The Big4 Blog

 Lisa Chapman, Big4.com

A recent interesting survey of top employer websites by Potentialpark Communications (of Stockholm, Sweden) shows that Ernst & Young and Accenture are keeping the best of company.

(We recently saw this ranking in the Wall Street Journal (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704764404575287254249588026.html?KEYWORDS=potentialpark) and reached out to Potentialpark to get more background and how the other Big Four firms fared in their analysis.)

Potentialpark went out to 2,457 US students and graduates and asked them to rate the most important features, functions and pieces of information that they expect on career websites among 100 top companies - The Top Employer Web Benchmark 2010 - The US Career Website Study.

And the winner is…Bertelsmann.

Yes, this media company beat out more well-known names “after years of working with advanced techniques, interactive tools and social media. As one of the pioneers in online recruitment communication, the media company sustained their first place in 2010.” This was a repeat of their first ranking in 2009.

And who, you may ask, is Bertelsmann? For those outside the media industry, it is a giant 175-year old German company with EUR 15 billion in sales, and 100,000 employees. It is (very) private with the Bertelsmann Stiftung and the Mohn families owing all the shares.

In the US, it’s the company behind Gray’s Anatomy, CSI, Law and Order and NCIS. They run Random House which brings you books from Danielle Steele, Stieg Larson and Dan Brown (DaVinci Code).

The career site is http://createyourowncareer.com/wms/bmhr/index.php. And what impressed us most was the prominent use of social media, including LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Xing (only 29% of US career websites have social media). Potentialpark ranked them the winner based on being top on quantitative ratings on multiple prioritized factors.

Right behind in rank 3 was Ernst & Young, up 6 places from 2009, and Accenture in rank 7, down 4 places from 2009. Further down was Deloitte in rank 18, up 2 places from 2009. Also in the top 50 were PricewaterhouseCoopers at 44, up impressive 36 places from rank 79 in 2009, and KPMG at rank 47, falling 3 places from number 44 in 2009. In a future post, we’ll take a look at the Big Four career websites, and see how they stack up.

Why is having a good career website critical? The answer in short is that great career sites go beyond information, and offer inspiration. The best career websites today are personal, full of faces, names and stories, and interactive. Research shows that 9 out of 10 candidates go online to find career related information; and of these 66% trust the corporate career websites; with job and career portals losing in importance.

Potentialpark’s attitude is simply stated, “Where others offer merely a website with information, the best companies open their doors for a virtual relationship among peers, demonstrating that working with them will be like working among friends….They have less confidence in general job platforms and prefer to go straight to the companies’ career websites to browse, connect and apply…..It is apparent that a successful career website does not depend on the company’s size or business, but the right attitude and a focus on relationship building. Anyone can do it, as long as they have the ambition to courageously and continuously follow the next generations that grew up with the Web 2.0…...”

So, its not size but attitude that counts, the company must really want to show its true inner workings to inform and attract the candidates which have a best fit with their culture. Social media’s is where’s it at today too – Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are almost given in any career intake strategy.

Which brings us back to the most frustrating mystery of all career sites – what really happens to the resume that you so painstakingly create online? Is there really a human at the other end, or it simply disappears into the infamous Resume Black Hole.

We turned again to Potentialpark for this $64,000 question, but their analysis does not quite cover this aspect. So the mystery remains. In future surveys, we believe this should be an important part of website ratings. Till then, we’ll just go with the front side of career sites.

BTW, what do the Big Four firms really do with resumes submitted to their career sites? Does anyone really know?

Potentialpark, career websites, applicants, Bertelsmann, Ernst and Young, Accenture