New Chart Showcases the Best Places in the World to Work

Attracting the brightest new talent to your company has always been key but is becoming even more crucial as workers get ever more savvy and footloose. Reputation is everything and it doesn’t take much for a firm to suffer a major blow to its recruitment plans because of negative headlines or a tidal wave of bad reviews on Glassdoor, but there’s plenty that can be done to ensure that you are seen as a great place to work.

With the right perks in place and a good culture of recognition and support, companies have lots of opportunities to showcase why someone should work there, particularly with all of the many awards and lists highlighting the companies that are the best places to work. The cream of the crop when it comes to these is Great Place to Work’s annual list of the “World’s Best Multinational Workplaces”, which gathers together multinational companies that have featured in at least five other best workplace lists.

Resume.io has visualized how this list has evolved over the last decade, from 2011 to 2019. This chart tells many stories about companies that have succeeded in keeping their staff happy and attracting new talent. One such story can be seen in the dominance of Google between 2013 and 2016 when it was top of the list for four years in a row, having been second in 2012. But then it disappears out of the top 25 altogether, not returning by the end of the decade.

Best companies to work for

Of course, this doesn’t mean that Google suddenly became a dreadful place to work, because being outside the top 25 companies in the world still potentially leaves hundreds of thousands of other companies trailing behind you. But you can bet that the HR and recruitment people at Googleplex will have been mulling over these rankings and trying to work out how to get back up there.

Google’s incredible perks (free meals at the office, cooking classes, free on-site gyms and workout classes, celebrity speakers, massage therapists, free shuttles to and from work and many more) are legendary, and they have led the way in Silicon Valley when it comes to creating a workplace culture to put them ahead of their rivals in what is an incredible competitive jobs market. 

That’s the case for the whole tech industry, which is why it’s no surprise that every single first place across the decade came from that sector, with Microsoft, SAS, Google, Salesforce and, in 2019, Cisco coming out top. Only The Adecco Group and Hilton even managed to crack the top two in all those years from other industries, with 16 of the 60 companies to appear between 2011 and 2019 coming from the tech world, twice as many as from financial services.

Best companies to work for

There are plenty of other stories shown, including the incredible comeback achieved by Swiss pharma company Roche, which was in 21st place in 2011 and then didn’t appear again until 2019 when it jumped up to 12th, showing that there’s always a way back if you work hard on your employee engagement strategies.