Where Professionals Want to Work Now

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.

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.

Last year, Apple introduced a novel benefit, doling out restricted stock units to the vast majority of its more than 100,000 employees. The move — unheard of among companies with a large base of hourly retail workers — brought raves on LinkedIn. But it’s Apple’s “transformative” products that account for the “essence of employee satisfaction,” HR chief Denise Young Smith said last summer. While 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 recently reported 12-month period, a 65 percent increase.

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).

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.)

Tesla has one of the healthiest public valuations in high tech — some $32 billion — and one of the leanest workforces: 13,000. 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." One rule, as he noted at a conference last year: Employees who find meetings a waste of time are expected to get up and leave.

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.’”

The appeal of Airbnb, one former employee wrote on LinkedIn, boils down to this: "Airbnb is a travel company (awesome) that solves problems using startup gumption and innovation (awesomer)." The company is a sought-after employer not only because its business is so widely admired — it’s one of most valuable unicorns — but also because of its culture, which fosters a “sense of belonging,” the company told LinkedIn. Offices are decked out with the sort of homey details any Airbnb guest would appreciate: lounge areas with oriental rugs, meeting rooms designed after popular rentals, lots of house-made sodas. The company pushes employees to never stop “being crazy” and tries to inspire a sense of adventure by offering travel vouchers to experience Airbnb properties.

Netflix doesn’t mind breaking from the pack: It distributed DVDs by mail when Blockbuster was ascendant; it embraced streaming when downloading seemed to rule; it created content when distribution seemed like its competitive advantage. It runs its company similarly. Co-founder and CEO Reed Hastings has instituted a “freedom and responsibility” culture throughout the lean 2,800-employee company that is famous for only attracting “fully formed adults.” Netflix demands self-sufficiency from employees and rewards them accordingly with unlimited vacation and a liberal expense policy. It even lets them decide what portion of their salary to receive in cash or Netflix stock. Read more: Netflix redefined American culture. Will it do the same abroad?

Dr. Homer Stryker founded this medical technology powerhouse in the early 1940s, rigging the first cast-cutting saw with a milkshake machine motor. His innovative spirit prevails: Today, Stryker's advanced products find their way into everything from computer-assisted surgery to operating room instruments. The 27,000-person Stryker attracts talent partially by sticking to a (relatively expensive) decentralized structure. As CEO Kevin Lobo explained, business units operate independently, meaning employees can stay closer to end customers and quickly plan, ramp and market ideas without worrying about corporate cruft. In 2015, Stryker — based in Kalamazoo, Mich., with offices worldwide — sent employees on paid leave to Bolivia to expand its work with Operation Smile, offering free cleft lip surgeries.

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.

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."

Fast-growing Workday obsesses about its culture — even citing “failure to preserve our culture” as a risk factor in its SEC filings. The co-founders of the cloud-based finance and HR software provider personally interviewed the first 500 employees, thinking, “if we got the first 500 right, they'd get the next 5,000 right,” CEO Aneel Bhusri said. The strategy paid off: Workday now has 5,600 employees and still boasts a customer satisfaction rate of 98 percent. Employees enjoy unlimited time off, “family fun events” and support to serve the community; in 2015, Workday introduced a “Volunteer of the Year Award.” There’s also the thrill of taking on incumbents: Workday’s products are making rivals like Oracle sweat. Its advice for jobseekers: Focus on the “‘we’ rather than ‘I’” in interviews.

One of the secrets of successful hiring: Bring on people who love your product already. At Pandora, that means prioritizing those with musical passion, enabling the company to remain a hot place to work despite recent turmoil (dropping profits; CEO shakeup). Music lovers experience on-site concerts with performers like Father John Misty or The Ting Tings, and plenty of in-office instruments to play. The company provides full coverage for gender affirmation surgeries, and co-founder and new CEO Tim Westergren proudly notes that Pandora’s workforce is nearly 50 percent female, unusual for most tech companies. Still, there are concerns that this band might be breaking up: Pandora’s largest shareholder, activist fund Corvex is pushing Pandora to find an acquirer. Westergren says they're not for sale.

Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank has a rule for employees: “No loser talk.” His company, after all, likes to win. In its 20-year history, Under Armour’s become one of the largest sportswear brands in the U.S., nabbing MVPs like the NBA’s Stephen Curry and the NFL’s Tom Brady for endorsements. Millennials make up 70 percent of its workforce of 14,000, and the company’s growing; by 2018, it plans to nearly double its revenue to $7.5 billion annually. To house all those workers, Under Armour looks for old spaces to redevelop. Its Baltimore harbor headquarters is housed in a former P&G factory complex — buildings are named after soaps — and includes a basketball court, café and four planted biowalls for healthy breathing.

“We’re not a perks-driven culture; we are data people,” Tableau tells LinkedIn. The Seattle-based company employs 3,000+ and embraces simplicity. “We work on fascinating products and we try very hard to do without any drama,” one engineer wrote. “If people are here after hours, we’re asking why – heroics are not the goal.” While after-work emails were constant at this employee’s previous jobs, at Tableau, “there’s never anything there – everyone else also went home.” The company takes happiness seriously; it recently upgraded many of its offices globally, adding private and open work spaces. And while some companies bond over foosball, Tableau staffers come together with “Iron Viz” competitions. “It’s like Iron Chef but with data visualizations,” it says, adding, “we’re such data geeks!”

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.

Everyday consumers might not know the name Epsilon, but PepsiCo, Citibank, Nestlé and other Fortune 500 companies do. Epsilon, based in Irving, Texas, just outside Dallas, is a digital marketing company where data and big ideas converge. CEO Andy Frawley assembles teams that can advise clients on the complexities of today’s marketing, from creative to technology, insights to quantitative analytics. “You can’t really go hire those people,” Frawley explained recently, noting, “we’re building them internally,” underscoring the unique skill sets Epsilon’s 7,500 employees develop in 70 offices worldwide.

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.

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.”

Deloitte is so in-demand as an employer that the company receives 1.9 million applications annually. One simple — but important — reason so many employees want to join? “Our people are challenged by interesting work,” it told LinkedIn. The 225,000-employee firm is known for its accounting, consulting and tax services. But its scope, coupled with its use of emerging technologies like data analytics and AI, has attracted many employees with STEM backgrounds. Deloitte invests heavily in its employees, offering various training as well as education reimbursement. It also encourages employees to give back: In the 2015 fiscal year, employees spent 340,000 hours on pro-bono assignments and more than 820,000 hours volunteering.

Box’s quirky culture comes from the top: 31-year-old CEO Aaron Levie is known for his wit and spot-on Twitter commentary. The cloud storage provider’s roughly 1,370 employees, known as Boxers, enjoy all the requisite tech-company perks — weekly yoga, fully stocked kitchens, a gleaming new office space — plus birthdays off, game nights and “epic ping pong battles.” Fun aside, the company sells to blue-chips like GE, Coca-Cola and about 60 percent of the Fortune 500 as clients. To serve those with deep wallets while still moving like a startup, Levie hires veterans and newbies and then forces them into mixed teams to create the right tension. “That’s when you get real disruptive innovation,” he explained at a recent conference.

Though not a household name, McKesson is a healthcare Goliath: The company is the largest pharmaceutical distributor in the U.S., supplying one-third of the drugs used by Americans daily. It raked in about $191 billion in revenue last year, putting it near the top of the Fortune 500 list. But even with more than 68,000 employees, McKesson stresses individual growth. The company offers up to 600 instructor-led courses each year through its in-house university, with thousands of hours of additional training online. When McKesson wrote about this benefit on LinkedIn, employees quickly gushed about the extra skills and certifications they had picked up. “I LOVE McKesson,” one wrote. 

Investment banking isn’t what it used to be; Goldman’s using that to its advantage. The firm’s actively repositioning itself as a tech company (about a quarter of Goldman’s 36,500 employees are now engineers and other tech staffers) and overhauling everything from hiring (no more brain-teasers) to reviews. To keep younger workers happy, Goldman extended its analyst program to three years instead of two and vowed to give those employees more meaningful work. Headcount is up 11 percent over the past four years, largely due to the addition of regulatory compliance employees. And, while comp has fallen, the average employee still earned an incredible $344,510 in 2015, according to filings. Related: We talked to Goldman HR chief Edith Cooper about the transition.

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.

Edelman is a private, family-owned business. That gives the PR firm a big advantage, as LinkedIn Influencer Richard Edelman wrote in May: “We invest ahead of revenue and we take chances on people, giving them jobs before their time.” The company’s won major workplace awards recently, partly because of its focus on developing its 5,500 employees. The company boasts of its continual training (29 hours, on average, per employee in 2015), leadership development and year-long fellowships that send select employees around the globe. Edelman also offers a one-week program (and $2,500 check) for employees to “give a dream or live a dream.” It’s paying attention to gender equality, too: it set a goal for women to represent 50 percent of its leadership by 2017.

For those who want to be in the beauty business, it’s hard to find a place better than Estée Lauder, a global company that houses more than 30 brands including consumer favorites like MAC, Bobbi Brown and Smashbox. Lauder has many perks, but employee favorites seem to center around the work itself: Product education so they can be well-equipped to serve clients; the opportunity to deal with multiple vendors; and an environment of smart and talented co-workers, more than 70 percent of whom are women. The company also has plenty of its founder’s DNA surging through it, with Estee’s sons, grandsons and granddaughters holding various board and operating roles.

Starbucks made its name in coffee, but among jobseekers, it's just as well known for being a progressive employer. The company's long awarded healthcare benefits, stock and 401(k) matches even to part-timers who work 20 hours a week. Last year, it went a step further, announcing a $200 million initiative to give free college educations to all U.S. employees. The program, a partnership with Arizona State University, is expected to help 25,000 employees earn degrees, CEO Howard Schultz told LinkedIn last year. The company employs 300,000 globally and keeps finding new ways to give back. Its latest effort: the 100,000 Opportunities Initiative, aimed at helping young people launch careers through internships and on-the-job training; it’s hired 7,000 through the program to date.

If you’re looking to have fun, grow your career and turn machine data into valuable insights, Splunk is the place for you. The 2,700-person firm wades deep into data — famously helping customers like Coca-Cola, for instance, discover that soda sales spike in college vending machines ahead of “Walking Dead” episodes. It recently set up home base in a new San Francisco office, where it offers catered meals, among other perks. But perhaps the most appealing benefit is Splunk’s focus on helping employees grow: In the last fiscal year, it promoted more than 300 employees, about 15 percent of its workforce. And while Splunk works with blue-chips, the work’s not all serious: “Let’s just say there is a reason why there are go-kart skid marks on the linoleum by the elevator,” it told LinkedIn.

Viacom describes itself to LinkedIn as a “fans-first company,” but employees don’t have it bad, either. While the global media company offers conventional benefits like free fitness seminars, it also offers some unusual ones: an infertility benefit up to $22,000; a college savings program; and pet insurance. The 9,000-person company also focuses on developing employees’ professional selves through its leadership development program, which provides mentorship from other employees, online courses and more. For those employees who are also “fans,” the Conversations at Viacom speaker series is a nice benefit, with personalities such as Academy Award-winning producer Brian Grazer and rapper LL Cool J stopping by to talk.

Live Nation knows it has limited times to interact with its customers — fans might only go to two live shows a year — so it needs people who can make limited engagements work. The company is staging tours this year from top artists like Beyonce and Rihanna, and it's put on more than 218,000 events in the past decade. Employees receive a yearly allotment of free tickets, along with giveaways to other concerts and events. Despite being a 9,000-person company, LiveNation still values entrepreneurship in each of its portfolio companies, from ticketing providers like Ticketmaster to event producers like Insomniac: “Each business thrives because it innovates and grows in ways that are best for its own success,” it told LinkedIn. What it's looking for: people who are "driven and interested in live entertainment."

Aside from the bragging rights that come with working for the company that airs hits like “Game of Thrones” and “Veep,” there are plenty of other benefits at HBO. It has networks in 50 countries, has sold programming in 150 markets and continues to expand its streaming services. Employee perks include a free HBO GO subscription, a tuition reimbursement program and free access to museums and cultural centers. As good as those are, HBO said “the work environment and intimate feel of the company are what keep employees here.” Looking to join the 2,800-person company? The three skills HBO is searching for now: “deep analytical software engineering skills,” “research/consumer insights and analytics” and “digital and social media (in particular, CRM),” it told LinkedIn.

Following a merger with Lockheed Martin’s services group, this government IT services contactor — pronounced LIE-dose — will soon become the largest of its kind in the U.S. The Lockheed deal will double Leidos’s revenue to $10 billion a year and nearly do the same to employees, taking the total to 34,000 — including, as Forbes points out, 1,000 Ph.D.’s. Leidos business model counts on its ability to take the technology developed under some government contracts and sell it to non-government clients, as CEO Roger A. Krone said in a keynote last year. It already works with hospitals and more, and could become an even bigger player in the private market with its expanded staff. The company is actively recruiting, too; it just pledged to hire 3,000 veterans or their spouses over the next five years.

The company behind mega-hits like “Empire” and blockbuster films like “X-Men: Apocalypse” promises job-seekers a touch of Hollywood glamour. On its 55-acre campus in Los Angeles known as the Fox Lot, which includes 22 sound stages, employees enjoy movie screenings, car washes, a child development center, fitness facilities, salon services and weekly food-truck lunches. When the company shares photos of new hires on LinkedIn posing in front of its sets, professionals regularly respond: “I wish I could work here!” The company also offers serious impact: Its brands, from Fx to 20th Century Fox, reach 1.5 billion people in more than 50 countries across film, television and sports. About 20,000 are employed across the 21st Century Fox parent organization.

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 a Yelp employee’s open letter went viral earlier this year, spawning a sea of rebuttals and more open letters, the review site took action. It raised the wages of its customer service reps, bumping up pay to $14 an hour, and gave those workers 15 paid days off and 11 paid holidays, Backchannel reported. It also pledged to hire more workers in lower-cost cities like Scottsdale. The company’s been on an upswing of late, reporting quarterly earnings that defied expectations, as Yelp landed more advertisers and crossed a milestone of 100 million reviews. One of the company’s values is “be unboring,” a mandate for both the 4,528 existing employees (come up with new ideas!) and jobseekers (no cookie-cutter applicants, please!).

When it comes to developing the careers of its 56,000 employees, Morgan Stanley takes the long game. CEO James Gorman said in November that the bank thinks about talent in five, 10-, 15-year increments to determine its leaders. “I look at the organization charts and ask, who, 10 years from now, could be in a senior role?” Gorman said. “What do we need to do to start moving them around to get them with the right toolset?” It’s an old-school approach, but one that represents Wall Street’s “coming of age,” Gorman said at a conference. Morgan Stanley has remade itself since the financial crisis, focusing more on wealth management and less on riskier areas like trading. Overall compensation declined last year, but it’s still hefty: Average pay per employee was $284,891, according to filings.