Where the World Wants to Work Now

Last year, Apple introduced a novel benefit, doling out restricted stock to the majority of its more than 100,000 employees. That’s not unusual in the tech world, but it’s nearly unheard of in retail — workers who now make up 30 percent of Apple’s staff. Not surprisingly, Apple has sky-high retention at Apple Stores: 81 percent, according to retail chief Angela Ahrendts. But it’s Apple’s “transformative” products that account for the “essence of employee satisfaction,” HR chief Denise Young Smith said. While even CEO Tim Cook (above) jokes that Apple has “more secrecy here than the CIA,” ex-employees gush on LinkedIn about talented co-workers and great flexibility. The company’s diversifying, too: It hired 11,000 women during a recent 12-month period, a 65 percent increase.

While planning its new San Francisco office, Salesforce took design advice from an unlikely source: Buddhist monks. They were visiting CEO Marc Benioff (above) and suggested that he add quiet areas to his workplace. So Salesforce listened, installing “mindfulness zones” and meditation spaces on every floor of its new tower. The cloud software provider is serious about wellness: “employees can't guide customers to success if they aren't first taking care of themselves,” it told LinkedIn. It employs 20,000 and is known for high-growth, above-market pay and lots of philanthropy. Salesforce has long offered paid volunteer time off; this past year, it upped the perk from six business days to seven.

When you’re competing for the most cutting-edge engineers — and you need an army of them each year — a culture that brings them in the door isn’t just a competitive advantage, it’s a must-have. Facebook promises that those people who are builders will get plenty to work with at the company: managers “set them free” to conquer projects. There are plenty of benefits for life outside the office, too. Last year, Facebook extended its four-month paid parental leave program to all full-timers. Another draw: The strength of its business. Revenue has increased by more than 40 percent for 14 straight quarters. As startup life gets more difficult, the appeal of landing at a growing safe-haven like Facebook is appealing: It recorded a 34 percent increase in new hires during our Top Attractors reporting period.

In the arms race for perks, few can top Google. The company lavishes its 60,000 workers with mountains of food, A-list speakers, on-site massages — even benefits after death, as HR chief Laszlo Bock shared. The bigger draw, though: working on noteworthy projects with “impatient overachievers,” as one ex-Googler wrote on LinkedIn. The company obsesses about employee happiness, rigorously studying how to build the perfect team. It doesn’t allow managers to make hiring decisions — removing bias — and bases pay on the job, not someone’s prior salary, to close the gender gap, Bock wrote.

Amazon used to have ambitions to be the “everything store.” Now it’s on path to be just “everything.” As a cloud-computing powerhouse, device manufacturer, voice-driven AI pioneer, and drone-delivering dreamer, it’s hiring needs are diverse and demanding. Amazon got some bad press after the New York Times called it a "bruising workplace," a characterization one Amazon engineer famously disputed. Our data shows that the NYT didn’t make a dent: Applications for Amazon jobs are up 25% since last year. The company provides excellent salaries and such perks as the Amazon Career Choice Program, which pays 95 percent of tuition for in-demand fields. Women in tech are championed, too; Amazon Women in Engineering provide ongoing mentorships.

Microsoft continues to be a magnet for job-seeking techies. On its Redmond, Wash. campus, the company offers restaurants, cafes, espresso stands (37 to be exact), retail shops and a sports field. Another draw for candidates is Microsoft’s unique approach to career development: “an individual adventure,” as it’s called. Its 118,000 employees are encouraged to plot their own path, working towards becoming a specialist or a generalist. Management might suit one employee; working abroad in one of the 200 locations, another. Microsoft provides career resources like mentoring, coaching and 2,000 training programs. (Note: This list was finalized before Microsoft said it would acquire LinkedIn in a $26 billion deal. For more, read here.)

Uber, the poster child for the gig economy, has become one of tech's elite destinations for engineers, operations and product managers. Word is that the interview process is grueling — but worth it. It may be different for independent contractor drivers, but its 6,700 official employees enthusiastically back Uber's mission to change livery as we know it. By far the most valuable unicorn, at $62.5 billion, Uber operates in 444 cities around the globe. While it has its critics, Uber has no problem attracting talent looking to change the world: It's already looking past delivering people to delivering anything (UberEATS) and is an unabashed proponent of driverless cars (starting with an extended trial in Pittsburgh).

There are few companies where your work can be found in every room of your house, from the kitchen (Lipton and Hellmann's) to the bathroom (Dove and Axe). Consumer goods giant Unilever has brands everywhere — as well as people. The company’s 169,000 employees get trained in the ways of Unilever at hiring; its Future Leaders Programme takes entry-level employees, for example, and gives them training and mentoring to become managers in two to three years. The company tells LinkedIn it has an “agile/flexible” working environment, and an entrepreneurial, “go for it!” culture. Employees are also committed to giving back; its Lifebuoy soap brand has taught 330 million people better hand-washing habits in an effort to reduce causes of childhood death, like diarrhea.

Coca-Cola’s in the midst of change, streamlining its business and tweaking everything from its benefits to work practices. To move faster, the company cut a layer of management and tied regional units directly to headquarters, as CEO Muhtar Kent noted in a letter to investors in April. It also added “zero-based work,” resetting budgets each year so that they “must be justified annually, not simply carried over at levels established in the previous year.” The company’s on track to cut $3 billion in costs by 2019, which it says it will reinvest in marketing and innovation to spur growth. Coca-Cola employs about 123,000 and will soon offer six weeks of paid leave to all new parents, an idea driven by its millennial employees.

When J&J shares glimpses into its workplace on LinkedIn, there’s a familiar refrain in the comments section: “So proud to work for this company!” After the healthcare giant noted that it offers eight weeks of paid parental leave for fathers, one employee remarked that it was J&J living its credo. More recently, it expanded fertility, adoption and surrogacy benefits, and announced it would ship temperature-controlled breast milk to mothers traveling on business. Again, raves. The company employs about 127,000; HR chief Peter Fasolo said at a conference that employee engagement scores are at about 90 percent globally. It’s constantly looking for ways to make workers happier, too. J&J abolished employee self-ratings, for example, after finding that they had different cultural implications around the world.

As the story goes, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison used to coach his recruiters to ask new college grads: "Are you the smartest person you know?" If the answer was "no," the next question was "who is?" — and then they'd go after that prospect. Oracle is still hiring the kids: 38 percent of the workforce are millennials. And it's building a culture that can handle working in a demanding environment. Also actively recruited: veterans. The Injured Veterans Internship Program offers paid internships and mentorships for injured Iraq and Afghanistan vets.

Nestlé is a 150-year-old Swiss consumer goods company with a novel way of recruiting and hiring. Under the leadership of CEO Paul Bulcke, Nestlé launched the “Nestlé needs YOUth” program, tackling youth unemployment. Nestlé committed to hiring 10,000 young people and 10,000 trainees in Europe by the end of 2016. It’s expanding the program to the Americas, too, aiming to hire 24,000 people and open 7,000 apprenticeship and traineeship positions by 2018. The company also attracts those who want an international career; it even offers resources to help spouses of employees with local job searches. What will you work on once hired? Narrowing it down is tough: Nestle has 2,000+ brands — from Nespresso coffee to Friskies cat food. 

PepsiCo’s pitch to jobseekers goes like this: Work here, and learn how to build a brand. The company’s long been seen as an incubator for executives, teaching young talent the ins-and-outs of marketing and developing products. It grooms professionals with both training (PepsiCo University) and rotations through its divisions. Those businesses are massive: PepsiCo owns 22 brands that now pull in a billion or more in annual sales, from Tropicana to Lay’s. (Its namesake soda accounts for 12 percent of revenue.) CEO Indra Nooyi’s shaking up the company, emphasizing design — R&D spending is up 40 percent since 2011 — and preaching faster innovation. As she said to HBR: “I told everyone that if they don’t change, I’d be happy to attend their retirement parties.”

Constant reinvention is a hallmark of Adobe's culture. The company behind Photoshop and Acrobat is more than 30 years old — a rarity in tech — and knows any of its 14,000 employees could come up with its next killer product. For that reason, it launched a program called "Kickbox" to help staffers develop and test ideas. Employees get $1,000 and lots of encouragement to refine their potential breakthrough. More recently, it introduced "experience-a-thons" so employees can dig in to new Adobe products and provide feedback ahead of launch. And while many companies are just now getting on the no-more-annual-review-bandwagon, forward-thinking Adobe got rid of its five years ago. Who does well here? The company tells LinkedIn it prizes "a learn-it-all versus a know-it-all attitude."

Even a global rout in oil prices hasn't kept jobseekers and professionals away from Shell. The energy giant tells LinkedIn that its global opportunities, "friendly and diverse culture and the meaningful projects" help explain why so many professionals want to work — or stay — at the company. Shell employs 95,000 globally and is known for top-notch pay and well-structured approaches to career development. Its graduate program, for instance, includes continual training and rotations over up to a five-year period, depending on the role, helping launch careers in everything from energy trading to engineering for oil and gas wells.

The beauty giant says professionals can spend their entire career at the company without ever getting bored. “You can have 15-plus jobs within the L’Oréal family,” Sumita Banerjee, SVP of talent acquisition for L’Oréal Americas, said last year. What keeps the work interesting: the company’s 32 international brands (Kiehl’s, Garnier, Maybelline, Lancôme, among others) and its relentless efforts to stay current, something proved by its widely praised makeup app. Another notable aspect is its focus on employee wellbeing. L’Oréal pledged to give all workers a universal set of social benefits by 2015, and stuck to that promise. Today, its global workplace of more than 82 enjoys a minimum 14 weeks of fully paid maternity leave and other progressive perks.

Legendary booze and beer brands like Johnnie Walker, Tanqueray, Smirnoff and Guinness are part of Diageo’s portfolio. The company is headquartered in London’s Park Royal and operates in 30 countries. Its slogan, “celebrating life, every day, everywhere,” hints at what’s attractive about Diageo as an employer; the offices bars and employee product allowances don’t hurt, either. Diageo also offers its 33,000 employees worldwide a variety of professional development options, including the Spirited Women mentorship program. (Nearly 50 percent of Diageo’s executive team is female, it told LinkedIn.) Diageo tends to attract those who have a global mindset because of its numerous international assignments.

There are consulting firms — and there’s McKinsey. Landing a job with the company is akin to joining an elite club; some have compared it to the U.S. Marines. Its alumni include bold names like Google’s Sundar Pichai, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and Morgan Stanley’s James Gorman, to name only executives running companies on this list. The firm employs 22,000, hiring from the top schools — about 50 percent of its consultants have MBAs — and keeping staffers learning. (It pours $100 million into professional development each year.) Consultants jump from project to project, so the work's often challenging (if, at times, intense). As managing director Dominic Barton told a crowd at Wharton: “Just as soon as you get comfortable with something, you go to the next level.”

IBM keeps reinventing itself to keep up with changing times. Assisted by an "employee" named Watson, CEO Ginni Rometty is betting that artificial intelligence is Big Blue’s next future. "Cognitive computing will impact every decision in five years," Rometty said in May. The IBM of today, as the company explained, is involved in everything from healthcare to weather prediction. Its workplace of 377,000 people is constantly evolving, too: This year, IBM ditched annual reviews and instituted a system called "Checkpoint" for more regular feedback. 

Square may get more headlines, but venerable Visa is the player in the payments space changing with the times — and changing them. “Dead, buried and gone” is the fate, says Visa CEO Charles Scharf, of anyone in his industry who isn't pushing the limits of the credit game. Scharf's nudged the insular Visa into key partnerships, which now include Apple Pay and Google Wallet — and, oh yes, an investment in Square. The 12,000-employee company is based in Foster City, Calif., with 200+ locations worldwide; it attracts mathematicians, engineers, marketers — even psychologists. Visa's adding to its top-grade perks, too: the company recently introduced maternity leave coaching for expectant parents and rolled out genetic cancer screenings.

It didn’t take long for Cisco’s new CEO, Chuck Robbins, to start shaking up the enterprise tech giant and its workforce of 72,000 employees. In March, Robbins restructured Cisco’s roughly 25,000-person engineering team into four new units. He’s also brought aboard a raft of new talent — including ex-BCG’er Ruba Borno, featured on LinkedIn’s Next Wave list — calling for employees to move faster to keep innovating. It’s all led to new energy inside Cisco and its sprawling California headquarters, where employees can make use of a massive gym, indoor basketball courts, an on-site medical office and enough Cisco video-conferencing products — even in the massage chairs! — to feel like they’re never out of touch.

After selling 100 of its weaker brands, P&G is starting to look and act like a much nimbler operation — albeit one that still pulls in a hefty $76.3 billion in annual revenue. The company is focusing on its 65 top-performing product lines, like Crest and Tide, and reshaping its culture, with new CEO David Taylor calling for a more decentralized structure. “We need more direct ownership for our regional managers all the way to the store shelf,” he said at a February conference. P&G is also tweaking bonuses (better rewarding an individual group’s performance) and rethinking how often it reassigns its 110,000 employees; category “mastery” is now key, Taylor says. Benefits remain top-notch: P&G pays 80 percent of tuition costs up to $40,000 total, and provides 16 weeks of paid leave for parents.

It’s been a banner year for Disney, with movies shattering records — from the latest Star Wars hitting a record $1 billion gross in less than a fortnight to "Finding Dory" becoming the biggest animated opener ever — and a new Magic Kingdom opening in Shanghai. That has to make it easier to embrace one of CEO Bob Iger’s demands: that employees be optimistic. Board member Jack Dorsey said enforced optimism is simple: “If you're not gonna be optimistic, you're not in the company.” The company employs 185,000 employees in 45 countries, and its multiple brands — from its film studio to its theme parks and TV networks like ESPN — mean employees enjoy "fulfilling and varied careers," it told LinkedIn.

When you’re responsible for providing advice and consulting services to businesses big and small, it helps if your people can deeply relate to the companies. EY makes that happen by keeping close to entrepreneurs — running the Entrepreneur of The Year competition and EY Entrepreneurial Winning Women — and welcoming the return of employees who quit to explore life on the inside. As one such “boomerang” wrote on LinkedIn, “I came back because I want to make a difference alongside other entrepreneurs...” The most famous returnee: EY CEO Mark Weinberg, who left three times before making No. 4 stick. Not that EY forces everyone to quit in order to learn: In 2015, it invested more than $500 million on training and employees participated in 8.2 million hours of learning.

Halfway through the assessment period for this list, Dell announced the biggest deal in tech history: a $67 billion acquisition of storage provider EMC. The combined company will bring in more than $80 billion in revenue; LinkedIn Influencer Michael Dell wrote that it turns his firm into an “enterprise solutions powerhouse.” The deal also gives Dell a piece of VMware, the virtualization company 80 percent owned by EMC. Both VMware and EMC ranked high in our metrics, in part, because of generous benefits and — perhaps more importantly — flexible scheduling. Dell, not to be outdone, is pushing ahead there, too. A quarter of Dell’s approximately 100,000 employees already set their own hours, but Dell wants half of all employees on flexible schedules by 2020, its HR chief recently told Fast Company.

Siemens is determined to get the world to see the company the same way it sees itself. “We think it’s a cool place,” Janina Kugel, head of HR, said recently.  Based in Munich, Siemens employs 348,000 people across multiple sectors in 190 countries. Employees could work with offshore wind farms in Sweden or solar thermal power in the Middle East. Siemens has an “ownership culture,” which Kugel summarizes as being honest, courageous in embracing technological advances and respectful to colleagues, whether it’s a technician or part of upper management. It offers comprehensive education opportunities, including paid internships in 20 countries.

Huawei, the colossal telecom until recently little known outside Asia, has been around for 20 years — but it's the next five that really matter. That's all the time the China powerhouse says it will need to surpass Samsung as the world's top smartphone maker — and, oh yeah, it expects to knock off Apple in half that time. It's a bold prediction from the former B2B-focused company which now courts consumers with such devices as the sleek P9. No doubt Huawei has the money to go big — 2015 revenues were $60.1 billion, more than half from outside China. But it is also putting its money where its mouth is: Last year, Huawei sank $9 billion into R&D, which employs a staggering 45% of its 170,000 workforce.

JLL helps thousands of companies pick an office space or manage it, so it knows a thing or two about setting up a high-functioning workplace. The commercial real estate giant has 60,000 employees in 280 offices in 80 countries. It knows well-planned spaces are key, one reason it’s gutting its Chicago headquarters, replacing everything from the cubes to the lighting, and documenting the process. The firm’s racked up every major workplace award, and boasts that 90 percent of employees state that they’re “proud to work for this company.” JLL is also a deal machine (35,500 transactions completed in 2015 alone), so it looks for professionals who are self-starters; the company “fully supports colleagues taking their ideas and running with them,” it told LinkedIn.

The mammoth French energy-management multinational — think smart buildings and smart cities — insists on getting close to its users, even if that means relocating half-a-world away. In 2011, CEO (and LinkedIn Influencer) Jean-Pascal Tricoire left the company’s France-based HQ to move to Hong Kong, explaining to an interviewer: “I don’t like headquarters, ivory towers where executives meet together. ... Our life has to be with our customers.” The embedding culture extends to learning: Schneider runs its own school where engineers are trained on the new systems it’s inventing. The company prefers to promote its own rather than recruiting stars, though employees at acquired companies find the path to big responsibility happens quickly.

Tesla has one of the healthiest public valuations in high tech — some $32 billion at this writing — and one of the leanest workforces: 13,000. To produce its iconic, all-electric vehicles, it's been recruiting a growing cadre of specialists in the nascent field of engineering for self-driving cars, a cohort for whose hearts and minds Tesla is battling titans Apple, Google and dozens of others. Trying to make that dream come true also requires people in design, IT, sales, customer service and traditional corporate roles — Tesla has more than 1,000 jobs listed on LinkedIn alone. Founder/CEO Elon Musk says he prefers company rules to company values, which can be “fairly obvious mom-and-apple-pie stuff."

Weeks after being named CEO last fall, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey announced that he would give a third of his stock to employees – an amount worth, at the time, around $200 million. The unconventional move won praise across the web and, more importantly, cheers from Twitter employees. Since then, the company’s delivered more perks, like 20 weeks fully paid parental leave for all full-timers. Dorsey told CNBC’s Jon Fortt he gets inspired watching the Golden State Warriors and strives for that same “electricity” among Twitter’s 3,800 workers. But the real key to employee happiness, he told another interviewer, is “just being able to say, ‘I shipped that, and my mom is using it.’”

Expedia harnesses its 19,382 employees’ enthusiasm for travel, offering perks like a discount code when booking a trip along with an annual travel reimbursement that starts at $250 and rises incrementally. In 2015, Expedia acquired Travelocity, Orbitz and HomeAway and it announced a headquarters move from Bellevue to Seattle’s waterfront, slated for 2019. Professionals who adapt quickly thrive; CEO Dara Khosrowshahi once wrote on LinkedIn that even he can’t predict what products his teams will develop in six months. When hiring, he looks for travelers first, asking candidates to describe the “craziest thing that’s happened” on vacation and how they responded. Travel, he wrote, “transforms you in tremendous ways that translate into smarter leaders and more passionate employees.”

Accenture’s CEO Pierre Nanterme has an acute dislike for the status quo and leads accordingly. Most consulting firms of Accenture’s size layer on process and standardization; even in the midst of growth, Nanterme has done the opposite, abolishing the annual employee review. “The process is too heavy, too costly for the outcome” and not in step with the millennial generation, Nanterme told the Washington Post. Instead, Accenture has implemented a system in which managers give timely feedback all the time. Its 373,000 global employees work in 200 cities in 56 countries. Professional development is highly valued: Accenture sank $841 million into employee training in 2015.

Nike is headquartered on a sprawling 270-acre campus dotted with offices, sports facilities, cafes and running trails outside Portland, Oregon. It has nearly 63,000 employees worldwide and operations on nearly every continent. Employees have a passion for sports and near obsession with helping athletes perform. Sustainability’s a big focus, too; 71 percent of shoes are now made from recycled factory waste, for example. In the U.S., new parents get eight paid weeks off (14 weeks for birth mothers), along with tuition reimbursement and a “generous discount” on Nike products. The company tells LinkedIn it’s growing faster than ever and is looking for employees with skills in “product creation, retail, digital technologies and other growth areas to accelerate our innovation.”

Mondelez isn’t a household name, but its products are: Cadbury, Oreos, Fig Newtons, Wheat Thins. The snack spinoff of Kraft Foods is based in the Chicago suburb of Deerfield, but its 100,000+ employees do business in 165 countries. Mondelez attracts prospects with a global view and offers internships and apprenticeships for recent grads all around the world, including a 20-month program in Australia — almost a career for a millennial. Mondelez may be all about satisfying our cravings, but it hungers for more: The Wall Street Journal reports it is "getting into the media business in hopes of reaching consumers who are increasingly avoiding advertising." If Mondelez can also make advertising tasty — there's no stopping it.

The company recently split into two businesses — lighting and healthcare — to allow for more nimble innovation in both sectors. Last year, the Amsterdam-based company invested 8% of its annual revenue in R&D for healthcare technology, now its largest business at 45% of revenue. “Our sole mission is to improve the lives of 3 billion people a year, by the year 2025,” a Philips press officer told us. At the root is being “eager to win,” one of the company’s core “behaviors.”

The most exciting comeback story in sports might be Adidas. The company is winning market share from arch rival Nike in European soccer and teaming with celebrities and athletes with a new willingness to embrace riskier designs. Employees are finding a new speed to the company, too: Adidas executives wants its 3,800 employees to spot trends and then research, prototype, build and ship quickly. That means hires may have the option to try cutting-edge 3D printing and a motion-capture system used by NASA to make its shoes. That said, not everything is new. Adidas says its mantra for creating products is a line from its founder: “It all starts with the athlete.”

The iconic round Honeywell heat thermostat found in homes is how most people know the company. But engineers know this massive conglomerate’s handiwork is woven into the fabric of everyday life, from power grids to food packaging. Honeywell, led by CEO David M. Cote (pictured above), attracts those interested in manufacturing, developing or managing anything from hospital infrastructure to ballistic-resistant armor. It employs 137,000 worldwide and is headquartered in Morris Plains, New Jersey. Since 2011, Honeywell has hired more than 1,700 veterans; if called to serve, Honeywell continues to pay their full salary with benefits.

Danone has a 97-year history, but its workforce barely qualifies as middle age: 88 percent of its nearly 100,000 employees worldwide are under the age of 50, the company reported in a recent filing. The company is in the midst of a turnaround led by newish CEO Emmanuel Faber, 52, a rock climber who also draws praise from Nobel laureates like Muhammad Yunus for being more social activist than corporate kingpin. He’s executing a plan to help Danone achieve “strong, profitable and sustainable growth” by 2020. One way it stays competitive: constant learning. Some 86 percent of employees received training last year, a four-point spike from the prior year, Danone reported.