LinkedIn lists 100 most sought-after cos; Accenture tops Indian employers

Technology companies seem to be the red hot favourites among the professionals globally, if LinkedIn's list of '100 most in-demand employers' is to be believed. According to the professional network's official blog, Google tops the list globally while Accenture is the top employer among the Indian member companies on LinkedIn.

The top 5 employers in India (among Indian LinkedIn members) happen to be Accenture, HP, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft in that order. Google tops the overall global list, followed by Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Unilever, GE, PepsiCo, P&G, McKinsey & Company, Coca Cola, Walt Disney, Nike, Salesforce, Twitter, Shell, Nestle, BCG, Ogilvy, Expedia and Accenture. These top 20 companies represent the top industries globally, including software, retail and consumer, professional services, oil & energy and health & pharmaceuticals.

The rankings are based on actual interactions of more than 175 million professionals on LinkedIn. "Last year, LinkedIn was home to over 15 billion interactions between professionals and companies. We cross-referenced our data with thousands of survey responses to pinpoint the specific activities that best indicate familiarity and interest in working for a company: Connecting with employees, viewing employee profiles, visiting company and career pages and following companies. After crunching the data and normalising for things like company size, we developed our top 100 global list. We then applied LinkedIn profile data to rank the most sought-after employers among professionals in five countries and four job functions," stated the blog post, written by Michael Li, senior manager (business analytics) at LinkedIn.

Looking at the rankings, one gets some valuable insights as well. First of all, software is the most represented industry in the list. Secondly, consumer brand biggies like PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Nike, and Disney are ranked highly but professional firms like Deloitte are also there among the top employers. Also, 50 per cent of top 100 companies have staff strength under 7,000, which would dispel the belief that only bigger companies are sought by employees.

(Edited by Sanghamitra Mandal)