The inflation of employer quality seals: A curse or a blessing?

This article is brought to you by 3.works GmbH – LEADING EMPLOYERS.

How do you identify truly excellent employers - employee opinion surveys, professional audit, or employer quality seals? Turns out, relying on just one aspect is not enough.

Applicants nowadays often hold all the aces when accepting a new job. The country’s best brains do not make their services available to just any company, but select their position wisely. Thus, the advantages and disadvantages of a potential employer are carefully weighed up, in order to make an informed decision.

Happy at work – have you found the right employer yet?

There are several organisations offering guidance for this. A large number of dedicated providers aim to address the important question of which firms promise their staff a high feel-good factor. The approaches taken range from employee opinion surveys, to professional audits, from a focus on certain values, to the perceptions of career entrants.

How do you identify truly excellent employers?

Given the multitude of different providers, what is actually intended to offer guidance has now turned into a jungle – a complex tangle of various views and perspectives with often highly diverse results and recommendations. It is striking that the same company may be in first place in survey A, but not even amongst the top 100 in ranking B. The way you interpret the results is therefore crucial.

The key message: Relying on just one aspect is not enough. A company’s reputation or a brand’s prominence alone are usually not a comprehensive benchmark for debating the actual quality of an employer. Even a recently awarded prize for a specific segment or a successfully completed financial year are insufficient to identify a truly exemplary employer using such snapshots.

The Leading Employers meta-study adopts a holistic approach to identify the top 1% of Malaysia’s employers

Can the value of a quality seal be considered reliable?

The Leading Employers meta-analysis answers the question of an employer’s quality on an unprecedented scale. ‘Meta’ means holistic – not selective. Instead of just one viewpoint, the survey incorporates more than 200 different sources. Relationships between the results of individual studies are established. Measurement errors and inaccuracies are eradicated.

This way, trends, deviations and other interesting correlations between the various results are revealed. The clear benefit of this is that combining various types of information is much more meaningful than is the case with just a single study.

Topics considered as part of the Leading Employers 2019 study

This holistic method is what differentiates Leading Employers from other quality seals: its broad range of reference criteria guarantees a high level of reliability. The independent survey’s systematic approach goes far beyond the usual standards: multiple quality criteria are transformed into a holistic interpretation, and a realistic picture is created by comparing the various views.

Equal consideration is therefore given to the opinion of an intern and the findings of an expert committee, for example.

The award considers a variety of approaches

Leading Employers creates transparency with regard to the type of data considered thanks to its fully accessible list of sources.

Newly established companies and qualified job seekers gain mutual benefit from the award. Under the supervision of the Advisory Board, which is made up of high-profile members from science and industry, the quality seal is presented exclusively to the top 1% of employers.

Please direct any questions and suggestions about the award to the Advisory Board at [email protected].

Lead photo / StockUnlimitedAll other images / Provided