Big Four firms dominate Top 100 Employers list, reports Carly Chynoweth

Accountants are still the most popular kids on the block, with three of the UK’s Big Four professional services firms dominating this year’s Times Top 100 Graduate Employers list.

PwC tops the list for the eighth year in a row, with its rival Deloitte less than 300 votes behind in second place. KPMG has moved up from fourth to third, while Ernst & Young, last of the Big Four, is in tenth for the third year running.

This is a far cry from ten years ago when a third of the top 10 were major manufacturing and industrial companies. “Then, students most wanted to work for organisations like Ford and big oil companies,” says Martin Birchall, the Cambridge engineering graduate who founded High Fliers, which publishes the Top 100.

“Now the list is dominated by big accounting firms, a couple of retailers (Aldi is fourth, while the John Lewis Partnership jumped from 28 to 11 after doubling its vote this year) and financial services. This is a reflection of what is happening in the wider economy as well as of students’ aspirations.”

The results suggest that the 17,851 final-year students questioned for the study pay more attention to recruiters’ marketing campaigns than the business press. For example BP, the oil company involved in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, and RBS, the banking group that is mostly owned by taxpayers after a government bailout, both improved their rankings this year.

“The Top 100 reflects what goes on at university more than anywhere else,” Birchall says. “There are organisations that have had dreadful write-ups in the papers but, because they continue to offer high-quality graduate recruitment programmes, these issues do not play out on campus the way they do in the business pages.” Banks did drop down the list in the wake of the financial crisis but moved back up when they started recruiting again.

Other notable movers in this year’s list include the Armed Forces — the Army has dropped out of the top 20 for the first time while the Royal Air Force is now at 69, its lowest ever position — and Centrica, which has moved up 37 places to 43.

“It is also interesting to look at companies that have come and gone,” Birchall says. “When we started, consulting was a relatively new concept but by 2001 Andersen Consulting, which became Accenture, was the place to be. That has now fallen away. . . [Consulting] is still recruiting a good number of graduates but it no longer has that glitz and glamour.” Glitz and glamour which, he notes, were at least partly attributable to Accenture’s promise of £10,000 bonuses for new recruits.

The Times Top 100 is not a list of the best employers but of those that students find most appealing as potential employers. Their views are based on several factors, including the quality of recruitment promotions, the number of positions available and the attractiveness of the package on offer, Birchall says.

It provides a useful starting point for graduates because it lets them see what their predecessors (all studying at one of 30 top universities) thought of each organisation. But it should not be treated as the only place to look. This is particularly true for graduates who are interested in careers such as advertising because the list contains only a couple of companies, each offering a handful of opportunities. By contrast professional services firms on the list will hire thousands of graduates each year.

There is an average of 180 vacancies per employer across the 100 but this disguises a wide variation: a fifth plan to hire at least 250 new recruits, while four hope to take on at least 1,000 graduates each in 2012. Accounting, investment banking and the public sector are the biggest recruiters, at 26 per cent, 15.7 per cent and 11.4 per cent of the total respectively.

The number of opportunities available has improved this year but there are still more graduates than there are graduate jobs.

The recession saw graduate recruitment schemes cut by about 25 per cent; many smaller companies closed them entirely. But things are improving now, Birchall says. “It looks considerably better in 2012 than just two or three years ago. But even among the top 100 we are not back to pre-recession recruitment levels.”