the worst, with all others receiving 5 points. We considered no answer at all to be the worst answer for scoring purposes, so if a company did not answer a question, it received no points, the best answer continued to receive 10 points, and all others received 5. There were several exceptions to this general rule—mainly concerning follow-up questions—that made the scoring process needlessly complex.

This year, to reduce the complexity and the possibility for error, we awarded no points to employers who declined to answer the question and to employers whose answer was the worst among those that did answer the question. So, for example, if four companies responded to our question about the maximum 401(k) match—with answers of 8%, 8%, 2%, and NA—both the 2% answer and the NA answer received no points for that question. While some companies lost points on individual questions as a result of the change, our back-testing showed it had very little effect on their overall performance in the employer survey, or on the ranking as a whole. And since all employers in all industries were treated the same way, the change did not confer a benefit to anyone.

Business Exchange related topics:
Employee Relocation
Employee Recruitment
Executive Search

Lavelle is an associate editor at BusinessWeek.